HOTELS OF RICHMOND



The Union Hotel, Main at Nineteenth
streets, built in 1817 to the
designs of Otis Manson.

This is the second part of a series on the Taverns and Hotels of Richmond. The first part is found here. The demand on the part of travelers and visitors for food and overnight lodging has usually been met by the provision of rooms (or beds) rented by the night in buildings provided by private enterprise, unless capital for that purpose exceeded local resources. In that case, institutions or individual landowners would provide guest lodging.  Over time, the building types that served travelers changed in response to changing levels of prosperity and demand.  The American luxury hotel, typified by Richmond’s Jefferson Hotel of 1895, had its origins in the early nineteenth-century taverns and hotels financed by merchants and developers to ease travel, promote business interests, and answer civic and social needs.

This new building type appeared in Richmond in 1817.  The Union Hotel, located at Main and Nineteenth streets, was built for Dr. John Adams and designed by architect Otis Manson, who was associated on at least one project with architect Robert Mills (he and Mills prepared plans for a new Richmond City Jail that wasn’t built at about the same time [Records of the Common Hall, 17 March 1817]). It represented a more architecturally sophisticated response to the demand for overnight accommodations, the first to rise “above the primitive level of inns and taverns” [Scott]. 




The Union Hotel from Charles H. Corey, A History of Richmond Theological Seminary. Richmond VA: Union University, 1895. Probably originally part of hotel promotional literature.

Its architectural form responded to the development of the “first-class” hotel as a civic amenity in major American cities. The most notable example of the new hotel was the Exchange Coffee House in Boston, a remarkable seven-story structure, designed by architect Asher Benjamin, that provided 300 rooms, banquet halls, and other public amenities. “Its destruction by fire [in 1818] was a civic calamity” [Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, 1966, 136].

 

The Exchange Coffee House in Boston [Wikipedia].

Like the Boston building, the Union Hotel featured an applied exterior architectural treatment and unprecedented height. Dr. John Adams must have intended that the new Richmond hotel serve a similar role in the city. The row of tall windows on the main floor suggests two entertaining rooms on the interior.   Manson provided the four-story hotel with a tall piano nobile with arch-headed floor-length windows that was topped by a two-story row of applied Doric half columns fronting the bedroom floors. The walls, stuccoed to resemble stone, were terminated in a pattern book Doric entablature featuring carved paterae between the triglyphs. The building was sheltered under a shallow hipped roof with a balustraded deck. A three-story wing stood to the rear. The cupola in the advertising lithograph shown above was probably added by the artist to improve the view, which was intended to show how large the building was.

 

Detail of the Union Hotel's cornice, 1865.

 

The Union Hotel in the period immediately after the Civil War [VCU archive]. Like many earlier taverns, it featured a wide portico across the front.

As Bryan Clark Green has observed, Richmond hotels, beginning with the Union Hotel, had about a twenty-year life-span before they appeared outmoded [NR form, Ninth Street Office Building]. By the early 1840s, when the Exchange Hotel was built, equipped with toilets, central heat, and running water, the Union Hotel was no longer fashionable. Although it was returned to use as a hotel, it was rented as the site of the predecessor of the Medical College of Virginia when the school was opened in 1838. It was used as barracks in 1847 during the Mexican-American War, but was back in operation in 1850, when it was visited by President Zachary Taylor [Christian]. It was purchased in 1870 by the trustees of the Richmond Institute, forerunner of Virginia Union University, as the college’s main academic building. In much the same way, the Exchange was replaced in favor by the Spottswood Hotel, new in 1859-60 and the favorite of Confederate politicians and officers.

In spite of the ostensible twenty-year rule, the ancient Eagle Tavern maintained its superlative reputation for decades, even in competition with newer hostelries. In 1825, Lafayette’s dinner at the Eagle Tavern was matched by one at the newer Union Hotel. John Tyler was entertained at the Union Hotel in 1827 (and again in 1836), but John Randolph was feted at the Eagle in 1827 and the Washington birthday ball was held there in 1832. The Eagle, by this time known as a hotel, burned in 1839 [Christian]. No image survives of this popular place of entertainment. According to one source, a popular song in Richmond during the antebellum period included the lines “I dined at the Union, got drunk at the Bell, and lost all my money at the Eagle Hotel” [John K. Trammell. Travelers to War-time Richmond, America’s Civil War, Sept 1996, http://www.historynet.com/travelers-to-wartime-richmond-sept-96-americas-civil-war-feature.htm].

Exchange Hotel with the second bridge to the Ballard House.



