Queer Places:
Northwestern University, 633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, Stati Uniti
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, Stati Uniti
Villa Vizcaya, 3251 S Miami Ave, Miami, FL 33129, Stati Uniti
Graceland Cemetery, 4001 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60613, Stati Uniti
James
Deering (November 12, 1859 – September 21, 1925) was an industrial executive
in the family Deering Harvester Company and subsequent International
Harvester, a socialite, and an antiquities collector. He is known for his
landmark Vizcaya estate, where he was an early 20th-century resident on
Biscayne Bay in the present day Coconut Grove district of Miami, Florida.
Begun in 1910, with architecture and gardens in a Mediterranean Revival style,
Vizcaya was his passionate endeavor with artist
Paul Chalfin, and his
winter home from 1916 to his death in 1925.[1]
Contemporary newspapers often emphasized Deering’s “bachelor” status. In 1922
a Missouri newspaper noted that Deering’s “house has 39 guest rooms and as he
is a bachelor of 59, it is said that although every room is kept in readiness
for company, he has never had a guest.” Many interpreted his much-talked-about
bachelorhood, as one houseguest recalled, as indicative of Deering simply not
being a “romantic.” In this way, Deering appeared queer in his asexuality.
Several jokingly wondered whether he “ever took off all his clothes . . . even
to bathe.”
James Deering was born in 1859 in the western Maine town of South Paris. He
was the son of William Deering and his second wife, Clara Hammond Deering. His
older half-brother was the arts patron
Charles Deering.[2]
His father, who had inherited the family woolen mill and was landowner in
the Northeast, invested in a farm-equipment manufacturing company, renaming it
the Deering Harvester Company. In 1873, he moved the family to Chicago,
Illinois. New 'Deering Harvester Company' reaper machinery enabled Midwestern
United States farmers to harvest an acre of grain per hour, a substantial
increase in productivity that increased the profitability of Midwest
agriculture significantly. The Deering Harvester Company grew in value, so
that by the end of the 19th century, the Deerings had become one of America's
wealthiest families, although his father William was conservative in family
spending. His parents did acquire a residence in St. Augustine, Florida, for
the winter season. James Deering's older brother Charles joined the family
business in the 1880s, after attending the United States Naval Academy and
nine years in the Navy. James Deering attended one year each at Northwestern
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before also joining
the company at the same time.
by John Singer Sargent
.JPG)
Villa Vizcaya, Miami, FL
James joined the Deering Harvester Company in 1880 as treasurer. In 1902,
with the Bank of J.P. Morgan purchasing Deering Harvester Company and
McCormick Reaper Company, a resulting merger formed the International
Harvester corporation and the largest producer of agricultural machinery in
the nation. James Deering became vice-president of the new corporation,
responsible for the three Illinois manufacturing plants. In 1909, he was
phased out of daily company affairs by J.P. Morgan interests.
By the turn of the century, James Deering owned homes on Lake Shore Drive
in Chicago, in the countryside near Evanston, Illinois, in New York City, and
in Paris, France. His name appeared in social columns as an arts connoisseur,
socialite, international traveler, and cultural ambassador. He hosted events
for French dignitaries at his New York and Chicago residences. In 1906, for
Deering's work in promoting agricultural technology development in France, he
was awarded the Légion d'honneur ("National Order of the Legion of Honour").
He retired from the vice-presidency of International Harvester, with his
health weakening due to pernicious anemia, so in 1910, Deering purchased land
in Coconut Grove, south of Miami and north of his brother's Charles Deering
Estate. James Deering and Paul Chalfin then partnered to travel and create
'Vizcaya' there.[3]
James Deering never married.
In the early 1910s, James Deering chose Miami as the site for his new home.
He welcomed famed painter
John Singer
Sargent to his estate in 1917. Sargent delighted in its tropical
atmosphere, where he found “a mine of sketching.” Although Sargent is best
known for his portraits of the upper classes in Europe and the United States,
he produced numerous provocative watercolors of Miami’s working class. This
included the villa’s black laborers. Sargent’s watercolors of these men
provide a rare glimpse into the homosocial world of early Miami and the
elite’s gaze and fetishization of the black laborer’s body. Like much of early
Miami, Vizcaya remained a male-dominated space with few women during its
construction. These paintings are among a handful of works Sargent produced in
Miami featuring naked black laborers. One art historian noted how “exoticism .
. . played a role in the allure of the figure, the intimate bowerlike setting,
and the sense of a voyeuristic peek into a more carefree world.” Indeed,
Sargent’s “images present a vibrant, forceful realism while subtly projecting
emotions, desires, and intuitions as their visual subtext.” As a lifelong
bachelor, Sargent’s own sexual proclivities have been the subject of
debate—both during his lifetime and posthumously—suggesting that these
experiences articulated a form of eroticism that later coincided with emerging
sexual subjectivities and possibly identities.
James Deering built Villa Vizcaya between 1914 and 1922 with visionary
mastermind of the project, designer
Paul Chalfin, his collaborator companion.
The architect was F. Burrall Hoffman Jr.. The estate's landscape master plan
and formal gardens were designed by Colombian landscape designer
Diego Suarez.
Paul Chalfin had attended Harvard, trained as a painter at the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was an associate of renowned decorator
Elsie de Wolfe.
