The Making of an Architectural Masterpiece: The Boston Public

The Making of an Architectural Masterpiece: The Boston Public Library
Author(s): Walter Muir Whitehill
Source: American Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, (Autumn, 1970), pp. 13-35
Published by: Kennedy Galleries, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1593895
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The American Art Journal
The
Making
of
an
Architectural
Masterpiece- The Boston Public Library
BY WALTER MUIR WHITEHILL
For seventy-five years the Boston Public Library has dominated Copley Square.
It is a Renaissance palace, created out of its time, but decorated as a Renaissance
artist would have desired, for its architect, Charles Follen McKim, called to his
aid a profusion of painters and sculptors, and provided them with ample opportunity to exercise their skills. Indeed it represents a marriage of the arts
hardly to be matched elsewhere in nineteenth century American architecture. A
tribute to its enduring quality is the respect for McKim's work that Philip Johnson has shown in the addition now rising behind the old building. Johnson's
building in its mass and materials closely resembles the earlier one, although its
details are of the present day; his obvious intention is to concentrate current
working library functions in the new wing, thus restoring to McKim's building
the spacious dignity that has been obscured by decades of overcrowding.
The original project started with a series of inauspicious fumbles. The Boston
Public Library1-the pioneer in this movement-first opened its doors to readers
in 1854 in temporary quarters in Mason Street. Its first building, in Boylston
Street on the site of the Colonial Theatre, inaugurated in 1858, was after thirty
years hopelessly outgrown. Therefore the Massachusetts Legislature in 1880
granted the City of Boston a parcel on the southerly corner of Dartmouth and
Boylston Street in the recently filled Back Bay, on condition that construction of
a library building begin there within three years. Boston was moving west into this
newly created area, still half a desert. As people built themselves houses on
the handsome avenues of the new Back Bay, churches and institutions followed.
The site granted by the Legislature was beside the New Old South Church, completed in 1875 from designs by Cummings and Sears, and opposite H. H. Richardson's massive Trinity Church, consecrated in 1877. On the south side of the
intervening space, which soon came to be known as Copley Square, the Museum
of Fine Arts had opened its first building in 1876.
The location was admirable; a building was needed, but nobody seemed sure
alter Muir Whitehi is director and
1. For the history of the institution see my Boston Public Library, A Centennial History
the Boston Athenaeum.
,-'~~
.,jT
\librarian
H i he ofauhor of the two-volume
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). Information not otherwise specifically acMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston A Cenknowledged is drawn from this book. This article considerably amplifies the book so far
as the decoration of the building is concerned. As the history was illustrated only with
tennial History, and was recently
elected an honorary member of the
drawings by Rudolph Ruzicka, the paintings and sculpture received far less treatment there
American Institute of Architects.
than here.
[13]
The American Art Journal
what. Unfortunately Justin Winsor, the great superintendent who had made the
library an essential Boston institution, had been so shabbily treated by the City
Government that he resigned his post in 1877 and crossed the river to Cambridge
to become Librarianof Harvard University. The equal of Winsor existed nowhere in
the United States. The trustees appointed as his successor the Honorable Mellen
Chamberlain, a retired judge of scholarly tastes, who, although a conscientious
administrator, had none of Winsor's clipper ship flair for crowding on sail and
steering a direct but sound course at record speed. Moreover, the trustees poked
their own fingers into details of operation more generally than they would have in
Winsor's time. There resulted a search for consensus, a kind of government by
uninformed committee, that left a great deal to be desired.
In 1881 the trustees consulted the City Architect, George A. Clough, a competent but not very inspired practitioner, whose most notable work was the recently
completed English-High and Latin School on Warren Avenue and Montgomery
Street, then admired as the largest structure in the world used for a free public
school. It had indeed been so generously planned that the City Council, seeing
pupils rattling around in its fifty-six rooms, directed the trustees of the Public
Library to consider the fitness of adapting the great building for their purpose.
They did so, with corresponding loss of time, for by August 1882 they had convinced themselves that the school simply would not make a satisfactory library.
Indeed so much time was lost that in 1883 the Legislature generously extended
for another three years the time limit before which construction must begin.
