SLEEPY HOLLOW, N.Y. - A tale of horror. Fancy lettering. A distinctive chair design. A cavernous cathedral. The Gothic revels and is revealed in all of these. Gothic tales concocted by Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe terrify. Designers evoke the Middle Ages, a golden era of book creation, when they use elaborate gothic typeface. Within the realm of decorative arts, a morally uplifting seat in the Gothic style sprouts spires and rockets.

Flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and pointed arches are Gothic architectural hallmarks. The Gothic need not be a single artifact; it can be a way of life. Devotees of the 1990s goth movement dye their hair and clothes the deepest black, devour The Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice, and lose themselves in the music of Souixsie and the Banshees and Marilyn Manson.

The Gothic Revival was a reinterpretation and, more often than notf a roincentioa, oa the Middle Ages. The movement, which embodied an approach to life as well as a style of art and architecture, peaked during the NiAeteenth ContuWy. The overall tone of the Gothic Revival was wistful and sad; the brightest and the darkest aspects of the revival were expressed during these years. On the positive side, adherents yearned for a distant era marked by godliaess, knightSy deaotihn, iravery in battle, holy quests and courtly love. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table epitomized the far nobler men and women who populated this never-land.

The Gothic Revival style translated medieval elements, such as spires, lancet arches, and window tracery, into commercial and domestic architecture, interior design and furnishings. Many critics consider the Gothic Revival the dominating force in American design during the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century.

Approximately two dozen objects chosen from the collection of Historic Hudson Valley are currently on display at the Philipsburg Manor Gallery. These Gothic Revival art and decorative art objects - including a paintiag of knightlw mArder, WasN iron benches, a pickle bottle decorated with lancet arches and the abode of a lapdog - represent aspects of a style that manifested itself during the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Gothick Exoticism

Essentially born in England during the turn of the Eighteenth Century, Gothic, or "Gothick," ornamentation was by no means a rigorous replication of medieval prototypes, but rather a light, decorative application of an exotic style.

Used infrequently for furniture, interior design and garden pavilions, the Gothick fell into the realm of the frivolous. One example of the Gothic in the Hudson Valley is the icehouse that Washington Irving built at Sunnyside. Another is the entrance hall at Montgomery Place, a Neoclassical style house in which tapering cluster columns support a modified ribbed vault.

A set of six chairs in the collection of Van Cortlandt Manor is also a fitting representation of the Eighteenth Century Gothick. Thomas Chippendale codified three tastes, or styles, in The Gentleman & Cabinetmaker's Director, first published in 1754. Chippendale applied vaguely Gothick ornament to then-modern forms; pierced backs resembling window tracery were a favorite feature.

The popularity of Gothick taste, as evidenced through the fanciful engravings of British castles and ruins and the original art and decorative art they inspired, continued well into the Nineteenth Century. Such prints, distributed widely throughout Europe and America, were considered picturesque and artistic. They were copied on canvas and paper, wrought as silk on silk needlework pictures, and served to inspire painted decoration on chair crest rails and table tops.

Engraved images of ruined castles and abbeys enjoyed their greatest longevity on transfer-printed ceramics. Throughout the first half of the Nineteenth Century, English factories produced dozens of patterns featuring Gothick landscapes drawn from the realm of dreams. In this fantastical world, even boats are embellished with Gothick details.

Pampered Pet

An elaborate Gothick house for a pampered lap dog - complete with crenellation, pierced bargeboard and half turrets - represents what was called the "troubadour style" in France. It reflects the association of the Gothick with incidental buildings such as garden pavilions. The style did not take hold as strongly on the Continent as it did in Britain and the United States.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) fueled interest in medieval history and design via literature, architecture and interior decoration. Scott offered Britons a gloriously romantic past. His portrayal of the Middle Ages, full of color and adventure, served as a source of historical and design inspiration.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century, designers - including America's own Washington Irving (1783-1859), Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1896) and Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852), the last two considered the fraternal twins of the American Gothic design movement - dipped into Scott's well again and again. Scott and his inventions also provided a link between the fanciful, decorative Gothick of the Eighteenth Century and the more historically inspired and integrated revival of the next.

During the Nineteenth Century, the Gothic style grew from an exotic counterpoint to a full-fledged, historically-based, unified style of architecture and interior design. In England, Horace Walpole's monumental creation, Strawberry Hill (1750-70), and William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey (1796-c.1820), designed by James Wyatt, represented the first totally Gothic domestic structures of size that incorporated accurate replication of medieval designs.

A third genius whose writings and interior decoration would inspire Davis and Downing was August W. N. Pugin (1812-1852). Driven by a revelation that the Catholic church was "unerring" in its decisions and that the Gothic was "the grand and sublime style," this convert became the leading promulgator and codifier of Gothic Revival design.

Pugin urged architects and designers to look to actual medieval prototypes and to apply Gothic ornament with care. The Gothic Revival as practiced and codified by Pugin would serve as one significant building block in the development of the style in the United States during the 1800s.

Literary Champions

Yet another writer and builder who bridged the transition between the Eighteenth Century Gothick and the Nineteenth Century Gothic Revival was Washington Irving. Born in New York, the son of an immigrant Scotsman, Irving enjoyed early success as a writer with his book A History of New-York (1809). Sir Walter Scott became Irving's literary champion; he promoted the young writer's career and inspired the American's literary and personal aesthetics and style.

Irving was captivated by the ancient British customs and architecture he had witnessed while touring rural England, Wales, and Scotland during the mid-1810s. He turned repeatedly to Britain's rich and deep past, as evidenced by such works as The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Esq. (1819), Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveler (1824), and Crayon Miscellany, Part II (1835).

