USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 22
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MINOR ARTISTRY (1775-1840)
In the minor arts and crafts, New England's work followed English precedent. In the eighteenth century Paul Revere was famous for his silver, and had a number of followers. In New Hampshire there were excellent potters. American furniture economically imitated English examples, the very economy giving it a charm of its own. Brickmaking was un- dertaken in Chicopee in 1800. Sandwich glass became well known. Bewick's famous woodcuts inspired a number of ex- cellent wood engravers, who made quaint illustrations for town histories and for the books of Peter Parley. They were worthy predecessors in the art to Timothy Cole and Anthony. Printing followed English precedent and was from imported fonts.
Nor should the whalers of New Bedford and the ships sail- ing from the New England ports be forgotten. They were of great beauty, and led to the supreme efforts of Donald McKay in the famous Yankee clippers, the cleanest cut, finest mod- elled, swiftest greyhounds of the seas. Their figureheads were done by skilled wood carvers and could at times be considered as sculptures. These men, in elaborate carving on mantels, imitated with great appreciation imported carving of maho- gany by followers of Grinling Gibbons.
AMERICAN GOTHIC ERA (1840)
In architecture, the Gothic Revival in England by Sir Charles Barry and Edis and Eastlake affected American de- sign but little, excepting in steep-roofed villas with jig-sawed vergeboards, as illustrated in Downing's work. These oc- curred more often in New York than in New England. There appears to have been a deep-seated feeling that classicism was appropriate to the assumed dignity of governmental work, Federal or State, and that it was more inherently monumental
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than any other expression. Therefore the designs of impor- tant buildings partook of classicism. It is probable that the work of Bulfinch in New England affected this attitude of mind. It appeared also in sculpture, and the legislators of our country were often swathed in togas. The chief source of inspiration in France was the famous École des Beaux Arts in Paris, founded by Louis XIV, at which the instruc- tion has been classic and academic. It has always maintained the grandiose conceptions of the Grande Monarque in its in- struction, and has therefore been admirably applicable to the great opportunities which have come to us.
TOPIARY ART (1820-1865)
Landscape work and town or city planning did not reach even an adolescent stage. Town greens like those in English towns, so-called commons, were frequent, such as Boston Common, but were entirely accidental in plan and used prima- rily for reviews of town militia and political rallies. With but few exceptions, the grounds and the groups of educational institutions were entirely unstudied as to general harmonious character and effect, and unfortunately in most cases still continue to be so. Yale has adopted a consistent scheme. In the heterogeneous Victorian age, no appreciation of un- animity of character of buildings or of their organic relation to each other could be expected.
Each donor who endowed a building wished it to be in- dividual in character, had no desire to associate it with any other, and had it placed upon the best site obtainable. No general planning was considered. Projects were initially of such small proportions that foresight was absent. The one conspicuous exception was Jefferson's University of Virginia. But Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, Amherst, Dartmouth, Wil- liams, Smith, and Tufts each happened fortuitously; and, while some effort is now being made to harmonize buildings and grounds, it has incurred expense and has accomplished results that are not entirely satisfactory.
The opportunities were great; but the country had not grown to them, and is still attempting with greater or less suc- cess to correct its errors of ignorance. The growth of arts
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in America was sadly handicapped by its being coincident with a period of poor taste in Europe, especially in England, which is unexampled in history; that is, the early Victorian period.
NINETEENTH CENTURY TENDENCIES (1840-1865)
At the time when, if left to ourselves, we might have con- tinued to develop the excellent colonial work, an entire Pan- dora's box of mediocrities was poured upon us, backed by the authority of the fashions of Europe. The result was disastrous, and the Civil War called a halt to its progress. The pre-Raphaelite painters in England-Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Watts and Burne Jones, and William Morris in his decorative work-were stimulating English art. The Romanticists in France, with Gérome at their head, had fame in France. Labrouste, Duban, Narjoux, neoclassicists, were simplifying architectural expressions.