Clough and Henry Van Brunt submitted plans; an open competition for designs
was advertised, but while the twenty sets of plans submitted were being studied
individually by each trustee, the Corporation Counsel concluded that the library
board had no authority to make awards! So matters rested until January 1, 1885,
when Mayor Hugh O'Brien authorized the library trustees, together with the
City Architect (by then Arthur H. Vinal), to award the prizes. They concluded
"that no one of the plans is suitable to build on," thereby proving that the year's
time and $10,000 spent on the competition had been poured down the drain.
Vinal then tried his hand at some plans. Time was pressing, for even with
the generous extension allowed by the Legislature in 1883, it was still necessary
to begin construction by April 1886 in order to hold title to the land granted by
the Commonwealth. Nobody seemed pleased with Vinal's design, which Ralph
Adams Cram, then an architectural student, remembered half a century later as
"an example of what Richardson's own style could become at the hands of a
sincere but incompetent disciple-it was a chaos of gables, oriels, arcades, and
towers, all worked out in brownstone." But time was pressing; construction had
to begin not later than April 21, 1886, and at 4:18 P.M.on that very day the first
pile was driven! Although work continued on the foundations, nobody could bear
the proposed design. While work was suspended during the winter of 1886-1887,
the Legislature intervened by the passage on March 10, 1887, of an amendment
of the act of incorporation of the trustees of the Public Library, giving them "full
power and control of the design, construction, erection, and maintenance of the
central public library building, to be erected in the city of Boston." They were
[14]
The American Art Journal
empowered to select their own architects. Thus in a single stroke the new building was removed from city politics and city architects and was, for better or
worse, made the sole responsibility of the library board.
When the trustees found themselves rid of Vinal and free to choose an
architect, they acted promptly. They first thought of Edward Clarke Cabot,
President of the Boston Society of Architects, who forty years before had built
the present Boston Athenaeum at 101/2 Beacon Street. Then one of their number,
Samuel Appleton Browne Abbott, who greatly admired the group of Italian
Renaissance houses that McKim, Mead and White had recently built for Henry
Villard on Madison Avenue, directly behind St. Patrick's Cathedral, hurried off
to New York to consult that firm. Charles Follen McKim, although a Pennsylvanian practicing in New York, had spent the year 1866-1867 at Harvard before
going to Paris to study architecture. On returning to America in 1870 he worked
for a time with H. H. Richardson on the drawings for Trinity Church in Boston.
The highly successful partnership that he formed in 1879 with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White (another former assistant of Richardson) was in
1887 engaged in building the Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue, only
a few blocks away from Copley Square. Samuel Abbott and Charles McKim
understood each other at once. They talked for four hours on Saturday, March
19, 1887, and continued on Sunday to such purpose that Abbott asked McKim
to meet his fellow trustees, President William W. Greenough and Professor
Henry Williamson Haynes, at the Brevoort the next day. McKim described this
in his memorandum book as a "very successful interview." So successful, in fact,
that the trustees, at home again in Boston on the 26th, voted to direct the president to make a contract with McKim, Mead and White, and to ask Edward Cabot
to discontinue any further action on library plans. Greenough and McKim signed
the contract on the 20th, and on the same day a quorum of the trustees (three out
of five) approved it. William H. Whitmore, who had favored the adaptation of
the schoolhouse, missed the meetings of March 26 and 30. When he heard of the
actions taken at them, he protested by letter on the 31st against three members
of the board having visited New York without having asked him and the
Reverend James Freeman Clarke to join them, stating clearly but uncivilly: "I
feel myself entirely released from any responsibility in regard to the construction
of the building." He did not feel free, however, to refrain from impeding and
harrassing his colleagues whenever possible.