The elevation of the Exchange Hotel can be seen in this 1845 Virginia Mutual policy at the top and the central courtyard can be seen in the 1851 Virginia Mutual policy below.

 

The cupola of the Exchange Hotel can be seen seen here from the west in a detail from an 1865 panorama [center right, Library of Congress].

 

The Exchange Bank opened in June 1841 and the new Exchange Hotel the next month. The name Exchange is a clue to the building’s proposed use by merchants and dealers to further their business. It was built near the tobacco warehouses at the foot of Shockoe Hill for a stock company of Richmond businessmen. Their intention was to encourage commerce by providing visitors to the city with a luxurious and even palatial hotel. After that date, most entertainments were held at the Exchange, including one for Charles Dickens in the following year [Christian]. The front was ornamented with four colossal, engaged, Ionic columns supporting a massive entablature and flaked by tall narrow, bow-fronted bays. The building was topped by a cupola resembling a circular Roman temple. The interior featured marble floors, a large vestibule ornamented with statuary, a “great hall,” a ladies’ dining room, a gentlemen’s drawing rooms, a dining room accommodating 300, reading rooms, and a ballroom, all surrounding a landscaped central courtyard [Bryan Clark Green et al, Lost Virginia: Vanished Architecture of the Old Dominion, 2001: 175].

 

The St. Charles Hotel can be seen to the far left and the Exchange Hotel to the right in this 1860s panorama of the city looking west from Church Hill.

 

 

Byrd’s Warehouse, site of the Exchange Hotel, in 1835. The trapezoidal site became available after the warehouse burned. Like the warehouse, the hotel was well placed at the foot of the hill between the lower commercial city and the upper capitol.

The Exchange Hotel and Ballard House seen on the 1876 Beers Map. The central courtyard of the Exchange was improved with paths and a central element such as a fountain.

The Exchange Hotel represented a new version of the ‘first-class” hotel taking shape in most of the nation’s major cities. Beginning with Isaiah Rogers’ Tremont House of 1827-30 in Boston, American hotels borrowed from the monumental forms of  public buildings.  The Tremont House gave “an unmistakable impression of elegance and public purpose, for which the Greek-revival orders, stylish in that day, were, of course, admirably suited. . . [and] confirmed a feeling as different as possible from that of the 18^th-centry inn” [Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 1966] Rogers’ Astor House in New York (1832-36), Jacques Bussière de Pouilly’s St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans (1838), and C.H. Reichardt’s Charleston Hotel (1839) had extensive reception rooms, fully expressed orders, and central rotundas [Pevsner, Building Types, 175-76]. These were comfortable, even palatial, buildings that employed the architectural orders on both the interior and exterior to create a sense of grandeur and importance for the commercial and social transactions that took place within. 

When Alexander Macay, an English lawyer, visited New Orleans in 1846-47, he remarked that “with us hotels are regarded as purely private property, and it is seldom that, in their appearance, the stand out from the mass of private houses around them. In America they are looked upon much more in the light of public concerns, and generally assume in their exterior the character of public buildings.” Daniel Boorstin observed that “lacking a royal palace as a center of “Society,” Americans created their counterpart in the community hotel. The People’s Palace was a building constructed with the extravagant optimism expressly to serve all who could pay the price. . . . From the early days of the 19^th century, hotels were social centers. . . . The hotel lobby, like the outer rooms of a royal palace, became a loitering place, a headquarters of gossip, a vantage point for a glimpse of the great, the rich, and the powerful” [Boorstin, 1966, 135].

 

The Ballard House was built across the street from the Exchange Hotel in 1855-56 [1865, LOC].

The five-story Ballard House was built by hotelier John P. Ballard in 1855-56 as a more modern hotel across the street from the Exchange Hotel, which Ballard had purchased in 1851. As can be seen in the photograph from just after the end of the Civil War, the Ballard was a plain tripartite building which relied on the shapes and details of the fenestration to enliven the facade.  Ballard connected the two buildings by a bridge at the second floor level allowing them to share facilities. The first floor of the Exchange was leased out to stores and the cellars were rented for storage. The hotels survived the evacuation fire and were refitted, but were unable to compete with the new Jefferson Hotel after 1895, the Exchange was demolished in 1900 and the Ballard House in 1920 [Virginia Historical Society, A Guide to the Exchange Hotel and Ballard House Records, 1865-1889].  

The main section of the Powhatan House (later Ford’s Hotel) on Broad Street in the post-Civil War period [Shadows in Silver].