All these might have influenced American work if the Civil War had not intervened, and actually a slight radiance from them appeared later. In the late 'fifties three New England students met in Paris, each of whom in his sphere was to be of mark : James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Edward C. Cabot. Despite the artistic beauty of the "Vision of Sir Launfal," Lowell's achievements have no place in this article ; but Norton was the beloved Professor of Fine Arts in Har- vard for years. Delicate in his tastes, precieux, he permeated his art teaching with high ideals and a gentle philosphy. Pe- culiarly sensitive to the mediocrities of the time, he was mildly pessimistic in his anticipations for the future ; an attitude which in his later days he felt to be unjustifiable as he saw the ever improving achievements. No man did more to penetrate and perforate material indifference with enthusiasm and reverence for the fine arts and what they represented in the life of man.
Edward Cabot came back a Palladian classicist and as such designed two notable buildings, the Boston Athenaeum and the interior of the Boston Theater; the former today one of the most satisfactory classic façades in the city ; the latter, now torn down, as large as La Scala in Milan and of fine charac- ter. Later he forsook classicism for the prevailing pictur- esqueness of design.
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POST-BELLUM ART (1865-1890)
The curtain of art progress fell with the Civil War. It rose in 1866 to reconstruction, not only of national affairs but of the arts. It took nearly ten years for results to be manifest, but in that ten years the future was forming its means of expression.
The desire for training at home came first, and appeared in projected schemes for schools, for hospitals, for libraries and museums, and for town halls. Education was to the fore; but painting, sculpture, and architecture lagged behind, the latter in as great a confusion as in the first half of the century. Academic training had not been established in New England. It is always characteristic of the enthusiasm induced by a sense of freedom that it tends towards spontaneous melo- dramatic expression rather than to serenity and dignity. It can be said of the New England architecture from 1870 to 1895 that it was enamoured of picturesqueness and it balked at formality. This in architecture is essentially an English or German trait, not a Latin one.
The men returning from abroad, such as H. H. Richardson and the others who very soon appeared, Mead and Peabody and Cummings and John Sturgis, worked as if the orders of architecture had never existed. Sketches of picturesque towers and gables and medieval accidental masses were their inspira- tion, not Stewart and Revett's Athens, nor Vitruvius, nor Vig- nola, nor even Letarouilly's Edifices of Modern Rome; and the results were amusing, interesting, often incongruous and without accord. Later these very men in many cases became classicists.
In the years between 1865 and 1880 they with others, such as Van Brunt, and Stone in Providence, and Earle in Worces- ter, were making the art of architecture respected as a profes- sion in New England. John Sturgis had studied in England and had been in J. K. Colling's office, as was later evidenced in his design for the first Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Edward C. Cabot went into partnership with Francis Chand- ler, who later took Professor Ware's place at the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology when Professor Ware went to Columbia to take charge of the architectural department there. Peabody in partnership with Stearns began to build
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many urban and suburban houses. Charles A. Cummings, a scholar with fine taste, is well known not only from his archi- tectural work but for his History of Architecture in Italy. W. P. P. Longfellow wrote for Appleton's a History of European Architecture at this time.
ERA OF RICHARDSON (1865-1890)
But the most original and emphatic and compelling person- ality of the time was Henry Hobson Richardson. He was a Southerner, who at the outbreak of the Civil War was study- ing in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts; and finding it well- nigh impossible to return, he remained there during the war. Later he settled in New York but soon came to Boston, and it is from New England that his influence emanated. Estab- lishing his office in Brookline in connection with his residence, he gathered around him patrons of the arts and young aspirants in architecture. His hospitality was lavish, and he created dinner symposia like a modern Lorenzo the Magni- ficent. Robust in person, in voice, in manner, and in ideas, he overrode all pettinesses of action. His very chairs and tables and fire irons and beer steins were of almost Brobdigna- gian scale, and withal he was a constant inspiration.
New England perforce had always been thrifty, and econ- omy was a traditional and acknowledged virtue. Luxury was looked at askance, and to be eschewed. Legislative op- portunism, public and private, is characteristic of New Eng- land, which exercises imagination in the terms of necessity.