The city had in 1883 appropriated $450,000 for the construction of the building. Although more than seventy thousand had already been spent on Vinal's
foundations, it was clear that McKim must make a fresh start in his design. The
architectural problems were complex, for there was no precedent in the United
States for a library of this size and character. Moreover, the site was bordered
by a curious variety of recent buildings, inspired by different aspects of the middle ages. The Romanesque masses of Richardson's Trinity Church dominated
Copley Square at the east. To the north, a block of brick and brownstone houses,
broken by the low, spireless facade of N. J. Bradlee's Second Church-an academic exercise in the revival of English Gothic-fronted on Boylston Street,
[15]
The American Art Journal
while at the far corner, beyond Dartmouth Street, the north Italian Gothic
campanile of Cummings and Sears' New Old South Church provided a vertical
accent that could not be ignored. Across the way Sturgis and Brigham had housed
the Museum of Fine Arts in a red brick and yellow terracotta approximation of
Ruskinian Gothic, while at the corner of Dartmouth Street and Huntington
Avenue S. S. Pierce and Company sold groceries in a brand new building by
S. Edwin Tobey that at once parodied H. H. Richardson's style and sought to recreate the picturesque roof lines of old Nuremberg. It would be no easy matter to
fill the vacant lot to the west with a structure of architectural distinction that
would not swear at its motley and aggressive neighbors, while simultaneously
creating for the first time in America "an ideal library," within the confines of
another man's foundations!
Charles Follen McKim proved himself fully equal to the task. Temperamentally
he was a man of the Renaissance. Remembering European squares, where buildings of many centuries and styles merge harmoniously, he early determined to
bring Copley Square out of the middle ages, while benefiting from the superb
mountainous Trinity Church and the graceful campanile of the New Old South.
He determined to emphasize horizontal lines, and to propose a building light in
color, severely simple in outline, and classical in style that would hold its own
among its darker, romantically picturesque neighbors. Although that decision
was soon reached, it took a year to produce a reasonable set of plans, for, as
McKim recalled: "It took us about six months to lose our vanity in connection
with the subject, and it took us six months more, having found out that we
couldn't make a scheme which we felt would go down the pages of time and be
enduring, to propose to the trustees what else could be done." Yet McKim's
modest "what else" has proved to have as enduring qualities as anything in
nineteenth century American architecture.
First of all it was necessary to abandon any thought of staying within Vinal's
existing foundations, and to proceed upon the theory that a building soundly
based upon classical precedent could hold its own in any setting. Although Henri
Labrouste's Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve in Paris, completed about forty years
earlier, furnished a suggestion in masses and in locating a great hall with arched
windows on the front of the second floor, the design that the trustees approved
on March 30, 1888, a year to the day after the signing of the contract, was very
much McKim's own. His plans proposed a rectangular building of Milford
granite (Fig. 1), the rear half of which was devoted to book stacks, surrounding
an arcaded courtyard (Fig. 2). An entrance hall with mosaic-covered tile vault
(Fig. 3) gave upon a noble stairway that led to a barrel-vaulted reading room
known as Bates Hall, 218 feet long, 42 feet wide, and 50 feet high, occupying the
entire front of the second floor, the great arched windows of which determined
the character of the facade. This noble apartment suggested the hall of a great
Roman bath, with decorative elements of the Italian Renaissance superimposed
(Fig. 4). Its semi-circular ends, separated by low screens from the body of the
hall, were designated for use as writing and catalogue rooms. Adjacent to the
catalogue area, and accessible from the staircase, was a Delivery Room overlook[16]
t
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The American Art Journal
Fig. 1. Boston Public Library, Copley Square facade, prior to 1912.
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Fig. 2. Boston Public Library courtyard, not later than 1895.
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[17]
The American Art Journal
ing Blagden Street; at the opposite Boylston Street end was a large room for
scientificperiodicalsand rooms for special students. The area on the groundfloor
underBates Hall and these rooms was, to the left of the entrance,assigned to the
orderingand cataloguedepartments;to the right, space was providedfor housing
bound newspapers,maps, and duplicates.Although the building appearedfrom
the exteriorto be only two stories high, a third floor, lighted from the courtyard,
provided commodious and secluded space for special libraries and research
collections.