The Powhatan House (later Ford’s Hotel) seen in a post-Civl War post card, at Eleventh and Broad Streets.http://[mississippiconfederates.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/lines-on-the-back-of-a-confederate-note/]

The Powhatan Boarding House, a four-story brick hotel, fronted on Broad Street north of the Capitol.  It began as a row of commercial structures facing Broad Street and known as Southgate’s Buildings, which housed shops on the first floor and a boarding house above. In 1831, James McKildoe enlarged Southgate’s Buildings to make the Powhatan House, which Mary Wingfield Scott says it was the most popular hostelry in the city before the construction of the Exchange Hotel. It was popular with politicians like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. It was much enlarged over time. When President Millard Filmore visited in 1851, he was put up at what was by then known as the Powhatan Hotel, from which he visited the Constitutional Convention then in session [Christian 173]. In its expanded form, it was later known as Ford’s Hotel from the 1870s until the early twentieth century [Scott, Old Richmond Neighborhoods, 97]. Like the other taverns and hotels, it featured a wide portico on which guests could watch the activities in the street. The hotel featured a luxurious lobby, dining room, and the usual barroom and barbershop.

Ford’s Hotel struggled to compete with more modern hotels as time passed. It was closed temporarily for renovations in 1903: “from to-day forth the hotel will be known as The Powhatan, a return to its antebellum name. The rates of the renovated and rehabilitated house will be fixed at from 12 to 13 per day, according to accommodations desired. It will be conducted on the American plan. Baths will be put in, everything brightened and renewed and its cuisine and service will be made a feature hereafter” [Times Dispatch, 1 October 1903]. The structure was demolished in 1911-12 to be the site of a new city courthouse that was never built [NR form, Ninth Street Office Building and John K. Trammell, "Travelers to wartime Richmond had a wide choice of luxurious hotels, inns and taverns,” Civil War Times Sept 1996. http://www.historynet.com/travelers-to-wartime-richmond-sept-96-americas-civil-war-feature.htm].

Many of the hotels of the time are shown on this detail from Ferslews’s Map of Richmond (1859) including the Powhatan House , the St. Clair (northwest of the Capitol), the American, the Exchange , the St. Charles , and Union Hotel (in lower right corner).

By 1859, the city’s taverns had all been transformed into hotels. Most of these hotels were located in a circuit around the Capitol and few were left in the older part of town east of Shockoe Creek. The city’s principal hotels, listed on Ferslew’s Map of 1859, were as follows:

-The American Hotel (a five-story structure south of the Capitol, at Twelfth and Main, built c 1840). It was rebuilt soon after the war and was later known as the Lexington Hotel. 

-The Exchange Hotel (the hollow square to the right of the center, built 1841)

-The Powhatan House (northeast of the Capitol, 1831)

-The Broad Street Hotel (on the northwest corner of Broad Street and Ninth near the RF&P Railroad Depot)

-The Central Hotel (an enlarged version of the old Washington Tavern west of the Capitol)

-The Columbian Hotel (on the east die of Shockoe Slip)

-The St. Charles Hotel ((labeled City Hotel, southeast of the Exchange, a four-story building at Fifteenth and Main, converted into Confederate Hospital #8, built c 1846)

A view of the American Hotel in 1858 at the corner of Main and Twelfth streets.

The Spottswood Hotel opened just before the Civil War. Seen here in 1865 at the SE corner of Eighth and Main. It burned in 1870 [LOC].

Spottswood Hotel, 1865

Hotels built in the late antebellum years, like the Ballard House, tended to be much less exuberant on the exterior, but even more luxurious and comfortable on the interior.  The new five-story Spottswood Hotel, built at Eighth and Main, was like an elongated version of a Richmond commercial building with no discernable main entry and no colonnade above its cast iron storefronts. Not until 1895, with the opening of the Jefferson Hotel, would Richmond hotels again join civic buildings and churches in employing elaborate architectural detailing. In spite of its plain exterior, when it opened in 1860 the Spottswood Hotel became the city’s most popular destination for travelers. Competing against the famous Exchange/Ballard Hotel, it was the favorite hotel for official visitors to the Confederate capital. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis both took rooms there until permanent homes could be found for them.  

A view of the American Hotel in 1858 at the corner of Main and Twelfth streets.

Immediately after the Civil War, the old hotels were refitted and reopened for business. New hotels, such as the second American Hotel, tended to follow the old patterns with new stylistic flourishes like arched cast iron window heads. 