She introduced Chalfin to Deering for the interiors of his Chicago home in
1910. In 1910, Chalfin and Deering traveled through Europe together for the
first trip of many over the years, in part to collect ideas and begin
acquiring art, antiquities, and furnishings for the new Florida estate. The
culmination of their shared effort and lasting memorial to their creative
relationship is Villa Vizcaya, the Miami estate created between 1914 and 1923.[4]
The Villa Vizcaya is distinguished for its Italian Renaissance-inspired
Mediterranean Revival architecture, its huge Italian Renaissance revival
gardens, and sumptuously designed, detailed, and executed interior
architectural elements with European, Asian, and American furnishings, and art
and antiquities that span two millennia. The numerous sculptures in the
gardens and villa are of ancient Greek, Greco-Roman, and Italian Renaissance
origins and styles.[5]
For example, one element is altar-like in white marble, featuring the
carved heads of goats, cattle, and lions, and flanked by coral stone pillars
with carving of the 'Oak Tree of Gernika', symbolizing the freedom of the
Basque Vizcaya in Spain.
The gardens are notable for introducing classical Italian and French design
aesthetics into a subtropical habitat's plant palette and context — a new
approach. This resulted in ongoing garden experiments with many tropical
plants new to American horticulture. While Vizcaya's landscape design style
evokes other periods and places, the use of native stone, plants, and light
modulation reflected Deering's desire to showcase the indigenous natural
beauty. By 1922, the 180-acre (0.73 km2) estate included large
lagoons and new islands down-coast south of the villa and its formal gardens.
On the estate's western acreage, across present day South Miami Avenue,
were the produce gardens and grazing fields. A village compound was designed
and built to the west, also. These endeavors were done with the intent of
making Vizcaya primarily self-sufficient, modeled on European estates to
compensate for the limited commodities and services of early 1920s Miami. The
village buildings housed the property's staff quarters, auto garages,
equipment sheds, workshops, and barns for the domesticated animals.
Deering chose white artist, interior decorator, architect, and New York
native Paul Chalfin “to plan, buy and arrange his superb home at Miami.”
Chalfin’s work on the estate, one contemporary observed, was a “monument to
the perfection of American taste and the period of American Renaissance.”
Chalfin and Deering traveled the world together “buying all of the things that
went into the house.” Deering never bought “anything until he had Paul’s
advice.” Chalfin even designed a secret passage from Deering’s bedroom to an
adjoining bedroom to ensure his privacy, a known feature Deering was often
teased about.
Deering spent winters there beginning in 1916, when the residence was
sufficiently complete. Among James Deering's closest friends were painter Gari
Melchers and his wife Corinne. Through his brother Charles, also a patron of
the arts and collector, he had friendships with the painters
John Singer
Sargent and Anders Zorn. Sargent visited Vizcaya in March 1917 and
produced a series of watercolors of the estate, as well as portrait of James.
After the extensive gardens were completed in 1923, Deering's health began to
weaken. Nonetheless, he traveled and entertained guests, including the silent
film stars Lillian Gish and Marion Davies. Deering was described in his later
years as "a reticent man with impeccably proper manners, leavened by a sense
of humor." He was not unlike a 'Jay Gatsby' figure of the 'Roaring Twenties'
era. In 1923, he opened the gardens to the public on Sundays, and Deering
reportedly watched the visitors from his balcony, curious about who came, but
not wanting to be recognized for his hospitality. In this period's personal
letters, he expressed the hope that his nieces and nephews would enjoy coming
to Vizcaya, so tennis courts, a bowling alley, a billiard room, and a swimming
pool were part of the estate to encourage their visits.
James Deering died in September 1925, on board the steamship SS City of
Paris en route back to the United States. The philanthropic beneficiaries
of his estate were Wesley Hospital, founded by his father in Chicago; the
Visiting Nurse Association; the Children's Hospital of Chicago; and the Art
Institute of Chicago, which received several significant paintings: the
Édouard Manet "Mocking of Christ" and three by Italian master Giambattista
Tiepolo of Rinaldo and Armida based on scenes from the 16th-century
epic Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso.
Following the death of James Deering, Villa Vizcaya passed to his two
nieces, Marion Deering McCormick and Barbara Deering Danielson. Over the
decades, after hurricanes and rising maintenance costs, they began selling the
estate's surrounding land parcels. In 1952, at a below-market price, they sold
the villa and formal gardens, and in 1955 the village 'core estate' to
Miami-Dade County for a museum and gardens to be open to the public. With the
initial sale, they donated the antiquities and furnishings to the County
Museum.
By 1961, a report referred to then-deceased Deering as “the prissy bachelor
who preferred bourbon to women.” One of his Vizcaya guests recalled: “He
certainly wasn’t interested in women. But, he wasn’t interested in men
either.” Although no evidence seems to suggest that Deering engaged in
homosexual acts, his sexuality became a subject of speculation and even legend
that persists in Miami to this day.
Unlike many other historic house museums, Vizcaya contains the original
antiques and furnishings, giving continuity to experience Deering's era. His
brother Charles Deering's nearby estate, now named 'The Deering Estate at
Cutler', is also open to the public and owned by Miami-Dade County, but
without art and furnishings. James Deering's estate, now named Vizcaya Museum
and Gardens, is an accredited museum and National Historic Landmark. The
villa, gardens, and village are under ongoing restoration. The Vizcaya Museum
and Gardens mission is "to preserve Vizcaya to engage our community and its
visitors in learning through the arts, history, and the environment."
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Deering
- Capó Jr., Julio. Welcome to Fairyland (p.74). The University of North
Carolina Press. Edizione del Kindle.