Inside one of New York’s last great treasure houses: Irene Roosevelt Aitken’s enchanting Fifth Avenue apartment

Meissen. Sèvres. Chippendale. Fabergé. Gainsborough. Lawrence. Boucher. Lancret. The collection of Irene Roosevelt Aitken was built upon master craftsmen and artists that would set any 18th-century European art enthusiast’s heart aflutter. Born in New York City in 1931, Mrs. Aitken grew up in Memphis in a house filled with paintings and antiques, though one could hardly have anticipated how important her future collection would become. She returned to New York for college, after which she began her career in fashion marketing, guided by Dorothy Schaver, the legendary president of Lord & Taylor department stores.

In 1965 she wed the banker John Aspinwall Roosevelt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s youngest son. During their marriage, Mrs. Aitken became the curator and registrar of their apartment’s sizable collection of Roosevelt family paintings, furniture, silver and historical documents. She frequented Manhattan’s countless museums, galleries and auction houses, where she developed her passion for 18th-century decorative arts.

Some years after Roosevelt’s passing in 1981, she fell in love with and married the artist Russell Barnett Aitken, then a recent widower. His late wife was the sculptor and tastemaker Annie Laurie Crawford, later Aitken, (after whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s British Galleries are named). Both ardent collectors, Russell and Annie Laurie had built an exceptional collection, particularly renowned for its antique European arms (Mr. Aitken was a skilled marksman), as well as its 18th-century English and French Old Master paintings and works of art. Irene Roosevelt Aitken proved the ideal partner to lend a sensitive and devoted eye to the Aitkens’ collection and their historic Fifth Avenue apartment, of which she became the proud curator and custodian.

‘Up until the day she died, aged 94, she was the one who dusted the Meissen birds, polished the silver and hoovered the Savonneries. She would not have it any other way. After all, nobody else would be as careful and as thorough as she was,’ says Wolf Burchard, Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mrs. Aitken was an honorary Trustee and Benefactor and a member of the Acquisitions Committee and various departmental Friends groups and Visiting Committees. She was integral to the overhaul of the museum’s British Galleries in 2020, which Burchard helped oversee. ‘Anyone who had the joy of visiting her elegant duplex was awestruck by the notion that Irene singlehandedly attended to its contents.’

This February the fruits of Mrs. Aitken’s labour will shine at Christie’s in Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Collector | Connoisseur | Patron. Together the three live auctions and two online sales in the series will feature nearly 800 lots of porcelain, paintings, drawings, furniture, carpets, antique firearms and objects. ‘One of the final intact private collections of its kind, the Aitken collection is comparable in taste and scope to the Wrightsman Collection — and is a remarkably complete vision, representing almost 100 years of collecting,’ says Will Strafford, Deputy Chairman of Christie’s Classic Art Group.

‘Irene’s apartment should rightly be considered a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, with the beautifully proportioned and panelled rooms serving as a backdrop of a carefully curated group of paintings, furniture, porcelain, silver, and antique arms,’ says Stuart W. Pyhrr, the Met’s Curator Emeritus, Department of Arms and Armor. ‘Irene’s devotion to the collection never waned, but she determined that her beloved apartment and its contents should ultimately serve another, higher purpose: it was her final wish that the collection, along with the rest of her estate, be sold for the benefit of the three New York cultural institutions that had inspired and guided her study of the eighteenth century: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and the Morgan Library and Museum.’

A trailblazing female patron of the arts

Mrs. Aitken’s story stands alongside those of esteemed female collectors such as Jayne Wrightsman, whose taste and generosity shaped institutions throughout the 20th century. In addition to her longstanding relationship with the Met, Mrs. Aitken was a dedicated supporter of the Frick Collection for 40 years. In 2008 she gifted the museum a rare canvas by the 18th-century French draftsman Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, the only example of that artist’s painting in New York.

She also made significant contributions to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, as well as the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other institutions and organisations she supported included the Metropolitan Opera, the Preservation Society of Newport, the Wildlife Conservation Society, as well as favourite institutions abroad, such as the Royal Academy and Wallace Collection in London.

Philanthropy and patronage, too, defined Mrs. Aitken’s approach to collecting. Strafford continues, ‘Today collectors can do the same: live with art, live through art and leave a mark on the city’s cultural landscape.’ For Mrs. Aitken, collecting was a passion that went beyond a beautiful veneer. Objects were meant to be studied and cared for so future generations could learn from them.

‘Irene transformed domestic space into cultural space. Her residence, overlooking the Met, symbolised the dialogue between private connoisseurship and public culture,’ says Strafford of the home, designed by Rosario Candela, the foremost architect of New York’s most coveted prewar apartment buildings. The apartment was completed in 1927, the year it was purchased for Annie Laurie Aitken by her first husband, the Pittsburgh businessman George W. Crawford, marking nearly a century of ownership within the family.