Not until the 1880s was Richmond’s economy recovered sufficiently to think of building a great new hotel to symbolize its joining in the renewed growth of the New South. Lewis Ginter (1824-1897), a extremely wealthy tobacco manufacturer, played the role of civic philanthropist toward the end of his life.  Ginter was a leader in a plan which originated as early as 1882 with the city's chamber of commerce, to construct a modern hotel in the western part of the city, augmenting the superannuated accommodation available downtown [Christian, 1912, 419, 446]. The Exchange Hotel of 1841, and the Ballard Hotel of 1856 undoubtedly appeared to him to be progressive or modern. By 1892 Lewis Ginter had personally taken up the hotel scheme, determined to act as a benefactor and tastemaker to his burgeoning adopted city.  The project’s extraordinary scale, complex plan, and high cost suggest that other factors, including the effective “boosting” of Richmond, outweighed practical profitability among Ginter’s intentions.

Jefferson Hotel [Department of Historic Resources].

The rectangular site selected by Lewis Ginter for the hotel occupied approximately one-half of a square or block west of downtown Richmond, between Franklin and Main streets, in what had been the city's most fashionable residential neighborhood for many years. The pressure of postwar industry and commerce in the city’s old center sparked new construction in the old residential areas to the west. The Franklin Street front was intended from the start to appeal to an elite clientele by its relationships of scale and form to its fashionable residential setting, while the flush Main Street front, which served as an entrance for commercial travelers, responded to the commercial functions located along Main Street and the streetcar line that ran its length.



The Jefferson’s Pompeian-style Palm Court with the central statue of Jefferson.

Jefferson Hotel “Rotunda” before the fire of 1901 that destroyed the south end of the hotel [Cook Collection, Valentine Museum].

The most direct inspiration for the Franklin Street front would seem to have been the Casino at Monte Carlo by Charles Garnier (1878-79). Visitors entering on the Franklin Street front found themselves in a central foyer, called the Marble Hall, detailed in the Doric order. A central archway opposite the entry gave a glimpse of the glazed “Palm Court” beyond, detailed like a Pompeian peristyle court. A grand staircase led down to a two-story glazed court known as the "Rotunda" or "Office Rotunda" on the lower level which gave access to amenities intended for the hotel’s male visitors and city residents,  such as a bar room, grill, billiard room, and barber shop. Remarkably, Carèrre and Hastings’ Rotunda recalled the sculpture court of 1820-39 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as roofed with glass in 1867 [see our commentary on the Ecole here].  The architects even imitated and elaborated the slender iron colonnettes that were added to support the gabled glass roof at the École.

Casino de Monte Carlo, Concert Hall, Charles Garnier, 1879

Jefferson Hotel

 

The young firm of Carrère and Hastings evoked the full depth of French academic classicism at this important project in the opening phase of the American Renaissance. The complexity and originality of the design grew out of the Jefferson's relatively small scale, generous capitalization, expansive functional program, and the personal direction of its developer.  Few commercial enterprises then or later have embodied such an ambitious effort at using art and architecture to fill a social and civic role.

 

Additional hotels were built in the years following, including Murphy's Hotel, the Hotel Richmond, the William Byrd Hotel, but none equaled the Jefferson, which, in spite of a disastrous fire in 1901, still operates in a substantial part of the original structure.    

 

THE MURALS AT RICHMOND'S HISTORIC BYRD THEATRE

The Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Virginia represents, both architecturally and decoratively, a culmination point in a long tradition, one that stretches back beyond the eighteenth-century origins of American theater. Play-houses since the 16th century have been given special decorative treatments in keeping with their importance in the civic realm. Relief sculpture and painted decorations referring to mythological themes ornamented the prosceniums and the fronts of box seats in European theaters. In the same tradition, the earliest theaters in the colonies undoubtedly made use of the decorative skills of the same painters who produced stage sets. In fact, the decorative arts are closely allied with those of the scene painter.

Popular entertainment became increasingly profitable in the years leading up to the First World War, and owners spent increasing sums on decorative plastering, mural paintings, bronze fittings, and marble finishes. The use of permanent and expensive materials was in accord with the comprehensive decorative programs associated with the burgeoning movement now identified as the American Renaissance. This movement grew out of the grand synthesis of art and architecture associated with the influential Parisian Ecole des Beaux-arts and popularized at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This mode of decoration, usually extended to major public buildings, was carried out in accord with a general program that established a theme and corresponded to the architectural form of a building’s interior.

Byrd Theatre, Auditorium Interior, photograph c 1928.

