Antiquarians' Delight

Scattered on the floor like driftwood on a beach were inlaid sideboards, china cupboards and end tables. Marble busts stood in dusty splendor on all the tables and desks; mirrors leaned at odd angles against the walls. Art and antique magazines, cardboard cartons and discarded papers littered the room. The scene of this disarray was not Ye Olde Antique Shoppe, but the paneled office of White House Curator Mrs. James N. Pearce, head huntress for Jackie Kennedy in her campaign to turn the White House into a treasure trove of Early Americana.

Private Paper. Other occupants of the White House may have been eminently satisfied with its Board Room Baroque decor of overstuffed sofas and roomy leather chairs. Not Jackie. Determined to make her new home a "period house" crammed with such artifacts as James Madison's medicine chest and Andrew Jackson's inkwell, Jackie formed a Fine Arts Committee to help her transform the White House into a "museum of our country's heritage." Rich committee members put up the cost of the antiques out of their own pockets. As thousands of letters poured into Washington with offers and suggestions, the committee tracked down the likely prospects, described, photographed and priced each piece. Final choices were made by Jackie, subject to the approval of the Fine Arts Commission. Last week the committee made its first progress report, listing all the items in Mrs. Pearce's crowded office: gifts, loans, bequests and discoveries.

Donated to the White House was furniture once owned by George Washington, James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln. While rummaging through a London antique shop, a committee member found some period wallpaper decorated with Revolutionary War scenes; it will be used to paper Jackie's private dining room. Mrs. Albert Lasker gave the committee a marble bust of George Washington, and a jowly, side-burned bust of Martin Van Buren was discovered in storage. Treasury Secretary and Mrs. Douglas Dillon chipped in with a roomful of Empire furniture including a mahogany library table and an anonymous source lent a Samuel F. B. Morse portrait of Revolutionary War General John Stark. Back to the White House from a private home in Virginia came a tufted upholstered chair that was formerly in Lincoln's bedroom. Cached in a discarded scouring-pad carton in the White House basement were two sets of vermeil knives and serving spoons that belonged to President Monroe.

The Cost of Hunting. No committee member was a more indefatigable antique hunter than Jackie herself. In storage, and in antique shops in Baltimore. New York and London, she uncovered such prizes as a Bellange pier table ordered by President Monroe and a Victorian slipper armchair of the Lincoln period. Steadfastly claiming that "the question of money should be subordinated to esthetic values," Jackie and the committee refused to reveal prices. But some of the pieces cost as much as $13,000. What Jackie was discovering was a fact happily known to every antique dealer in the U.S.--Early Americana comes high--especially when it is headed for the White House.

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