On a slope overlooking the dark waters and densely wooded shores of Laurel Lake we built a spacious and dignified house,” Edith Wharton wrote about The Mount, the estate which she created in the early years of the twentieth century in Lenox, Massachusetts. Among those in her inner circle who came to stay—President Theodore Roosevelt, diplomat Walter Berry, and sculptor Daniel Chester French, whose studio, Chesterwood, was nearby—was her spacious and dignified friend Henry James, who, writing to a mutual friend, described it as “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” Escaping the drawing rooms of New York, Edith Wharton created an artistic arcadia  in the Berkshires, where intrigues--both literary and romantic--unfolded in dramatic fashion.

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz on location at The Mount, featuring supermodel Natalia Vodianova portraying Wharton herself as well as other young actors and well-known authors re-creating scenes from Wharton's life in Lenox, the shoot featured pieces fromElise Abrams Antiques, including a pair of Bohemian green overlay panel cut crystal tumblers and a 19th c Baccarat gilded crystal set of goblets and decanters.