The Byrd Theatre

In 1928, the Byrd Theatre opened just as talking pictures were introduced. It was an architecturally sophisticated film-only venue in the city’s West End neighborhood. Such an ambitious project represented a new scale of investment for the increasingly profitable partnership of Walter Coulter and Charles Somma. Fred Bishop, the architect, and Arthur Brounet, whose studio was in charge of the interior finishes, took their decorative program from French theaters and opera houses of the early to mid-nineteenth century, seen though the lens of big-city vaudeville and movie venues of more recent years. These were typified by the vast Chicago Theatre, built in 1921 to the designs of architects Rapp and Rapp in the “Neo-Baroque French Revival style” with elaborate mural paintings, or the 5,000-seat Roxy Theatre in New York conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin, Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager, and decorator Harold Rambusch and completed in 1927.  

The interior decoration of the Byrd was executed by the Brounet Studios in New York, a well-known firm that specialized in theater and lobby decoration. Arthur Brounet (1866-1941), a native of Le Havre, France, studied art in France, Germany and Italy at various times in his life. He arrived in New York at the age of twenty. He was listed in the census of 1890 as a “decorator of arts” and in a directory of 1892 as an artist. He advertised as early as 1896 in the Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide, notifying clients that he was a “designer in every style, Relief Work and Tapestry Painting,” located at 678 Lexington Avenue in New York.  He was married and had three children, including Arthur G. Brounet, who would assist his father in installing the work at the Byrd. 

Arthur Brounet, Mural in Lobby of the Ettinge Theatre (Empire 42nd St), New York, 1912.

Brounet worked with prolific theater architect Thomas W. Lamb in 1912 to provide the Egyptian-styled decoration, including murals, for the Eltinge 42nd Street Theatre of 1912 in New York. The lobby of the Eltinge 42nd Street Theatre contains one of the few surviving Brounet murals. It was part of a larger set of murals that decorated the auditorium in the “Egyptian” style. 

Brounet found it unnecessary to compromise his Beaux-arts training to come up with suitable Egyptian themes. Instead, he adapted the theatrical allegories he was accustomed to produce for use on the dome, the “sounding board” and the fronts of the boxes at the Eltinge. The critic for the New York Times  found the juxtaposition incongruous and remarked that “what the designer intended when he decorated the boxes with bacchanic figures wearing Egyptian headdresses and playing pipes can only be imagined.”  

Other important theaters designed by Lamb for which the decoration was credited to Brounet include the Selwyn, on 42nd Street, and the Cort Theatre, for which he provided an eighteenth-century French interior. Brounet did aquatic-themed murals at Warren and Wetmore’s 1927 Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, NJ, and was responsible for the decoration at many others, including the Prospect Theatre in the Bronx, the Keeney Theatre in Brooklyn of 1915 (with a foyer mural), and the Maryland Theatre in Hagerstown, MD, in the same year. The Hanover Theatre in Pennsylvania, which he decorated in 1928, is still standing. His technically assured and carefully composed paintings are consistently in the mainstream of the academic tradition, even after the tradition began to falter in the second decade of the twentieth century. His work was capable of holding its own with the most accomplished architectural settings.

The Keeney Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. Proscenium mural by Arthur Brounet, [Architecture and Building, April 1915]. The theme appears to be another version of “The Coronation of Theatrical Art,” similar to the Prospect Theatre. “The decorations are well carried out and in fine materials. The color scheme is in rose, cream and gold with a large proscenium decoration. The entrance lobby is also highly decorated, containing another fine mural by Arthur Brounet over the entrance to the inner foyer.”

Brounet undoubtedly painted the Byrd’s murals himself and planned the color scheme of the interior. For his work in “decorating and mural work & tapestry” he was paid $16,000. This did not include the drapery, which came to $2,742, and the carpeting, which cost about $8,915, which his firm also supplied. His firm hired and sent to Richmond a “gang” of skilled decorative painters to execute the design in the months leading up to the opening. 

Close examination of the design and execution of the overall painted decoration shows a commitment to detail and quality, as well as traditional methods of execution. The decorative paints and metals used were less costly, but gave a similar effect, to the most expensive materials, like gold leaf. Some of the architectural finishes have held up very well, while the inexpensive quality of others has meant that they have lost their intended effect (notably the use use of bronze powder paint as a substitute for metallic leaf in some areas). The murals were executed in oil on canvas in the New York City studio and shipped to the site. 

