Abstract
Discovering Boston for the first time, tourists often visit Copley Square for the restaurants, shops, bookstores, parks, cafés, lectures, fashion, concerts, architecture, and the sheer human activity that this concentration of attractions brings. Because Boston is an old city, visitors must often locate themselves by using landmarks rather than a grid of perpendicularly arranged streets. In search of a center of orientation, newcomers cannot help but notice the building that now dominates Copley Square: a structure of glass and steel rising alone and stiletto-like, seven hundred ninety feet in the air: the John Hancock Tower. Unfortunately, the building’s observation tower has been closed since the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001. Before then, guides to Boston often recommended looking at the whole of Boston’s landscape from this view.
Having no architectural type of our own as distinctly American to follow, we have greater latitude of selection than would obtain in any of the countries in the Old World; for, without any national traditions to maintain, we can choose among all styles and all ages.
—Henry Hobson Richardson, 18721
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Notes
Charles Gambril and H. H. Richardson, Descriptive Report and Schedule for Proposed Capital Building of the State of Connecticut, Department of Legislative Research, Connecticut General Assembly, 1872; quoted in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale, Temples of Democracy The State Capitols of the USA (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 161.
As Ross Posnock has written of the aesthetic leaning of one of William James’ most devoted students, W. E. B. Du Bois, art and aesthetics in Europe and Africa helped to instruct all the Cosmopolitans about the possibility of change in America. See Ross Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” American Literary History 7 (1995): 502, 512. For scholarship that argues for the increasing collusion between high art and elitism in nineteenth-century American art, see sociologist Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33–50, and “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 303–22. See historians Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Social History of Cultural Institutions: The Upper-Class Connection,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979): 137–46; and especially Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
James F. O’Gorman has often pointed out that H. H. Richardson’s architecture was no mere aping of European styles. See James F. O’Gormon, “Then and Now: A Note on the Contrasting Architecture of H. H. Richardson and Frank Furness,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 84–85. For Mumford’s views, see Lewis Mumford, Sticks andStones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York: Dover, 1955), 46.
In his work on nineteenth-century Chicago, Daniel Bluestone makes a similar argument about Chicago. See Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–3. See also ibid., 21–22, 207.
John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 145–47.
This interpretation of the cosmopolitan elements of Boston’s architecture agrees with the assessment of H. H. Richardson’s architecture by critics such as Margaret Henderson Floyd, James F. O’Gorman, and Jeffrey Karl Ochsner. See Margaret Henderson Floyd, Henry Hobson Richardson: A Genius for Architecture (New York: Monacelli, 1997), 293. See also Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “Seeing Richardson in His Time: The Problem of the Romanesque Revival,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 109.
Henry Hobson Richardson, “Description of the Church,” Consecration Services of Trinity Church, Boston, February 9, 1877, reprinted in New England Magazine n.s. 8 (1893): 156–62.
James F. O’Gorman points out that “the only other earlier extensive decorative program in the country was to be found in the Capital at Washington.” See James F. O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60.
See H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer of the American Mural Movement,” in John La Farge: Essays by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, and James L. Yarnal, ed. Henry Adams, et al., (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 171.
See ibid., 165.
Ibid.
Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (New York: Penguin, 1986), 175.
Henry Adams to Isabellla Stewart Gardner, February 9, 1906, in Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of Unpublished Letters, ed. Harold Dean Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 578.
Leland Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 94–95. Washington and Jefferson had shared Lincoln’s hope that the architecture of Washington, DC, would symbolize the type of strong democratic nation that they hoped that the United States of America would become. See Pamela Scott, Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4, 5, 19.
See Roth, Concise History, 86. See also Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (New York: Random House, 1960).
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Esquire in the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in The Harvard Classics, vol. 24, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1963), 58.
For a description of these reforms, see Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 63–65.
Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1985), 24.
See Annie Jacques, “The Programmes of the Architectural section of the école des Beaux Arts, 1819–1914,” in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 58.
Richardson, “Description of the Church,” 158–165. For an exploration of how the French method of architectural training directly influenced Richardson, see Ann Jensen Adams, “The Birth of a Style: Henry Hobson Richardson and the Competition Drawings for Trinity Church, Boston,” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 409–33.