The public exhibitionof the plans was well received,although everyone could
see that this monumental structure could never be built within the original
$450,000 appropriation,of which, after the various false starts, only about
$358,000 remained. The City Council clamored for an estimate of cost within a
week. Although the time was inadequate, and detailed plans were not completed,
McKim cobbled up what figures he could, and on April 23, 1888, reluctantly suggested the sum of $1,165,955. To its eternal credit, the City Council on May 7
authorized the trustees to go ahead within that greatly increased limit. About
this time, President Greenough, who was pushing seventy and felt unable to cope
with the responsibilities of construction, resigned from the board, and within a
few weeks the Reverend James Freeman Clarke died. Samuel A. B. Abbott, who
had brought McKim into the scene, succeeded to the presidency. Proposals for
construction were advertised, and, after harassing tactics by William H. Whitmore, who continued tooth and nail opposition to everything, the bid of Woodbury and Leighton was accepted on July 23, 1888. The cornerstone was laid on
November 28. Early in 1889 Whitmore resigned from the board. With the last
exponent of New England economy eliminated, Abbott was free to move wholeheartedly in step with McKim's plans for a monumental palace in which, as in
the Renaissance, painting and sculpture would join hands with architecture.
The day after his first talk with Abbott in March 1887, Charles McKim and
his partner Stanford White had spent Sunday afternoon walking with Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. Their thoughts had early turned to decorative adjuncts to the
proposed building, and McKim's plans soon involved bronze sculptured groups
flanking the entrance by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and a pair of monumental
Siena marble lions on the main staircase by his brother, Louis Saint-Gaudens. Although Stanford White wished to procure European painters for the decolation,
Augustus Saint-Gaudens insisted that there were "strong men of American fiber
who should be employed." So, although Puvis de Chavannes eventually decorated
the main staircase, John Singer Sargent and Edwin A. Abbey were also brought
into the scene. McKim, White, and Saint-Gaudens clearly saw, in the words of
Charles Moore, "the possibilities opening before them for the creation of the
greatest combined work of the architect, painter and sculptor ever achieved in
America up to that time." Abbott, whose taste and enthusiasm often outran his
tact and discretion, readily fell in with their plans; the role of patron suited him,
and, as he was giving his time without compensation, he could readily persuade
himself that it was all in the public interest.
When veterans of the 2nd and 20th Massachusetts Infantry Associations pro[18]
The American Art Journal
posed erecting memorials in the library to their comrades fallen in the Civil War,
funds were found for Louis Saint-Gaudens's staircase lions. Although sources of
other funds remained vague and formal contracts were postponed, John Singer
Sargent was informally commissioned to decorate a great vaulted gallery on the
third floor and Edwin Austin Abbey the Delivery Room. Both artists were still
in their thirties; both were by choice expatriates. Born in Florence in 1856,
Sargent was twenty before he saw the United States, and thirty-one before he
visited Boston. Although based permanently in London after 1885, he had many
friends among literate and artistic Bostonians. Abbey was a Philadelphian who,
after considerable success as a magazine and book illustrator, had settled in
England, where he became a good friend of Sargent's. In the spring of 1890, when
Abbey had returned to New York to be married, he and Sargent dined one
evening at the Players with McKim, White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In the
course of this congenial dinner the thought arose of Abbey trying his hand for
the first time at mural painting. It seemed so promising an idea that McKim early
in May 1890 bundled his dinner companions into a private car added to the New
York-Boston train, to sell the idea to Sam Abbott. On arrival, the cronies went
to a baseball game. Dinner that evening with the library trustees, who no longer
included the economical Whitmore, clinched the matter. Abbey agreed to do a
frieze for $15,000, thus moving from book illustration to mural painting.
Sam Abbott went abroad in various summers, usually with McKim, visiting
quarries in search of particularly handsome marble, and looking into possibilities
of decoration. In the hope that Whistler might be persuaded to decorate a large
panel at the Boylston Street end of Bates Hall, Sargent arranged a charming dinner at Foyot's in Paris for himself, McKim, Abbott, and Whistler. The evening
could not have been more agreeable. Whistler responded, drew sketches on the
tablecloth, and his companions marveled. But the tablecloth went into the wash,
and nothing tangible came of the meeting, even though the Bates Hall panel was
informally reserved for Whistler.