Comparison of Arthur Brounet’s work with that of prominent contemporary muralists and with other projects executed by his firm indicate that he remained loyal to his training as an academic realist. His murals consistently employed classical subjects and traditional mythological themes well into the 1920s. He undoubtedly closely planned the allegorical and historical content of the pictures within the larger context of the era in which he had been trained. 

The following illustrations show similar work embodying mythological and allegorical content from Arthur Brounet Studios:

Arthur Brounet, Mural in Lobby of the St. James Building, New York, built 1898 [empheralnewyork]

Proscenium decoration illustrating “The Coronation of Theatrical Art (above) and mural allegory of “Harmony” (below) by Arthur Brounet for the Prospect Theatre in the Bronx, 1911, from “Theatres and their decorations” [Architecture and Building: A Magazine Devoted to Contemporary Architectural Construction (43:8) May 1911].

The Byrd Theatre’s Mural Program

The mural paintings throughout the Byrd were intended to provide allegorical content to complement the building’s interior architecture. In keeping with Beaux-arts concepts, the architect selected an architectural order, a historical period, a setting that accommodated a hierarchy of allegorical paintings, and a complement of decorative details that upheld film presentation as a legitimate form of drama. 

It seems worthwhile to explore the theme of the murals to better understand the ways in which the theater responds to its purpose and setting. Examination of Brounet’s surviving decorative work has shown that his theater murals were often intended as allegories. and were, as well, given appropriate explanatory titles. At least one example made a positive reference to drama as an fine art. In this case, Brounet’s allegory seems to have appropriated some rather modern ideas appropriate to the prospective art of cinema.   

Byrd Theatre, Foyer Interior, photograph c 1928.

The mural program is centered on the large triptych high on the wall in the two-story foyer. The foyer paintings, executed in oil on canvas, are in a long line of theatrical murals presenting the muses as patrons of the arts and the history of drama as an Dionysian celebration inherited from the ancient Greeks. 

Melpomene, Arthur Brounet, Central Mural in Foyer, Byrd Theatre, 1928.
The mural was painted at the studio in oil on canvas, which was then adhered
to the plaster substrate.

The central mural in the upper wall of the Byrd’s foyer is the focal point of Arthur Brounet’s decorative program. It depicts the muse Melpomene ruling over the sacred mysteries that form the Greek origins of Western drama. The partially undressed figure is seated on a marble throne and wrapped in a red cloak. She holds in one hand a primitive and terrifying version of the tragic mask used by Greek actors, and in the other a palm branch probably representing fame. She has a poppy in her hair, perhaps representing the viewers’ forgetfulness of the outer world when under the influence of the imaginative power of the dramatic art. Framed by the setting sun, she appears ready to don the mask herself, as the revelers to either side perform the ritual that sets the stage for the evening’s celebrations. As we will see, she occupies the central position in a larger performance on a stage of her own.  

Melpomene, Edward Simmons, Library of Congress, 1896 (above),
Melpomene, Paul Baudry, Grand Foyer, Paris Opera, 1874 (below). 

A well-known mural in the Library of Congress by Edward Simmons shows a similar seated figure with a mask at her feet and flanked by putti, one of whom holds a wreath of  ivy, associated with Dionysus. This mural shows the academic context in which the Byrd’s murals were painted. Somewhat earlier, another red-clad Melponene sat among her sisters in cove panels on the ceiling of the Grand Foyer of Charles Garnier’s influential Paris Opera. The sumptuous ceiling, completed by Paul Baudry in 1874, as well as the sculpture and painting that ornaments the rest of the state-sponsored opera house, was a distant, but potent source of the form and decorative scheme of the Byrd. 

Gustave Boulanger, Bacchanal and Country Dance, Salle de Danse, Paris Opera (left) 
and Instrumental Music, Proscenium mural, Casino de Monte Carlo (right). Both buildings 
by Charles Garnier.

According to one scholar, “the nineteenth century appropriated the figure of the maenad transmitted from Antiquity and filtered by the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, to become, in fact, a 'muse' of the new time and articulated around it a modern poetic. . . . they appear in the cycles of official decorations just as in the advertising posters or the illustrations of novels. . .The same artists can make the subject both pretext to a scene of licentious nudity, or the recreation of the glorious tradition of the ancient bacchanal.” Examples include the academic paintings below, showing dancing and exhausted revelers not unlike those seen in the foyer murals.                                    

Bacchante and Satyr, Leon Palliere, 1862 

In addition to nineteenth-century academic paintings with which Brounet was familiar, there were also the tamer Neo-classical sources that were never out of print, such as John Flaxman’s reliefs for Wedgewood ceramics and his illustrations for Homer, and the relief designs of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. Brounet’s dancers have more in common with these graceful forms than with the later academic paintings.  