Richardson, partly because of the economy of the use of rock-faced stone as compared with finished ashlar, but un- doubtedly from his sympathy for vigorous expression, was enamoured of the beauty of the heavy-walled, round-arched so-called Romanesque architecture of the eleventh century of France, England, and Spain. He began to design in that manner and created what was known and recognized as Rich- ardsonian architecture, which was greeted in Europe as being a characteristic and appropriate American style. No history of architecture published abroad up to this time gave any considerable space to American work; nor, with the exception of colonial work, which was considered merely imitative, did
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it deserve much consideration. It was taken for granted that our work was raw, the only complimentary adjective applied to it was that it was "virile"; and there was a general desire at home and abroad that we should develop a national archi- tecture. Because it was virile, it was assumed that Roman- esque was an excellent type of work to express America.
Like all powerful personalities, Richardson had among his pupils many followers, and so-called Richardsonian buildings appeared everywhere, seldom with the merit of his own. The type was adopted at the time for small town libraries and town halls, and occasionally for churches.
Richardson's legitimate successors were Shepley and Cool- idge, the work of which firm has been for years well known throughout the country. Charles Allerton Coolidge, one of the original members of the firm, has designed the new Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and many of the new Harvard buildings.
ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOLS (1865-1901)
The most prominent educator in architecture was Profes- sor William R. Ware, who in partnership with Henry Van Brunt was designing in Victorian Gothic-the best known of their buildings being Memorial Hall at Harvard, with an ad- mirable plan and good masses, but injured by the English detail. When Rogers founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he wisely associated with it a Department of Architecture, destined to be the ancestor of all similar schools throughout the country. He placed Ware at the head of the department, where he remained twelve years or more until he took over the similar department at Columbia.
The high idealism, the gracious courtesy, and the scholarly attainments of Professor Ware established a character and an esprit de corps in that department which it has never lost. The country at large owes an inestimable debt to Professor Ware. The first class, a small one, was graduated in 1868. The Department of Architecture deliberately adopted the traditions and methods of instruction of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and Professor Ware obtained the services, as Professor of Design, of Eugene Letang, the first of a long list of Grand-Prix diplomés of the Beaux Arts who have oc- cupied similar chairs in American schools.
From the State House Guide
THE STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, DESIGNED BY BULFINCH
Courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, DESIGNED BY STURGIS
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ART AND ARCHITECTURE
The training of these schools has been consistently aca- demic; i.e., it has been based upon proved principles of design, not upon emotional fantasies, no matter how imaginative. Well-established methods are essential to elemental teaching. The gradual effect of the schools has been to ameliorate the eccentricities due to ignorance. At the present time most large educational institutions have departments in which archi- tecture is studied, and the skill in architecture of America is recognized and praised throughout the world. This is very largely due to the careful logical training of the schools, which has been persistently maintained and has never been lured into stressing fantasy at the expense of dignity and power. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Chicago, Berkeley, Oregon, St. Louis, and many others have strong architectural departments, the descendants of the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology department. The Univer- sity of Pennsylvania has an art school of all the fine arts. Contemporaneously with the inception of the schools came the desire for public art museums to contain originals and copies of works of art of all times.
Individuals in the 'seventies studied in England under Burgess and Colling, and were designing in the English Vic- torian manner. England has always been famous for her homes, and while from 1820 to 1850 residences were often inspired by Greek temples, they now were built of brick in a peculiarly heavy English manner, without control. The result was a great number of heterogeneous erections which are now in disfavor.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE (1880-1890)
The decade between 1880 and 1890 was one of progressive achievement, and steady growth in the arts. The men who were approaching thirty years of age were beginning to make themselves felt, and the men of the previous generation formed a body of patrons in relation to music, literature, and the fine arts.
