Linenfold Panel purchased by Br. Sixtus in 1982

Many guests of the Abbey have had the opportunity to see a room adjacent to the Stillman Dining Hall known as the Paneled Room or the Linenfold Room. It is named for the paneling which is the subject of this article by Br. Sixtus Roslevich, who continues our ongoing series on ”Artists of the Abbey,” here highlighting the handiwork of the anonymous craftsmen who designed these panels around 1500 C.E.

Early 20th-century “Tudor” cupboard door at the RI Antique Mall, Pawtucket.

One of my all-time favorite museums is the 1852 Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Known informally as the “V&A” and located in South Kensington, it boasts 2.27 million objects and prides itself on being “the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design.” My first visit there was in March 1982 on spring break when I was staying just across Cromwell Road in the Rembrandt Hotel. Paris, too, boasts a similar museum in a wing of the Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts), with about one million objects within its holdings, where I also spent time later on that same holiday. But it has always been the English study collections which have held my interest over the years, feeding into my work in various fields of design. It was in the V&A that I became aware of the wide diversity of stylistic differences to be found in a seemingly simple category of English woodwork called “linenfold”, which replicates the look of folded fabric.

Panel at St. Joseph’s, Newport, RI


Linenfold bench at Providence College

On a morning walk that year, March 17 to be exact, I stopped in The Antique Hypermarket on Kensington High Street, about a mile from the Rembrandt, and visited the antiquarian Pamela Rose in her Stand #44. What caught my eye was a single oak linenfold panel measuring 9¾” wide by 17¾” high, neither medieval nor hand-carved, but possibly machine-made at a much later date, maybe late-19th century, according to Pamela. The price in pounds was within my budget and, knowing that it would fit neatly into my suitcase, it made the trip home to St. Louis with me. Thirty years later in 2012, on an early visit to Portsmouth Abbey, I was surprised to be shown the monks’ private dining room with an expanse of medieval linenfold comprising one entire wall. This is not the room known as the refectory, within the monastic enclosure, but a smaller more intimate area outside the enclosure where lay guests are often entertained, especially for the informal Sunday evening dinner. In addition to the linenfold paneling itself, the room contains some important works of art. The room is dominated at either end by a Renaissance triptych of the Epiphany and a della Robbia of Virgin and Child. On the longer wall opposite the main entry doors are displayed framed pages from large old antiphonals and smaller personal illuminated Books of the Hours, all with hand-done calligraphy and illustrations of Biblical stories. Being done on light-colored parchment, they command the eye’s focus leaving the equally important dark oak panels, 112 in all, to fade into the background. Not until a guest is invited to look at the panels more closely do they realize the importance and craftmanship of the carved woodwork, of roughly the same time period as the framed artwork. A small inscription above eye level, over a door, gives us a clue. It is barely visible, lettered in 1960 in black paint on a flat dark brown panel:

“These XV century panels are given in memory of Clarence Hungerford MacKay by John William MacKay.”

Seminarian Anthony Kunnumpurath with Abbot Matthew Stark in the
much-utilized Linenfold Room on Easter Sunday, coincidentally his 87th birthday.

At this point in time, more is known about the Mackays, père et fils, who gifted these panels, as well as an important collection of medieval stained-glass windows (see The Current, Nov. 28-Dec. 4, 2021), than about the individual artisans who crafted them. Clarence Hungerford Mackay (1874-1938) was an early telecommunications magnate who commissioned the silk-stocking architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design Harbor Hill, a large mansion in Roslyn, New York, on Long Island. Three years in the making, 1899-1902, it was the largest private residence ever designed by Stanford White and was situated on 688 acres, Harbor Hill being the highest point in Nassau County. Mackay’s wife, Katharine Duer Mackay (1880-1930), oversaw and approved many of the design details with White, presumably including the incorporation of the European stained glass and the English linenfold paneling into parts of the estate which also counted a number of outbuildings (the Dairyman’s Cottage, the Gate Lodge, the Water Tower, etc.). Upon the death of the elder Hungerford in November 1938, his son, John William (1907-1988), namesake of his paternal grandfather, “received a large part of the household and personal effects,” according to The New York Times the following month, which also reported that “Mr. Mackay requested his children to preserve as well as possible any family heirlooms that come to them under the will and to give them in time to their children. Most of these will apparently go to the son.”

Bronze front doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 5th Avenue, New York City

Harbor Hill had been the venue in the 1920’s for high society events honoring Charles Lindbergh, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII and the Duke of Windsor), among others. Following the Great Depression and during World War II, the main house was vandalized and eventually demolished in 1947. It is surmised that in the 1950’s, the windows and linenfold panels were given to the Portsmouth monks, perhaps kept in storage for some time, until the architect Pietro Belluschi came upon the scene and incorporated the pieces into his designs for the 1960 abbey church, monastery and school dining hall. For over five centuries since their creation, these enduring examples of architectural and applied art continue to intrigue anyone who comes under their spell. Two monks of Portsmouth, Fr. Hilary Martin and Fr. Peter Sidler, in dialogue with Belluschi, were instrumental in assembling the monastery’s collection of art and situating much of the collection in the structures to be built.

A final anecdote on my encounters with linenfold. A year or so after returning to work in St. Louis following that spring-break holiday in 1982, a colleague at the regional theatre and university where I worked came into my office. Carolyn L. Ross spotted the single linenfold panel which I had carried back in my suitcase. She was about to design the set for a 1984 production of the play, Sleuth, a British mystery by Anthony Shaffer, and decided to include a wall of linenfold paneling. Our scenic shop had the capability of reproducing multiple two-dimensional elements by means of vacuum-forming sheets of polystyrene plastic. Once assembled into a full wall, scenic artists used the original oak panel as a paint sample and created an English-looking wall which remarkably resembled the dining room wall at Portsmouth. Given that the molded plastic replicates carved oak, which itself mimics folded linen, does this become two-fold imitation: a case of art imitating the art which imitates life?