John Flaxman, the Dancing Hours, a popular source for theater muralists.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, bacchante and satyr

The symmetrically placed panels flanking the central muse are not as immediately readable as was the center panel. The entire scene is set in a autumnal Arcadian landscape with a distant background of mountains seemingly lit up at sunset. Four partially clad bacchantes, two on each side, are dancing with satyr-like male figures, devotees associated with the abandonment of the worship of Dionysus, accompanied by the music of an double reed flute called an aulos, usually associated with worship of the god. The dancing trios are flanked by reclining female forms, wearing red cloaks matching the muse. Each is provided with an female attendant.

As we will see, the background is notionally part of the same landscape depicted in the murals in the auditorium. The overall composition contains five elements: the central muse, two groups of dancers, and the reclining figures and their attendants. It is noticeable that the outer figures to the left seem more wooden and less well painted than the lithe figures of the dancers and the lady on the right. Flanking columns or piers, partially visible, and tapestry hangings are shown at each side, suggesting that the scene is set on the stage of a Greek outdoor theater.

When Brounet sent the murals to Richmond, Charles Somma must have indicated that something about one of them was unsatisfactory. Arthur G. Brounet told Somma that “In reference to the mural now in your possession, upon my first trip to your job, will bring this back and make the necessary changes.” Might this account for the poor quality of the artwork on the bacchante in the left panel, if a part of it had to be hastily repainted? Was the original too risque for Richmond? Or was there some painted reference to Bacchus’ wine which Somma thought would raise questions during Prohibition?

Arthur Brounet, Byrd Theatre, flanking murals in the foyer, right (at top) and left (at bottom)

In the academic tradition, an idealized female figure is often employed to personify a concept or trait. The connection with Dionysus in the Byrd’s murals is emphasized by the partially clad bacchante reclining in an ecstatic pose on the left. She is wearing an ivy crown and holding a pine-cone-topped thyrsus, both symbols of the god’s presence. Here, the reclining bacchante represents the Dionysian contribution to drama.  Above her, on a pedestal, is an archaic Greek-style amphora showing a horse and a man. 

In contrast, the robed female figure on the right is holding an ornate lyre, such as accompanied the performance of epic poetry. Her alert pose and attitude are clearly antithetical to the figure on the opposite side. Her cool composure is assured by her attendant’s carefully wielded fan. A clue to her significance may be found in the lyre, her only attribute, which makes a conventional mythological connection with the god Apollo. Dionysos and Apollo were each associated with specific musical modes and instruments, as confirmed by standard surveys of classical art: 

If Apollo’s delight was the melodious and restrained lyre, Dionysos’ instrument, at least by the 4th century BC, was the rousing, versatile, and dramatic aulos (tibia in Latin). The aulos was was a cylindrical pipe, sounded with a reed (a cross between the modern oboe, clarinet, and flute), and played in pairs.- not to be confused with the syrinx, the ‘panpipes’ associated with Pan, the rustic god of shepherds and fertility. It was played in all manner of Dionysian rituals- at the theatre (accompanying the chorus of an Athenian drama), Bacchic mysteries, and the symposium. . . The rhythmic fervor of cymbals, the tambourine, and drums could also be connected to Dionysos and his primordial realm.
                     Nigel Spivey and Michael Squire, Panorama of the Classical World 

While the ancients understood that Apollo and Dionysos, both sons of Zeus, were related in a symmetrical way, it was the philosopher Nietzsche who, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), articulated the tension between the antithetical forces represented by the sensual Dionysos and the rational Apollo as the source of tragic drama. It is inappropriate to read too deeply into a frankly commercial production like the Byrd Theatre murals, but the paintings do seem equipped with symbols enough to bear the weight of a Dionysian/Apollonian interpretation.  Thus, the Byrd murals may be interpreted to present Melpomene as the allegorical figure of Drama in her especial manifestation as Cinema. She sits enthroned at the hinge between the wild abandon of the vaudeville tradition and the emotional control characteristic of the legitimate stage. The mural makes the controversial argument that film is the equal of live theater and that it is capable of making a similarly honorable contribution to the civic realm. 