Early in the decade the American Archaeological Society, which had previously been interested in American archaelogy, went far afield and obtained a firman from the Sultan of Turkey to excavate the remains of Assos in Asia Minor. The president of the society was Charles Eliot Norton, Professor
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of Fine Arts at Harvard. A body of young New England men were sent out to undertake the work. Among them were Clarke, who had been educated in Munich; Francis Bacon, the older brother of Henry Bacon, who was later to design the Lincoln Memorial at Washington and who owed much of his fine classical taste to Francis Bacon; Norton's son Eliot ; Lawton, a Greek scholar; Edward Robinson, later curator of the Boston Art Museum and still later curator of the great Metropolitan Art Museum in New York; and C. Howard Walker. Bacon, Robinson, and Walker returned in the early 'eighties and settled in Boston.
The first art museum was erected in Copley Square from the design of John Sturgis and Brigham in the late 'seventies. It was built in 1880 and was one of the pioneers in art museums, housing admirable collections. The very inception of and necessity for these museums was due to private collec- tions made by travelling Americans, which existed before and increased in large numbers after the Civil War. They brought home foreign pictures from various sources, many examples of which were of mediocre quality and overestimated, and when imitated induced work of like character. Literal rep- resentation of natural scenes and of the episodes of daily life -i.e., pictorial subjects-were popular; and although there were dilettanti and cognoscenti who realized the inspiration of the Italian, Dutch, French and English galleries, the public at large had little knowledge of it. It was at this time that public libraries began to increase, until a large number of New Eng- land towns built town libraries.
ART MUSEUM IN COPLEY SQUARE (1876)
John Sturgis's design for the Art Museum in Copley Square was in the Victorian Gothic style of brick and terra cotta. No terra cotta had been made in America, and it was imported from Stoke-on-Trent, England. When the English company failed, an American terra cotta company, established in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, completed the porch of the museum, one of the first examples of the output of an industry which has since developed to vast proportions. Terra cotta became a fashion; and the Lowe Art Tile Company was established at Chelsea, and competed with imported tiles. The nucleus of
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the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts was from the Athenaeum, a building by Cabot, which was primarily a private library but housed collections of art. The most im- portant were a number of sarcophagi and other objects from Egypt, and a fine group of drawings and some paintings be- longing to Quincy Shaw. Later, through the efforts of Professor Edward S. Morse, who had resided for twelve years in Japan, Dr. Sturgis Bigelow, and Charles Weld, one of the most complete collections of Japanese art in existence was housed in the museum, which rapidly became a stimulus to the many art museums, public and private, throughout the country. By its art school it also stimulated painting, sculp- ture, and the minor arts. Libraries open to the public ap- peared sporadically for years. In this decade they began to take on definite functions, as did specialized museums, anthro- pological, ethnological, and the like, each containing exhibits of the arts relating to the subject, but not primarily art museums.
ART TRAINING (1885-1930)
The larger colleges included a study of art in their curricula, and housed small art collections and art libraries. The origi- nal Boston Public Library, on Boylston Street, had been out- grown; and the new library, which arose upon Copley Square near the museum, was designed by McKim, Mead and White, Mr. Mead being the New England member of the firm. Asso- ciated with them was Joseph Wells, who had never been in Italy but had worked in Peabody's office under the influence of picturesque design. He chose the work of Bramante for his inspiration. Like Bulfinch and Charles Atwood he was a born architect. Retiring in personality, an excellent musician, cultivated in his tastes, he had much influence on architecture in his insistence upon the study of Italian Renaissance. The men who had studied under Richardson-Robert D. Andrews, Jacques, Heins, A. W. Longfellow, Shepley & Coolidge, Richardson's successors, and Langford Warren-were be- ginning to make themselves felt. Later, when the Department of Architecture at Harvard was established, it was taken over by Warren, who had developed it into a very strong depart- ment at the time of his death in 1916. Another group who had been in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts-Chamberlin,
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Whidden, F. F. Wilson, William D. Austin, A. C. Everett, Edmund March Wheelwright and others-were also busy, the last-named becoming city architect of Boston and build- ing many excellent schools.
