At Wellesley College
Copyright, 1898, by E. Vedder. From a Copley Print, copyright, 1899, by Curtis & Cameron, Inc.
SAMSON, by Elihu Vedder
Blashfield and Maynard had had some slight experience in decorative work; but the rest were practically novices, though all had been serious, capable students in Paris, and were familiar with examples of the decorative arts of history. Millet was a rare executive, a man who was subsequently to do an enormous amount of just such work. It will be remembered that he went down to his death in the ill-fated Titanic. Of the rest of the group Weir, Reinhart, Beckwith, Melchers, and McEwen returned to their easel picture work after the Chicago fair, with only an occasional decoration. Blashfield, Maynard, Simmons, Cox, and Dodge have, however, continued to be strongly identified with mural work, and these men must receive closer attention. The decorative scheme at Chicago was a remarkable achievement, all things considered, and the grounds were referred to as “The White City,” “The Fair City,” “The City of Dreams,” and finally, alas! as “The Vanishing City”; but in reality nothing like it was ever seen before and probably never will be again.
THE PROPHETS, by John Sargent
In the Boston Library. Center panel, showing Elijah, Moses, and Joshua
EDWIN HOWLAND BLASHFIELD
Of this group Mr. Blashfield has been more largely identified with decorations all over the land than the rest. The list of his mural work is a large one. A pupil of Bonnât’s (bo-nah´) in Paris, a writer of great charm, and a most serious student of his profession, Mr. Blashfield brought to his art scholarly endowments of a high order. After his work of decorating the dome of the Manufacturers’ Building at Chicago came a series of commissions to embellish various homes of private individuals,—Collis P. Huntington, the Drexels, the Vanderbilts, Adolf Lewisohn, and others,—with work for the Library of Congress, the Appellate Court of New York, the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the Prudential Life Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey, the state capitols of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Idaho, and other states, with innumerable courthouses at Baltimore, Newark, Hudson County (New Jersey), Youngstown (Ohio), the Federal Building at Cleveland, some schools, and many more. In these he disclosed enormous invention, great facility, a good pictorial sense of composition, and generally a scholarly grasp of decorative requirements.