As the field of American art emerged from second-class status in the 1960s, Wayne Craven’s wonderful volume on American sculpture helped define the field. Now, in this new book on Stanford White’s role as a decorator and antique dealer, Craven calls attention to a significant aspect of the American Gilded Age. Craven has produced a neat, careful volume documenting a half-dozen of White’s most opulent houses, those designed for William Collins Whitney, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, Payne Whitney, Clarence and Katherine Mackay, Henry Poor, and Stanford White’s own New York City house. The book allows for a closer study of the “statement” houses White designed when the strings of a large purse lay open. This is a complicated and largely unrecorded episode in the history of taste, with Craven working on the American saga while John Harris pursues the English interiors that washed up on American shores. We await Harris’s study. The late French physician Bruno Pons accomplished much of the French story before his untimely death in 1995 (Bruno Pons, Grands décors français, 1650–1800; reconstitutés en Angleterre, aux Etats-Unis, en Amérique du Sud et en France, Dijon: Editions Faton, 1995). Sadly, far too few records have survived, which renders...