LANDSCAPING (1860-1893)
In landscape work one man became preeminent and ac- quired a national reputation-Frederick Law Olmstead. In his early life, working with Calvert Vaux in New York, he became the arbiter of designs of estates and of parks through- out the country. Catholic in his character of design, he was equally conversant with naturalistic treatment and formal planning. He thoroughly realized that the grandiose work of LeNôtre and Italian gardens were not yet sympathetic as en- vironment for American parks or estates, and he refrained from attempting them until the time of the Chicago Exposition in 1893. A charming, simple, quiet little man, he was a genius; and the written exposition of his ideas spread before uneducated committees and boards was so exhaustive and convincing that it was nearly always accepted. The well known park system of Boston is due to him, and there are few cities in the country that do not owe him an inestimable debt.
NINETEENTH CENTURY INFLUENCES (1840-1860)
Between 1840 and 1860 steam navigation between Amer- ica and Europe was established, and travel increased. The West had been opened, the gold rush to California had oc- curred, and fortunes were made in the development of the country at large.
It was to be expected that the phases of nature and the inti- mate episodes of daily life should appeal to wealthy pioneers, amateurs as far as any knowledge of the fine art of painting was concerned. Genre pictures made an especial appeal. Pri- vate collections began to appear. It was the period of German idealism, and the work of the German sentimentalists ap- pealed. Meyer von Bremens, and Ary Scheffers were bought. The Barbizon school was appreciated by few, and the works from France were of rather a saccharine character, such as the allegories of Merle.
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NEW ART SCHOOLS
At the time when these importations were beginning to affect American work, the Civil War delayed all development. It is probable that the delay was fortunate, as it gave an op- portunity later for a more intelligent retrospect. Education in the arts was as yet in no sense organized, and it was recognized that study abroad was desirable; but the trend of mind in New England had always been toward propaganda, and in New England developed a wish to learn and to impart-that is, to educate-and education as a desire, a profession, and as a subject for pride soon became a New England character- istic. This implied a certain egotism, which has been recog- nized by its results to have been justifiable. New England for a time became the principal center of educative effort, and the alma mater for many students, who in their work have often exceeded the achievements of the source of their inspiration, but have acknowledged the benefits derived from it.
Before the period of the Civil War music had been taught by individual musicians, and small musical societies were formed in many localities; and early in the 'sixties the New England Conservatory of Music was established under Eben Tourjee, which in the long years of its prosperous existence has encouraged and fostered and supplied with teachers many similar organizations.
Painting languished after the Civil War. In the 'seventies the outstanding figure was William Morris Hunt, brother of the New York architect, Richard M. Hunt, a man of broad ideas, founding his technique largely upon Couture. He painted a series of admirable portraits and undertook mural decoration in the State capitol at Albany. He was an inspir- ing teacher, terse and epigrammatic in his statements. Freder- ick P. Vinton, also an admirable portrait painter, and J. Foxcroft Cole and J. Appleton Brown and others followed. At the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, under Otto Grundmann, a younger group of men were becoming proficient.
NEW ART SCHOOLS (1865-1920)
Besides the Art Museum school there existed the Lowell School of Design under Hollingsworth, endowed by Augustus Lowell. Its Department of Design was largely devoted to
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textiles. It was an era in which art was introduced into the schools throughout New England. The State normal schools included it in their curricula, and it was introduced in the secondary schools for several hours in each week. In 1885 it was suggested to Walker to establish a department of design in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts on the atelier basis of teaching. It became the ancestor of similar schools of design throughout the country. The pupils of the New Eng- land art schools, public and private, have gone out all over the country as teachers. Walker took over the Lowell Depart- ment of Design, again taught design at the Museum of Fine Arts, and finally established his own school under the manage- ment of Miss Child, who has had exceptional influence upon art teaching.
SCULPTURE (1865-1930)
After the Civil War a number of monuments and memorials to its participants appeared in both the North and the South. With few exceptions they were of mediocre quality; but eventually a new type appeared, that of tall shafts crowned by a symbolic figure of Liberty or of Victory, with realistic soldiers and sailors and allegorical figures around the base. This was essentially an American type. One of the first was that erected in 1874, upon Boston Common by Martin Mil- more. The type became popular. Classicism began to lose its entirely imitative character at the time of the Centennial Expo- sition of 1876, which stimulated a certain freedom of idea, and an expression of a growing nationalism appeared.
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