The evolution of grand American collections

For Irene Roosevelt Aitken, collecting was as much a passion project as it was an intellectual pursuit. ‘She was fascinated with provenance, the background and social history of her objects. Nothing made her happier than to learn the name of some previous owner or discover an unrecorded auction record for one of her treasures,’ says Pyhrr, noting that Mrs. Aitken, ‘admired Russ and Annie Laurie’s taste and their exceptional achievement as collectors’ and sought high-quality pieces that would complement and enhance all areas of the collection. ‘A true scholar, she consulted with leading curators, dealers and auction house specialists in the United States and abroad and assembled a significant reference library.’

‘To step into Irene Roosevelt Aitken’s apartment at 990 Fifth Avenue is to pass through the looking glass into a preserved fragment of Gilded Age splendour — a sanctuary of rarefied connoisseurship where every object speaks to an era of uncompromising taste and limitless possibility,’ interior designer Miles Redd says of his experience visiting Mrs. Aitken’s residence. ‘Here, amid museum-quality collections and impeccable period details, one encounters not merely a residence but a time capsule of a vanished world, where beauty and cultivation were pursued with single-minded devotion. It is a life gone with the wind, yet miraculously arrested in amber — a last, luminous glimpse of an age when such refined existence was still possible.’

With the core of Mrs. Aitken’s collection acquired by Russell and Annie Laurie Aitken during the 1960s, the apartment reflects the mid-century revival of Gilded-Age aesthetics that prized European antiques for their ability to convey built-in heritage. Many of the works in the collection hail from prominent figures of a bygone age of American collecting, including the automobile tycoons Thelma Chrysler Foy and Henry Ford II, the publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst and high-society fixtures such as Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, Winston Guest, Elleanor Elkins Widener Rice (whose first husband George Widener died on the Titanic) and Mrs. Morton Plant, who famously persuaded her husband to sell the Cartier mansion for a string of pearls.

Mid-century collectors often adopted historic works to meet modern tastes and lifestyles — throughout her life, Mrs. Aitken truly lived with her 18th-century art and objects. Whereas in centuries past, portraits — a central part of Mrs. Aitken’s collection — were commissioned to display social prestige, ‘during the 20th century, collectors like Irene built lives so artful and refined that their very way of living became their portrait,’ says Strafford.

Collection themes and threads

The dialogue between English and French taste runs throughout Mrs. Aitken’s collection. ‘Collectors sought balance between French opulence and English restraint, mirrored in furniture, silver and portraiture,’ notes Strafford. When renovating their apartment during the late 1950s, Russell and Annie Laurie Aitken furnished it with the finest available 18th-century furnishings (several with royal provenance) and works of art. Prized possessions range from a collection of Meissen birds and flowers, symbolising renewal and timelessness, to Nicolas Lancret’s The Four Seasons, an extraordinary set of four decorative panels, reputed to have been commissioned by the Duc de Melun for his hôtel on the Place Royale, Paris. Another highlight is a spectacular Louis XIII Savonnerie carpet of unusually large scale and with the rare feature of a coat-of-arms depicting a castle.

Perhaps, Mrs. Aitken’s most important French acquisition was Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s pastel portraits of the Duc and Duchesse de Belle-Isle, which the collector proudly reunited after being long separated.

Mrs. Aitken added significantly to the English holdings, including masterpieces of British portraiture by Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney and Thomas Lawrence. She also became a specialist in the works of 18th-century English silversmith Mathew Boulton and formed one of the world’s greatest collections of his ormolu-mounted blue john and marble vases. ‘The alluring combination of figured blue john and burnished gilt-bronze mounts had a magnetic attraction for her. “I’ve cornered the market” she loved to say,’ recalls Burchard.

An eye for unusual objets

Upon viewing Mrs. Aitken‘s apartment, fashion designer Adam Lippes recalls how there were ‘masterpieces everywhere you looked’: ‘Each room opened up a new chapter of discovery — seemingly a chapter of her life, one in which knowledge both academic and aesthetic led her buying decisions. From objects of vertu that dazzled the mind to a royal Louis XIV carpet and the most delicate early William Vile secretary, I knew Irene was a friend, even though I had never met her.’

Illustrating the breadth and depth of the collection are a sparkling collection of silver pieces and jewel-like objets by Fabergé, as well as the highly decorated antique European firearms and edged weapons dating from the 16th to the early 19th century. Though the latter was a specialised subject with which her late husband is usually identified, Mrs. Aitken acquired several superb examples. One of the most surprising rooms to encounter in Mrs. Aitken’s apartment was the dark panelled library whose bookcase recesses had been retrofitted to house firearms.

Mrs. Aitken continued collecting to the end of her life in 2025, and her acquisitions reflect her commitment to quality, beauty, scholarship and provenance. ‘Her apartment embodied the mid-century reinterpretation of the Gilded-Age ideal: elegant, storied, but modern,’ says Strafford. ‘It’s quite interesting to think about what it meant to collect in her time and what it means to collect now, especially as a form of autobiography through works of art.’ Today with more diverse expressions of taste than ever before, Mrs. Aitken’s treasures will undoubtedly find their way to myriad interiors where no matter the design sensibility, they will surely delight, as they have for centuries.