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Wright Saltus Ludington (1900–1992) was an art collector, artist and one of the founding members of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Wright Saltus Ludington was born in New York City on June 10, 1900, to Charles and Ethel Ludington. [1] He had two brothers: Charles Townsend Ludington, who was born in New York City in 1896, and Nicholas Saltus Ludington, born in Bryn Mawr in 1904. [1]
Ludington was exposed to art at an early age - his aunt Katharine Ludington was an accomplished portrait painter, his mother was a collector of impressionist paintings and his father was a collector of pre-Columbian and Asian art. [2] He attended the preparatory boarding Groton School in northern Massachusetts before moving to Santa Barbara with his family where he attended the Thacher School in Ojai, California. It was here that he first met Lockwood de Forest Jr., who would go on to become a renowned landscape architect and lifelong friend of Ludington who would also design the gardens at his estate, Val Verde, located in Montecito, California. [3] After his time at Thacher, Ludington went to Yale to study architecture; however, after one year he dropped out to pursue the study of art. He enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later the Art Student League in New York but his studies were interrupted with the death of his mother in 1922.
At the request of his father and possibly as a distraction from his grief over his mother, Ludington was sent on a “grand tour” of Europe and was accompanied by his good friend Lockwood de Forest. Ludington and de Forest particularly spent a great deal of time in Italy and Paris – visiting the ancient Roman sites that likely influenced the gardens and landscaping at Ludington's first home, Val Verde. In 1927, after the death of his father, Ludington officially settled in Santa Barbara in his inherited estate Dias Felices, which Ludington rechristened Val Verde. [3] It is said that the gardens and the reflecting pools at this home were loosely adapted from features found at Roman Emperor Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli. A pinnacle of Lockwood de Forest's achievements, the gardens at Val Verde completed in the late 1920s have since been designated a national treasure by the American Society of Landscape Architects as well as a national, state, and county landmark. A few years later Ludington would acquire the statuary that once adorned that 2nd century villa including the Lansdowne Hermes and Lansdowne Dionysus (once part of the 18th-century London collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne) and now in the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. It was also during Ludington's grand tour that his collection of art commenced with the purchase of early 20th century modernists, including his first purchase, a small portrait by André Derain in 1924 [4] as well as a still-life oil painting by Georges Braque, bequeathed to the museums' permanent collection in 1993. Through his collecting activity, Ludington developed relationships with Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gaston Lachaise, and Graham Sutherland, among others. [4] He was an early collector of both British and West Coast modernism; of the latter, he said "My evident interest in a number of West Coast artists...is not at all chauvinistic. I believe that the best artists out here are as good as any in New York." [2]
In 1938, Ludington began construction on another stately home in Palm Springs, which featured a Roman bath. [5]
Given his interest in the arts and his already impressive and growing collection, Ludington was instrumental in the formation of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. After the old post office was purchased from the Federal Government, the Museum Association was formed in 1940 where Ludington was part of the building committee, responsible for hiring the renowned Chicago architect, David Adler, to remodel the post office into a museum. As a memorial to his father, Ludington donated funds to convert the original lobby of the post office into a sculpture court of classical Roman and Greek pieces, The Charles Henry Ludington Court. Ludington also served as the museum's first vice president, a position he shared with fellow philanthropist Katharine McCormick. After his service in World War II teaching camouflage painting to the troops, Ludington continued to take on leadership roles at the museum, first commissioning de Forest to redesign the landscaping, and later becoming the institution's president in 1951. After the untimely death of the museum's first director, Donald Bear, Ludington hired one of the first woman art museum directors in the country, Ala Story. Throughout his 50-year involvement with the museum as a donor, board member, and president, Ludington donated nearly 400 objects to the museum's permanent collection.
Among Ludington's vibrant social circle in Santa Barbara was actress Judith Anderson, with whom he was quite close and often socialized along with Ala Story and her partner Margaret Mallory. [6]
Ludington hired architect Lutah Maria Riggs to further remodel Val Verde in 1952, and when that was finished, kept her on to design his second home in Montecito, which he named Hesperides, and later engaged her to design his third home in the area, October Hill, in the 1970s. [3]
UCLA staged a major exhibition of Ludington's collection in 1964, which art critic Henry J. Seldis credited with bringing Ludington's philanthropy and collecting activity to the attention of a wider audience. [2] Hollywood costume designer Orry-Kelly frequently stayed at Ludington's home with screenwriter John Colton in the 1940s; in his memoir, Kelly remarked that at the time, Ludington and former Harper's Bazaar Paris editor Louise Macy "had a crush on each other," but other sources either allude to or explicitly state that Ludington was homosexual. [6] [7]
By 1975, Ludington was increasingly reclusive; an article in Travel & Leisure magazine by Brian Moore highlighted the importance of his collection but noted that Ludington was "a reticent man" who "shuns interviews." [8]
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was an American architect celebrated for his work in Gothic Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival design. He also designed notable typefaces, including Cheltenham and Merrymount for the Merrymount Press. Later in life, Goodhue freed his architectural style with works like El Fureidis in Montecito, California, one of three estates he designed.