The Byrd Theatre at the time of opening in 1928 with organist Carl Rond at the keyboard

The Auditorium

The theater was designed by the architect to allow either murals or fabric inserts in panels in both the foyer and the auditorium, but the owner made the choice to spend the substantial sums required to purchased a total of eleven paintings. These were placed where they would make the most effective contribution to the whole. In the auditorium, the murals included the six landscapes in the arches on the side walls and the two box seat or “organ arch” panels, as they were called in the mural specifications. In addition, smaller cartouches and panels around the room continued the theme of dance begun in the lobby. The pilaster capitals flanking the boxes were designed in a variant version of the Corinthian order, which incorporates a “cameo” of a heroic figure at the center of each. Since the cameos are not shown on the architect’s section drawings, these details may represent a collaboration between the muralist, the decorative plasterer, and/or the architect. They appear to have been painted on plaster at the theater.       

As noted above, the auditorium is also ornamented with a series of grisaille medallions and panels. These were executed in an appropriately Neoclassical style. These have lost most of their power due to their darkening over time and the loss of a set of medallions that was included as part of the “plaster stage setting” that was removed in 1989.  The group is dominated by a central panel on the beam supporting the dome and located over the front of the balcony. It consists of four female figures who are dancing around a central altar crowned by a flaming tripod.

Byrd Theatre, central panel on the beam above the balcony rail.

In keeping with the decorative program identified in the foyer murals, the ceiling panel appears to represent a stylized, Neo-classical version of the celebration of the dance around the altar of Dionysos in the center of the theater in Athens. This ritual was associated with the worship of Dionysus, out of which grew Greek dramatic performance.  Corresponding paintings of dancers are found on the center of each of the five rounded projections on the front of the balcony.  

These famous Neo-classical rondels of the muses Polyhymnia, Euterpe, and Terpsichore by Thorvaldsen are part of the visual ancestry of the four muses in the auditorium paintings. They closely resemble three of the four figures in the ceiling panel above, but the number of the figures and inclusion of the altar do not confirm the Byrd figures as muses.   

Landscape Murals

The landscapes painted in the two boxes flanking the stage and behind the plaster filigree in the three arches on each side of the auditorium are intended to give glimpses into the continuous evening landscape that can be seen in the evocative backgrounds of the foyer murals. The only intrusive notes that seems to deviate from the Greco-Roman ornamental program are in the central arches on each side, where Maxfield Parrish-inspired castles have crept into the Arcadian twilight. 

Three of the six archway murals

Murals in the backs of the box seats flanking the proscenium

Painting the backs of box seats to resemble a garden landscape may not have been part of the architect’s initial intention, since it seems to work against the architectural logic of the theater. The vistas in the backs of the box seats. as executed, however, serve to open the heavy sides of the proscenium and link the landscapes along the walls, and by extension even the terrain outside the theater, with the fantastic scenes projected on the screen. The murals in the boxes are the most unstructured and dream-like of any in the building, perhaps because only portions of them could be glimpsed from any one spot. Elements such as tombs, funereal urns, and memorial arches in both murals suggest the memories of heroic lives.

The painting on the right side of the stage contains a view down an allee of clipped shrubbery toward a circular structure like a heroic or imperial tomb, which is supported on a rusticated base and topped with an urn. In the foreground is a pool in which a statue or shadowed figure is bathing with her back to the audience beside a monumental funerary urn bearing the image of a hero or god. In the distance, in front of the tomb, stands an arch made entirely out of clipped vegetation. The mural on the left has a pool in the distance in which stands a tripartite triumphal arch topped with gilded sculptural figures and a heraldic crest, located on an artificial island. In front of the arch, a bronze fountain plays into a basin surrounded by a hedge. To the right in the foreground rises the corner of a tall Corinthian temple. 

Behind its restrained “Renaissance” or “Empire” facade, the Byrd Theatre’s interior was intended to astonish Richmonders accustomed to the cool neo-classicism of the city’s existing theaters. Most viewers responded positively to the lavish lobby and auditorium. An early reviewer declared that “from the moment of entering the lobby, wainscoted with Grecian marble in tones of brown and buff, with its bronze doors and stair railings, it unusually well-executed frescoes and its beautiful crystal fixtures, one is impressed with the feeling of luxury the promoters of this enterprise have tried to provide- not costliness merely, but beauty, comfort and refinement” [News Leader, 25 Dec. 1928]. 

The Byrd has shown films almost continuously since it opened. Due to its meticulous preservation through the decades, the theater retains not only its dramatic marble and ornamental plaster interiors and historic Wurlitzer organ, but its historic paint scheme and valuable mural cycle. A careful restoration of the decorative finishes and murals is planned to be completed over the next three years.