H. H. Richardson, “Description of the Church,” 165. Newly printed copies of this document are also available for purchase at the Trinity Church bookstore.
One important Richardson scholar underlines the architect’s contributions to the design of buildings for growing cities and emerging suburbs in the late nineteenth century; specifically, Richardson made important urban commercial buildings, such as the Marshal Fields Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885–87); many elegant railroad stations, such as the Old Colony Railroad Station, (1881–84); as well as small public libraries, such as the Ames Memorial Library in North Easton, Massachusetts (1877–79). See James F. O’Gorman, Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865–1915 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), chapter 2. Also see O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms, passim.
See O’Gorman, Three American Architects, 45. For further information on the relationship between Richardson and Olmstead, see Francis R. Kousky, “The Veil of Nature: H. H. Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, 71–73. Olmsted to H. H. Richardson, February 6, 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; quoted in Kousky, “The Veil of Nature,” 73.
Frederick Law Olmsted and James R Croes, “Preliminary Report of the Landscape Architect and the Civil and Topographical Engineer, upon the Laying Out of the Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Wards,” City of New York, Document 72 of Board of the Department of Public Parks, 1877; quoted in Frederick Law Olmsted, Civilizing American Cities: Writings on City Landscapes, ed. S. B. Sutton (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 67.
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston for the year 1881,” City Document 16, 1882; quoted in Olmsted, Civilizing, 259–61.
Raymond W. Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 107, 139, 146–47.
Helene Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge and the Decoration of Trinity Church, Boston,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 334–36.
Douglass Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–1950 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 6.
Ibid., 6; Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1968), 8.
See Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 152–54. See also Bainbridge Bunting, The Houses of Boston’s Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840–1917 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967), 33–37.
See Bernard Marchand, Paris: histoire d’une ville (xix–xx siécle), (Paris: editions du Seuil, 1993), 75–92.
Walter Muir Whitehill attributes Arthur Gilman with coming up with the Back Bay’s “imposing plan, with its long vistas and suggestion of French boulevards.” See Walter Muir Whitehill, Topographical History, 151. See also Bunting, Boston’s Back Bay, 15, 68–69.
Charles Follen McKim, Memorandum, February 1895, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; quoted in Fikret K. Yegül, Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, 1894–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 221, emphasis mine.
Yegül notes that this liberal vision that McKim had set forth in the memorandum of 1895 “was not maintained in later years when the Academy strictly controlled the styles allowable for study.” See ibid., 221.
See Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 38–41.
Richard Guy Wilson, American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum Division of Publications, 1979), 71. Wilson touches on many of the themes that I use, especially “cosmopolitanism”; however, Wilson bases his understanding of cosmopolitanism on the reading given by Howard Mumford Jones’ in The Age of Energy (1971), a reading that I criticize in Chapter 8.
Richardson’s style is seen as being so unique that art historians have generally assigned his name to the short-lived architectural movement with which he is associated, the Richardsonian Romanesque. See, for example, John C. Poppeliers et al., What Style Is It? A Guide to American Architecture (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1983).
Most critics’ negative interpretations of this movement feature a quotation from McKim’s partner, Stanford White, who said in response to criticism that the homes he helped to build were filled with art that was taken from
foreign lands that “In the past, dominant nations had always plundered works of art from their predecessors; … America was taking a leading place among nations and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.” White, quoted in Richard Guy Wilson, American Renaissance, 15.
Both McKim and Gardner relied heavily on the labor of skilled immigrants for completing their buildings. See Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead and White (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 124; and Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 206–207.
John La Farge, Concerning Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections (New York: August F. Jaccaci, 1909), 21.
A few recent publications on the Exposition of 1893 concentrate their interpretations on the imperial aspirations and insensitivity of the “White City.” See Wilson, American Renaissance, 16. See also Robert W. Rydell, “A Cultural Frankenstein? The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” in Neil Harris et al., Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993), 141–70. Neil Harris directs us to a more sober reading of the fair in ibid., 29.
Leland Roth asserts that by 1886, the firm of McKim, Mead, and White deliberately dedicated itself to urban architecture “prompted by a concern for buildings as part of the larger urban context.” Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 113.