Katharine Dexter McCormick was a U.S. suffragist, philanthropist and, after her husband's death, heir to a substantial part of the McCormick family fortune. She funded most of the research necessary to develop the first birth control pill.
Ganna Walska Lotusland, also known as Lotusland, is a non-profit botanical garden located in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California, United States. The garden is the historic estate of Madame Ganna Walska. The County of Santa Barbara restricts visitation via a conditional use permit: Lotusland botanic garden is open to the public by reservation only, with walking tours 1½ to 2 hours long.
The Getty Villa is an educational center and art museum located at the easterly end of the Malibu coast in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. One of two campuses of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Villa is dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD, including the Lansdowne Heracles and the Victorious Youth. The UCLA/Getty Master's Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation is housed on this campus.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is an art museum located in downtown Santa Barbara, California.
George Washington Smith was an American architect and painter. He is known particularly for his work around Santa Barbara, California, and for popularizing the Spanish Colonial Revival style in early 20th Century America. His notable works include Casa del Herrero, the Lobero Theater, the Santa Barbara News-Press building, and buildings at the Santa Barbara Cemetery. He also designed several private houses in Montecito.
Mar Y Cel, also known as Mar i Cel, is an open space preserve conserved by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, in Santa Barbara County, California, USA. Located in the Santa Ynez Mountains foothills above Montecito, Mar Y Cel is a 350-acre (1.4 km2) estate. It includes the "Tea Gardens" as well as the West Fork of Cold Springs Trail, a well used hiking trail.
Carleton Monroe Winslow, also known as Carleton Winslow Sr., was an American architect, and key proponent of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California in the early 20th century.
Lockwood de Forest was an American painter, interior designer and furniture designer. A key figure in the Aesthetic Movement, he introduced the East Indian craft revival to Gilded Age America.
Lutah Maria Riggs was an American architect who worked for several decades in Santa Barbara, California. Born in Toledo, Ohio, she moved with her mother to Santa Barbara after high school, where she returned after receiving a BA in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1921 to 1930, she worked as a draftswoman for George Washington Smith, and she continued to work as an architect in Santa Barbara until 1980, focusing primarily on residential work. She was the first licensed female architect in Santa Barbara, and the first woman in California to be named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Fernand Lungren (1857–1932) was an American painter and illustrator. He is mostly known for his paintings of American South Western landscapes and scenes as well as for his earlier New York and European city street scenes.
Francis Townsend Underhill was a politician from the U.S. state of New York and an amateur architect in California.
Francesco Franceschi – known in Italy by his title and birth name of CavalierEmanuele Orazio Fenzi – was an Italian banker and horticulturist who spent part of his later career in the United States, where his efforts contributed to the introduction of new plant species in southern California.
Charles Townsend Ludington, was a businessman of Philadelphia. He was an aviation pioneer who helped establish an every-hour-on-the-hour air service between New York and Washington.
Head III is an oil painting by Francis Bacon, one of series of works made in 1949 for his first one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, in London. As with the other six paintings in the series, it focuses on the disembodied head of male figure, who looks out with a penetrating gaze, but is fixed against an isolating, flat, nondescript background, while also enfolded by hazy horizontal foreground curtain-like folds which seems to function like a surrounding cage.
Ysabel Galbán Wright was a Cuban-American botanist and plant collector who specialized in cacti.
Ludington House may refer to:
Val Verde, in Montecito, California, also known as the Wright Ludington House, is an estate which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The listing included five contributing buildings, 10 contributing structures, four contributing objects, and a contributing site, on 8.9 acres (3.6 ha).
Ala Story, born Emilie Anna Maria Heyszl von Heyszenau, was a gallerist and curator, as well as the director of the American British Art Center in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1952–57). She was the daughter of an Austrian colonel and cavalry commandant, W. von Heyszenau, and traced her lineage on her mother's side back to a 12th-century minnesanger, Hoffman van der Aue.
John James Mitchell Jr. was an American banker and a co-founder of United Airlines.
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