Katherine Mcqueen

“It is our fancy for things ancient, more than for things beautiful, that induces us to lift marble mantels from Venetian palaces and to place them in Fifth Avenue houses,” writer John Van Dyke grumbled in 1909, reflecting on the Astor-led impulse of aping European taste. “To hang our walls with tapestries from France and pictures from Italy and Holland, to cover our floors with Dagestan rugs, and to put in our drawing-rooms worm-eaten chairs from Paris and Nuremberg. Their inappropriateness in their new western setting is glazed over by the statement that they are ‘very old’—a statement which might, with equal pertinence if less interest, be made about any pudding-stone from the neighboring hills.”
― Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty