Hitherto American architecture had been most influenced by English precedent, and the Victorian Gothic had able advocates, especially in Boston, where the Art Museum by Sturgis & Brigham, as well as many stores, residences, and churches by Cummings & Sears, Peabody & Stearns, and others, showed much vigor and originality. William A. Potter, as supervising architect for the Government, adopted this style, in 1875, for his buildings at Fall River, Mass., Nashville, Tenn., and Covington, Ky., and R. M. Upjohn designed for Hartford, Conn., the only Gothic State Capitol in this country.
R. M. Upjohn and Henry M. Congdon of New York had already done much Gothic ecclesiastical work and, with the possible exception of Grace Church in 1840, and St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in 1886 by Renwick, there is no example of this style which shows such appreciation of proportion or of form, in mass and in detail, as Trinity Church (1843) by the first-named architect.
It was perhaps rather fortunate that just as the Queen Anne fashion, with its multiplicity of detail, was brought to us from England, H. H. Richardson, of Boston, called our attention to the bigness and (almost brutal) simplicity of the Romanesque from Southern France. From the date of the building of Trinity Church, in Boston (1876), may be reckoned the parting of the ways. Heretofore everything we had done of any importance had an English stamp upon it; henceforth the work that was done showed the result of training of the Parisian atelier or of the well-filled sketch books of Continental travel.
Not only in this church, but in his libraries at Woburn, North Easton, Quincy, Milford, Burlington, and New Orleans, did Richardson show his grasp of the subject. Trinity is unmistakably a Christian temple, and its bigness most conducive to the sense of awe and reverence. His libraries leave no doubt as to their having been built for the storing and reading of books; his stone buildings, whether the Court House and jail in Pittsburg, the Chamber of Commerce in Cincinnati, or private houses in Buffalo or Chicago, show their purpose and emphasize their material; his brick buildings, whether a college building at Cambridge, railway station at New London, or residence at Washington, tell their story in brick; and his country houses about the suburbs of Boston, to be what they are, could not have been other than of wood.
His influence upon the architecture of the day was therefore not surprising, but there was a subtleness in the character of his designs that his imitators could never acquire and even his immediate successors could not long retain after his personality was lost to them; and from the lack partly, perhaps, of true sympathy, partly from the modification of conditions, his art may be said to have died with him.
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, PHILADELPHIA.
As R. M. Hunt had the last word on the cast-iron front, so he had the first on the modern sky-scraper, a peculiarly American production; the walls of the Tribune Building, however, carry both their own weight, and that of the floors, being built before the days of the methods of steel skeleton construction. Hunt was trained in Paris, as was Richardson, and had assisted in the design of the Pavillon de Flore under Lefnel, and he showed his appreciation of the Neo-Grec movement in his design for the Lenox Library. It is somewhat unusual for an artist to do his best work in his latest years, but surely no better work of its kind has been done in modern times than the residences which he designed for three members of the Vanderbilt family at Newport, in New York city, and at Biltmore, N. C. The design which he left for the Fifth Avenue front of the Metropolitan Museum, now being carried out by his son, is a magnificent Corinthian order, whereas much of his other work is late French Gothic.
That he was called upon to design the base for Bartholdi’s Liberty in New York Harbor, and the Administration Building at the International Exposition of 1893, and that a portrait bust has been erected to his memory, all testify to the appreciation in which he was held by the profession.
To McKim, Mead & White, of New York, we are greatly indebted for their influence upon secular architecture, and their Casino at Newport, built in 1880, was probably more far-reaching in its effect upon country houses than any other building at that time. Among the other work from their office may be mentioned the Boston Public Library, the Madison Square Garden (reproducing in its tower the Giralda of Seville), the Library and other buildings for Columbia College, the Metropolitan and University Clubs, the Agricultural Building (of staff) in Chicago in 1893, now being reproduced in marble for the Brooklyn Institute, the Tiffany, the Villard, and other city houses, and a host of country houses at Newport, Lenox, and elsewhere.