Back in the late 1800s, Samuel Mayo Nickerson filled his three-story mansion at 40 E. Erie St. with a collection of fine American art.
Now R.H. Love Galleries has done the same. The Nickerson Mansion, often called the ”Marble Palace,” is the new home to the Love collection of 18th and 19th Century American art.
”We`ve put the art back in the house, and we`re showing it as Nickerson did,” said Julie Love Hosier, daughter of the galleries` owner. With one difference: Now, for the first time since it was built, the mansion is open to the public.
Nickerson, a founder and president of the First National Bank of Chicago and a founding trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, had the 25,000-square- foot mansion built in 1880.
When Nickerson moved to New York, the mansion was bought by Lucius Fisher, president of Union Bag & Paper Co. Then, in 1919, a group of Chicagoans bought the mansion for the American College of Surgeons. The college rented the space to Love after moving to a different building last year.
”It`s just an incredible piece of architecture,” Hosier said. ”If you walk in here, you`ll see about 200 different kinds of marble.”
You`ll also see art, including works by Mary Cassatt, Gilbert Stuart and Robert Henri. Which is, Hosier said, just what you should see at the mansion. ”Nickerson collected American art at a time no one else was doing it,”
she said. ”It`s good to put things back as they were.”
