Syrie Maugham

Syrie Maugham

Syrie Maugham, photo by Cecil Beaton
Born Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo
(1879-07-10)10 July 1879
England
Died 25 July 1955(1955-07-25) (aged 76)
Occupation Interior designer

Syrie Maugham (née Barnardo; 10 July 1879 – 25 July 1955) was a leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and 1930s and best known for popularizing rooms decorated entirely in shades of white.

Birth

Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo was born in England on July 10, 1879.[1] She was the daughter of Thomas John Barnardo, the founder of the Barnardo's charity for destitute children, and his wife, the former Sarah Louise "Syrie" Elmslie. Maugham was the eldest girl in a family of six and as an adult she always went by Syrie.[2]

The Barnardos were members of an American religious sect, the Open Plymouth Brethren. Thomas John Barnardo believed in daily Bible reading, obedience, strict punctuality, the forgoing of worldly pleasures such as drinking, smoking and visiting the theater.[2]

Career

In the 1910s, Maugham began her career by apprenticing under Ernest Thornton-Smith in a London decorating firm to learn about furniture restoration, trompe-l'oeil, curtain design, and the mechanics of traditional upholstery.[2][3] In 1922 at the age of 42, Maugham borrowed £400 and opened her own interior decorating business at 85 Baker Street, London in 1922.[2] As the shop flourished, Maugham began decorating, taking on projects in Palm Beach and California.[4] By 1930, she had shops in London, Chicago, and New York.[1]

Maugham is best-remembered for the all white music room at her house at 213 King's Road in London. For the grand unveiling of her all white room, Maugham went to the extreme of dipping her white canvas draperies in cement. The room was filled with massive white floral arrangements and the overall effect was stunning.[1] Although she was known for white rooms, her own drawing room was the only all-white room she ever did.[4]

Also well-known was Maugham's salon in her villa at Le Touquet, a society resort in France. The salon was decorated entirely in shades of beige, relieved only by pale pink satin curtains.[4][5]

Although she made her fortune and fame with her white decors, by the mid-1930s she had largely given up the white decors to create interiors with baroque accessories and color schemes punctuated by bright green, shocking pink, and bold reds. Cecil Beaton remembered leaf-emerald wallpaper, magenta cushions, and Schiaparelli pink.[5][4]

Maugham charged high priced and could be very dictatorial with her clients and employee. She once told a hesitant client, "If you don't have ten thousand dollars to spend, I don't want to waste my time."[4]

Maugham popularized mirrored screens, indirect lighting, and plump furniture upholstered in white.[1] Maugham preferred wood furniture to be pickled or stripped, painted, or finished with a secret craquelure technique.[6]

Maugham's glamorous rooms influenced almost every designer, particularly Elsie de Wolfe, Jean-Michel Frank, and Frances Elkins.[4][7]

After Maugham closed her New York shop in 1932, someone suggested that Rose Cumming fill the gap and design white furniture of her own. No, Cumming said, "white was always Syrie's."[4]

Maugham's daughter Liza married in 1936, and the London house Maugham decorated for her was among her best work. After finishing it, she sold her own house and traveled to India with Elsie de Wolfe "to paint the Black Hole of Calcutta white". Maugham continued decorating, but had already completed her most famous and successful work. Her clients included Wallis Simpson, Marie Tempest, Oveta Culp Hobby, DeWitt Wallace, Elsa Schiaparelli, Capt. Edward Molyneux, Edward James, Mona Williams, Babe Paley, Bunny Mellon, Clare Boothe Luce, Alfred Lunt/Lynn Fontanne, Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll and the Hon. Stephen Tennant. She redecorated The Glen, Scottish home of Christopher Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, who hated the existing Scottish Baronial style of the house.[8]

Marriage to Henry Wellcome

Gwendoline Syrie Maud Wellcome (née Barnardo). Photo from 1901.

In 1901, on a visit to Khartoum with her father, she met Henry Wellcome, an American-born British industrialist who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals (his firm became Burroughs Wellcome). She was 22 and he was 48, and they married soon after. In 1903 they had a son, Henry Mounteney Wellcome. The Wellcomes' marriage was not happy, and Syrie reportedly had numerous affairs, including with the department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, Brig. Gen. Percy Desmond Fitzgerald, and the novelist William Somerset Maugham. Eventually, after some years of separation, she became pregnant with Maugham's only child, Mary Elizabeth, who was known as Liza.[9] When the child was born in Rome, Italy, she was given Wellcome's surname. Wellcome then publicly sued for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.[10]

Marriage to W. Somerset Maugham

Syrie Wellcome and W. Somerset Maugham married in 1917 in New Jersey, although he was predominantly homosexual and would spend much of his marriage apart from his wife. They divorced in 1928. Her divorce settlement from Maugham was their house at 213 King's Road, fully furnished, a Rolls-Royce, and 2,400 pounds a year for her and 600 pounds a year for Liza.

In his 1962 memoir Looking Back Maugham virulently criticised his former wife, which caused a public outcry. After Maugham's death in 1965 John Beverley Nichols, a former lover of Maugham's and a close friend of Syrie's, wrote in rebuttal a defense of her called A Case of Human Bondage (1966).

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 Fehrman, Cherie; Fehrman, Kenneth (2009-10-01). Interior Design Innovators 1910-1960. Fehrman Books. ISBN 9780984200108.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Hastings, Selina (2010-05-25). The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 9780679603719.
  3. ↑ Petkanas, Christopher (2010-04-28). "High Gloss". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-11-22.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Lambert, Elizabeth. "Design Legends: Syrie Maugham | Architectural Digest". Architectural Digest. Retrieved 2016-11-22.
  5. 1 2 "Syrie Maugham". Old-House Interiors. XV (5): 44. 2009.
  6. ↑ Lambert, Elizabeth (1999). "Syrie Maugham Famously White Rooms for an English Innovator". Architectural Digest (31 December). Retrieved 13 August 2016.
  7. ↑ Adler, David; Thorne, Martha; Chicago, Art Institute of; Architecture, Kisho Kurokawa Gallery of (2002-01-01). David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300097026.
  8. ↑ "The Glen, house and service wing: Listed Building Report". Historic Scotland. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
  9. ↑ Her birth name is given as Mary Elizabeth Wellcome in the immigration and naturalization files of ellisisland.org, wherein she is listed, along with her mother, then Syrie Wellcome, on the 21 July 1916 manifest of the HMS Baltic.
  10. ↑ McKnight, Gerald (1980). The scandal of Syrie Maugham. London: W.H. Allen. pp. 63–64. ISBN 0491027613.

References

Further reading

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