Arrangement in Grey and Black

Winans

In the 1830s, Russia did not have much of a railway system—seventeen miles of track to be exact. Czar Nicholas I wanted to build a line to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. He looked to America for help. Ross Winans, a locomotive builder in Baltimore and one of America’s first multi-millionaires, sent his two sons, Thomas and William. The Russian delegation that visited America recommended Major George Washington Whistler as consulting engineer. A West Point graduate, Whistler had experience in constructing locomotives as well as infrastructure, especially bridges. The Whistler and Winans families were related. Whistler’s brother George had married Winans’s daughter, Julia.

In 1842, Whistler, with a seven-year contract in hand, moved his family to Russia to oversee the project. His son, James, was eight years old. With a five-year contract, Winans’s sons moved to Russia bringing along major machinery and equipment duty-free. After their first five-year contract, which they completed a year early, they were given another contract. Whistler didn’t fare so well. Just before his contract was up, two years before the project was completed, he died of cholera. Whistler is credited creating what is the standard five-foot-gauge track still in use in Russia and neighboring countries. With his brother-in-law, McNeill, he also designed the Canton Viaduct, in 1835, for the Boston and Providence Railroad. It has been in continuous service since. A bridge model of similar design is exhibited in the October Railroad Museum in St. Petersburg. The Whistler family moved to England for a time before returning to Massachusetts.

The four-hundred-mile-long railroad was completed in 1851.

Whistler

Also in 1851, James Abbott McNeill Whistler began his studies at West Point, as his father and other relatives had done. A combative young man, he was not fit for the regimen and kicked out. He appealed to Robert E. Lee, the superintendent. Some reports attest he was given a special exam. Others, that it was a regular exam. The anecdotal story: He complained for the rest of his life that if silicon were a gas, he would be a general.

In 1852, Thomas Winans started building houses in the States (the Czar paid in gold). His first project was Alexandroffsky, a Russian-style estate on a city block in Baltimore surrounded by a twelve-foot wall when the hoi polloi started closing in. His next project was Crimea, his country estate on nine hundred acres. Other buildings followed.

In1854, William Winans and Eastwick, of the Harrison and Eastwick firm, hired to construct rolling stock for the Russians, were investigated, after a complaint from DuPont, for manufacturing gunpowder for Russia, as the Crimean War broke out, which suggests the Winans were on Russia’s side in the conflict.

Also in 1854, Julia de Kay Winans, Thomas’s daughter, married George William Whistler, son of Major Whistler and brother of James. The two marriages between the Whistler and Winans families were slightly less intimate than the marriages between the Darwin and Wedgwood families, Charles Darwin’s mother and wife were both Wedgwoods.

In 1861, Ross Winans, a Southern sympathizer and member of the Maryland House of Delegates was arrested twice. His companies were reputedly making arms to defend Baltimore from Union troops. He was released after signing a “parole” that he was loyal to the Union.

In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the US for seven-point-two million dollars. It is reported that more than two/thirds of that payment went to William Winans who continued his railroad work in Russia after the initial project was completed. William retired to England.

In 1871, Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. The iconic painting of his mother hangs in the Musée ďOrsay.

In 1882, Ross Winans, grandson of his namesake, hired McKim, Mead and White, the most successful architectural firm in America, to design his house. Stanford White designed the forty-six-room Queen Anne mansion. Cass Gilbert served as clerk of the works. The big guns were called in. Tiffany was engaged as was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed a small fountain.