52nd Annual Delaware Show

THOMAS JAYNE: A PERSONAL TRIBUTE BY TOM SAVAGE What a pleasure and privilege it is to welcome an old and dear friend as this year’s honorary chair and featured speaker at The Delaware Antiques Show. Thomas Jayne is truly one of Winterthur’s own, having graduated from the master’s program established by Henry Francis du Pont in partnership with the University of Delaware. In its sixty-three years, The Winterthur Program in American Material Culture has produced many of America’s leading curators, academics, and museum directors. To that distinguished list may now be added one of America’s top scholar-decorators. More than any student before or since, Thomas Jayne absorbed far more than the academic curriculum. During his two years at Winterthur, Thomas seems to have channeled H. F. du Pont and absorbed his approach to color, decoration, and room arrangement. To put it simply, Thomas Jayne was learning everything we were not teaching! Thomas and I met some thirty years ago while students on the Victorian Society Summer School in London. In the ensuing years, we have been classmates and often roommates for memorable tours—The Furniture History Society’s study visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, and numerous study weeks with The Attingham Summer School. His company always enhanced the learning experience. His playfulness, tempered with respect, left me always expecting the unexpected. On the 1994 Attingham Study Week in Paris, I arrived and opened the door of the room we were to share to find a makeshift shrine, complete with lighted candles, to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died just days before. I introduced Thomas Jayne to several of his earliest clients in Charleston, South Carolina, which guaranteed that he was a frequent visitor to that magical city I called home for eighteen years. My own little carriage house set in gardens behind the 1772 William Gibbes House on South Battery was one of his first solo decorating projects, albeit on a young curator’s limited budget. That collaboration was one of the most enjoyable of my career, and despite budget constraints, he gave me a personal and stylish setting that was photographed for House Beautiful, British House and Garden, and Southern Accents. I will always be grateful for having lived in an “early work” by Thomas Jayne. — 17 —