The budget for the library was revised upward at least twice. See Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 122–24. See also William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 61–65, 70–71, 90–91.
Douglas Shand-Tucci writes that “McKim was a master of the dinner of persuasion, and he cajoled trustees, politicians, private donors, and artists into rising repeatedly to his costly enthusiasms.” Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston, 137.
The recent reaction to the demolition of Pennsylvania Station that started in 1963 and traumatized many New Yorkers shows that even in New York, McKim’s work had a deep effect on the emotional and civic lives of Americans. See Nathan Silver, Lost New York (New York: American Legacy Press, 1967), xii.
Although it is difficult to conclude with complete assurance that the popular interest in the library reported by most local newspapers was nothing more than boilerplate journalism celebrating Boston’s democratic culture, the cumulative evidence provided by a variety of newspapers does lend credence to the library’s popularity among both the lower and upper classes. Indeed, local criticism focused much more on the library’s cost rather than its status as an elite institution. The petulant Lowell Weekly Journal did point out that the “people pay the taxes, and then alleged servants expend the cash and have their names engraved on column or panel to show the value on their services.” See untitled, Lowell Weekly Journal, February 1, 1895 and “Our Boston Letter,” Lowell Weekly Journal, February 15, 1895.
Charles Follen McKim to John Galen Howard, April 13, 1892; quoted in Moore, Charles Follen McKim, 81.
For a recent book on Puvis de Chavannes, see Brian Petrie, Puvis de Chavannes (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997).
Royal Cortissoz, “Some Critical Reflections on the Architectural Genius of Charles F. McKim,” Brickbuilder 19 (1910): 23–24.
Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante: Its Trial, Condemnation and Restoration,” Sculpture Review 42 (1993): 29.
For the accusation that the Bacchante was dangerous for public morals, see “Honors Immorality,” Boston Post, November 13, 1896. For an indictment of the library as un-American, see “The Bacchante is not Wanted,” Boston Post, November 15, 1896.
Unfortunately, Saint Gaudens’ letter to the commission could not be found at the archives of the Art Commission of the City of Boston. Reports of the letter were found in Walter Muir Whitehead, “The Vicissitudes of Bacchante in Boston,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 438; and Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante, ” 29.
See Mary Smart, A Flight with Fame: The Life and Art of Frederick Mac-Monnies, 1863–1937 (Madison, CT: Sound View, 1996), 171–72; and Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante, ” 29–31. In his 1954 article on the Bacchante controversy, Whitehill echoes Henry James’ impatience with Norton’s moralizing by describing him as “the supposedly infallible Charles Eliot Norton.” See Whitehill, “Vicissitudes of Bacchante,” 438.
See ibid., 453.
Gardner attended Norton’s classes at Harvard University around 1878; she also helped to fund some of Norton’s scholarly projects on Dante. See Shand-Tucci, Art of Scandal, 58, 49, 116–17.
William James mentions the invitation in a letter of April 1, 1904 to his brother, Henry. See Correspondence of William James, 3: 267. For a record of William James’ attendance at Gardner’s opening night party on New Year’s night, 1903, see Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 199–201.
Ibid., 201.
Karen Haas reports that Gardner’s Fenway Court is very similar to Villa Mirabella (from the fifteenth century) outside Milan and Villa Settignano (from the sixteenth century) close to Florence. Karen Haas, “Isabella Stewart Gardner, Willard T. Sears and the Building of Fenway Court,” (Master’s thesis for degree in Art History, Boston University, 1989), 45.
In addition to Douglas Shand-Tucci’s book on Gardner, Art of Scandal, art historian Anne Higonnet writes an eloquent plea to maintain Fenway Court as Gardner specified in her will in “Where There’s a Will …,” Art in America 79 (1989), 65–75. Kathleen D. McCarthy has written a piece that places Gardner in the context of United States’ women’s history at the turn of the century as well as the history of American cultural institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. See Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149–76. Shand-Tucci’s book on Gardner is written in an engaging style and offers many important details concerning Gardner’s life.
Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 22.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). Architecture: The Cosmopolitan Contribution to Public Space. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_7
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