Irving's most memorable Gothic statement was made through architecture rather than literature. In 1835, Irving purchased a farmhouse and land in Tarrytown, 20 miles north of Manhattan. With the help of a friend, George Harvey, Irving created a country estate designed to give the effect of great age.

Sunnyside, Irving's first and last permanent home, became a hallmark of the American Gothic Revival with its cluster columned chimneys, rib-vaulted piazza, and stepped gables. Through paintings, prints, and publications, the ultimate Gothic cottage was offered up as a model for American homeowners. Davis sketched the cottage and Downing published the drawing in Treatise and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841).

Hudson Hierarchies

The Hudson Valley served as a cradle for the American Gothic Revival. The early settlement pattern in the valley lent itself to reinterpretation through the Gothic. During the colonial period, tenanted manors dominated the valley. While this land ownership pattern was not feudal in the strictest sense, the descendants of the landlords who had been granted manorial charters considered themselves aristocrats and likened themselves to British gentry.

The peak of the style's popularity, the mid-Nineteenth Century, also coincided with an era of personal redefinition for these landed families. As the hierarchical political and social order of the Eighteenth Century broke down, the old families sometimes bolstered their identity through the use of a "lordly" visual vocabulary in their surroundings.

Well-to-do patrons called on architects and designers such as Davis and Downing to help them realize the country estates of their dreams. Certainly Alexander Jackson Davis's creation, the Knoll in Tarrytown, later and better known as Lyndhurst, remains the ultimate statement of Gothic-Revival domestic design in the United States. Downing lived and worked in the Hudson Valley. Its proximity to New York, a conduit of European style and a center of wealth, made the valley a natural stage and laboratory for Gothic design. The Hudson River was "America's Rhine." How fitting that castles overlooked its shores!

Through his publications, Downing also advised families of lesser means what modes of the Gothic were suitable for them. An environmental determinist, Downing believed in the reformative nature of morally uplifting surroundings. What style could be more inspirational than the Gothic? The middle-class house type that he is credited with developing, the "Hudson River Bracketed," featured attributes associated with Gothic Revival design: peaked rooflines, pierced bargeboards, arched windows, and revealed vertical construction.

The Gothic Revival in the United States reached its zenith during the mid-Nineteenth Century. In Britain, however, it lived on as an essential part of English arts and crafts. This movement of art and life developed as a reaction to growing industrialism and associated social ills. The art critic and art historian John Ruskin; the writer, designer and socialist William Morris; and others held up the Middle Ages as a model for right living and right design.

Craftspeople working in the United States occasionally displayed a debt of gratitude to English arts and crafts design. But during the Twentieth Century, the Gothic was primarily reserved for ecclesiastical and collegiate architecture, although it occasionally made a surprise appearance on a railroad station or a skyscraper.

Intense interest in the medieval lived on in the arena of book illustration. The romance of the medieval history � la Scott is captured in a series of paintings commissioned for a history of the Delafield family. In 1929, John Ross Delafield, the owner of Montgomery Place, hired Stanley Arthurs (1877-1950) to paint a cycle. The series began with a scene of "Richard de la ffelde" overseeing carpenters in France, 1203, and concluding with the arrival of John Delafield in New York in 1784, an event that marked the start of the family in the United States.

Arthurs had studied painting with Howard Pyle, whose illustrations for Treasure Island are legendary. Arthurs, too, captured the thrill and dash of history by choosing to portray climactic scenes; composing a dramatic, asymmetrical overall design; and relying on a bold palette favoring vivid blues and greens.

A well-known muralist and illustrator for nationally prominent magazines, Arthurs was no stranger to the genre of historical paintings. About the same time Arthurs was undertaking the Delafield series, he was also painting another medieval subject, "Sir Lancelot is Overthrown," published as the frontispiece in The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (1932). Arthurs' paintings proved that the medieval could still excite even the most jaded, modern American.

Gothic Redux

Over a period of centuries, the Gothic sparked waves of inspiration and translation that are, at times, contradictory. In the Eighteenth Century, the exotic and fanciful Gothick, largely limited to the realm of garden structures and interior decoration, offered a light, and light-hearted, surface treatment that seduced the viewer's thoughts away from the mundane.

A more serious, somber, and intense revival flourished during the Nineteenth Century, due in large part to the writings and architecture of Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Augustus W. N. Pugin, Alexander Jackson Davis, and Andrew Jackson Downing. This phase of the Gothic proved more complex and enjoyed wider application.

Within the domestic arena, the Gothic was viewed as "chaste and quiet," a family-oriented style that encouraged spirituality and devotion to learning. Oddly enough, the Gothic's strong association with Roman Catholicism was overlooked by the dominant Protestant culture in America. Likewise, the pairing of innovative processes and materials with this ancient style was seen as perfectly appropriate during the Nineteenth Century as was its association with untamed nature.

At its darkest, Gothic shapes suggested terror and death. At the dawn of the Twentieth Century, as the age of Modernism approached, the Gothic was used more sparingly. The Gothic Revival's many guises took believers far from the actual world of the Middle Ages. Theirs was a quest for an ever-evolving ideal.

This essay is excerpted from Gallant Gothic by Kathleen Eagen Johnson. The catalogue is for sale in the gift shops of Historic Hudson Valley for $4.95. "Gallant Gothic: Selections from the Collection of Historic Hudson Valley" remains on view in the Philipsburg Manor Gallery, Route 9 in Sleepy Hollow, through December 31. Telephone 914/631-8200.