By Ellen Gilbert

The sorry spectacle that played out over the last several years as the late Brooke Astor’s 89-year-old son, Anthony Marshall, was tried, convicted, and lead to jail for stealing from his mother is unlikely to be remembered as a high point in the annals of New York’s beautiful people. (Citing ill health, Marshall was recently sprung.) Two current exhibits, though, remind of us of the sheer gorgeousness of the lives Gilded Age New Yorkers.

AN ELECTRIC LIGHT DRESS

At the Museum of the City of the New York (1220 Fifth Avenue, at 103RD Street), “Gilded New York” offers over 100 items culled from the extravagant houses, furnishings, jewelry, clothing, portraits, and decorative objects amassed by business titans like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Rockefellers, and Astor heirs from the mid-1870s through the early twentieth century.

On view is a silver-gilt place setting an “Electric Light” dress worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, II to a ball in 1883, and John D. Rockefeller's luxe toiletry set. Offsetting Mrs. Vanderbilt’s silvery gown is a golden satin damask wedding gown by Maison Worth in 1878 that was worn by Annie Schermerhorn, descendant of a prominent Dutch family in New York. Visitors are encouraged to view the exhibit as an exploration in “visual culture” during this era, rather than as a paean to beautiful objects and their owners.

The exhibition marks the inauguration of the Museum’s new Tiffany & Co. Foundation Jewelry Gallery, and the firm is well-represented by several dazzling pieces, including a brooch of gold, sapphires, zircons, enamel (c. 1900), and a necklace, made in 1904 of gold, diamond, pearls, turquoise, and enamel. Other jewelry in the exhibit includes a 1900 Marcus & Co., necklace, comprised of gold, natural pearls, demantoid garnet, and enamel. A folding fan made at about the same time by the Parisian haute couture house of Jean-Pierre Duvelleroy is made of painted silk, feathers, and mother-of-pearl.

Gilded New York: Design, Fashion and Society is a new monograph prepared in conjunction with the exhibit by Donald Albrecht, Jeannine Falino, Phyllis Magidson. It focuses on interior design and decorative arts, fashion and jewelry, and publications that may be seen as having anticipated some of “shelter magazines” of today, like Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, and Country Living.

PICTURE PERFECT

The New York Historical Society’s (170 Central Park West, at 77TH Street) exhibit, “Beauty’s Legacy, Gilded Age Portraits” includes over sixty paintings of personalities of the day. Curators note that this was the era in which New York became the nation’s corporate headquarters and the “Ladies’ Mile” of luxury retail establishments and cultural institutions brought the city global prominence. To their credit, a number of these people became New York’s first cultural philanthropists, supporting fledgling institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera.

Like the City of New York Museum’s stated intention to examine the visual culture of the gilded era, this exhibit is meant to be more than a mere rogue’s gallery. It is framed, to use an apt word, as a study in the art of portraiture, and the “remarkable critical and popular resurgence” of the genre during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and the “impetus to document the appearance of those who propelled and benefited from burgeoning wealth.” This “cultural pattern,” we are told, resembled earlier colonial era practices.

The works of art are all from the New-York Historical Society’s collections and include portraits of “prominent New York sitters including Emma Thursby, Samuel Verplanck Hoffman, Mary Barrett Wendell, Reverend Henry Codman Potter, and Mary Gardiner Thompson. The American artists who painted them include John Singer Sargent, James Carroll Beckwith, George Peter Alexander Healy, Daniel Huntington, Eastman Johnson, and Benjamin Curtis Porter.

The demand for portraits done by European artists was “vigorous” as well, and there are paintings of James Hazen Hyde, Georgina Schuyler, Samuel Ward McAllister, Cortlandt Field Bishop, Leonard and Rosalie Lewisohn, and Samuel Untermyer by Léon Bonnat, Bouguereau, Carolus-Duran, Alexandre Cabanel, Anders Zorn, and Théobald Chartran. Photographs and graphic materials are used to provide background for some of the images painted by both American and European artists, and advertising graphics show popular fashions and cosmetics of the day.

A selection of twenty-five miniature portraits of reigning social celebrities from Peter Marié’s Beauties of The Gilded Age is also on display. Until his death in 1903, Marié liked to have miniature portraits painted of “the beautiful debutantes whom he had introduced to New York City.” An article in the magazine Public Opinion from that year described the collection as “the result of [a] peculiar whim” that had not yet found a home.

A catalogue, published by the New-York Historical Society in association with D Giles Limited of London accompanies “Beauty’s Legacy: Portraits of the Gilded Age,” and includes essays by guest curator Barbara D. Gallati, and by Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at The Fashion Institute of Technology.

EDGIER ALTERNATIVES

If all the razzle-dazzle gets too blinding, it is good to know that a current Museum of the City of New York project offers something more, shall we say, politically correct in “Activist New York,” an ongoing exhibit and blog that look at “the passions and conflicts that underlie the city's history of agitation.” Coming up (February 5) is “City as Canvas” a first-time exhibition of works selected from the expansive street art collection of Martin Wong.

At the New York Historical Society, the current “Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Evolution” is not a mere reprieve from gilded age materialism; it’s reason enough to visit the Historical Society.

A spokesperson for the Museum of the City of New York said that “Gilded New York” is intended as an ongoing exhibit that will be regularly replenished with new material drawn from the Museum’s collections. “Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America” runs through March 9, 2014 at the New York Historical Society.