Designer of Dreams: The Work of Alexander Jackson Davis

May 23rd – September 23rd, 2025

Lyndhurst is a National Historic Landmark located on the banks of the Hudson River in Tarrytown, just outside New York City. It is considered the masterpiece of architect Alexander Jackson Davis.  This exhibition will explore Davis’s career as an architect and furniture designer through his designing and building of Lyndhurst, his extant Gothic revival masterpiece, and other homes in the region.

Alexander Jackson Davis set American architectural taste at a time when Americans were looking to form a unique, native culture after their liberation from England. However, Davis’s fame as one of the founders of American cultural institutions and architectural taste has significantly faded and this exhibition will reintroduce Davis’s reputation as America’s preeminent architect of the nineteenth century and place Davis as the founder of America’s architectural fascination with historical pastiche.

The exhibition will unite works from the New York institutions that hold major parts of Davis’s archive: The Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University, The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Museum of the City of New York. The works of furniture and interior decor that survive the buildings they were built for also are included. There is also significant documentation of Lyndhurst, the many drawings, letters, and watercolors about the Lyndhurst Commission will be exhibited in the place for which the plans were made. The exhibition will also explore new research into Davis’s influences including his background as an actor and watercolorist and explore the influence of Gothic novelists and playwrights of the period.