Not many people were commissioning classical gardens in postwar America, but then, not many people were Chauncey Devereux Stillman. Banking heir, naval officer, conservationist, cutting-edge gentleman farmer, equestrian, and intellectual, Stillman began spectacularly improving Wethersfield, his estate in Dutchess County, New York, in the late 1940s, at just about the same time that the cradle Episcopalian divorced his wife and converted to Catholicism. (Horst P. Horst photographed Wethersfield for AD’s October 1979 issue.) A painterly sequence of Italian Renaissance–inspired spaces was conjured, linked by sweeping terraces, speckled with thrilling statues in modern-classical style, and punctuated by an ornamental oval pool with water dyed jet-black to mirror the passage of the sun. “It’s an idiosyncratic place,” admits Toshi Yano, Wethersfield’s director of horticulture, who is particularly intrigued by a woodland spot…