While all these exciting plans were afoot, construction progressed, and expenses mounted. By the end of 1890 it appeared that the total cost, including
shelving but no other furniture, would be $2,218,865. To show that they were
not the only body guilty of underestimating costs, the trustees appended a list
of contract prices and actual costs of fourteen public buildings constructed since
1885. The parallels were striking, but nobody else had achieved quite so resounding a miscalculation. Nevertheless the City Council once again responded, and
the Legislature permitted the issue of a second million dollars worth of bonds
outside the authorized city debt limit. The Boston newspapers were less sympathetic. Indeed they mounted such a hullaballoo that in February 1892 Mayor
Nathan Matthews served notice of his intention to investigate the expense and
convenience of the new building before authorizing the expenditure of any part
of the second bond issue. By that time the facades, interior masonry walls, and
fireproofed floors were completed; the tile roof was in place; Bates Hall was
progressing (Fig. 4), and Louis Saint-Gauden's noble lions were already installed
on the stairway (Fig. 5). The mayor's investigation delayed construction for many
[19]
The American Art Journal
Fig. 4. Boston Public Library, Bates Hall under construction in Fig. 5. Boston Public Library,main staircase before installation
of Puvis de Chavannes murals in 1895.
1892.
months. During this interval there occurred one of the small comedies that
punctuated the construction of the library.
McKim had sought to relieve the severity of the granite facades by introducing
decorative carvings and inscriptions, replete with historical and literary allusions.
In the spandrels of the window arches were round medallions, carved by Domingo
Mora, derived from the marks or trade devices of the earliest printers and booksellers,2 while below the great arched windows tablets were carved with the
names of literary men, artists, scientists, statesmen, and soldiers, which served
not only as a decorative relief but constituted a kind of roll of honor. To suggest
the diversity of riches to be found within, the names were intermingled in a
pleasant hodge-podge. Then, on May 27, 1892, the Boston Evening Record began
screaming that there was more to these names than met the eye, for at the left
of the Dartmouth Street faCade this combination occurred:
MOSES
MOZART
WREN
HERRICK
CICERO
EUCLID
KALIDASA
AESCHYLUS
IRVING
ISOCRATES
DANTE
TITIAN
MILTON
ERASMUS
2. These charming decorations are illustrated in Herbert Small, Handbook of the New Public
Libraryin Boston (Boston: Curtis and Company, 1895). pp. 9-13.
[20]
The American Art Journal
The Record's shocking "discovery" amounted simply to the fact that the architects, like scribes in medieval scriptoria, had amused themselves by working an
acrostic of their names into an inscription primarily conveying an unrelated
meaning. The trustees took the matter as the harmless joke that it was, but the
popular comment became so heated that money was needlessly spent erasing the
offending acrostic.
Early in July 1892, the trustees reminded Mayor Matthews that his investigation
had already delayed the completion of the building by five months, and tactfully
implied that enough time had been wasted. In reply, he proposed saving two hundred thousand dollars by eliminating certain ornamental work, bronze doors, and
statuary. Although this notion was highly unwelcome to Abbott and McKim, the
trustees compromised sufficiently to make it possible to advertise for bids for final
contracts in September. Eventually, through a memorial signed by Richard Morris
Hunt and other distinguished artists from other cities, and through the interest
of such Bostonians as Major Henry Lee Higginson and Professor Charles Sprague
Sargent, Mayor Matthews came to see the desirability of decorative elements and
ceased his opposition.
As a result of this improved climate, President Abbott was authorized on
October 28, 1892, to contract with Augustus Saint-Gaudens for two main groups
of statuary to be placed on pedestals flanking the main entrance, at a cost of
$50,000,3 "and to reduce the verbal contracts for decorative painting entered into
about November 7th, 1890, with Messrs. John S. Sargent and Edwin A. Abbey
to writing." In May 1893 a contract was authorized with Pierre Cecile Puvis de
Chavannes, the painter whose work adorned the Pantheon, the Hotel de Ville in
Paris, and many other French buildings, to decorate the main staircase, thus
bringing to fruition negotiations begun by McKim and Abbott during their European travels in 1891. Private generosity supplemented public funds to allow
two young Boston painters to have a share in the decoration of the library. In
1891 Dr. Harold Williams had proposed a subscription among friends for work
by John Elliott (1858-1925), a Scot who had settled in Boston after his marriage
in 1887 to the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe. Two years later
Elliott, having been assigned a ceiling in the Patent (later to become the teacher's
section of the Children's) Room, went to Rome to paint an allegory of the
Triumph of Time, which was installed in 1901. Thirteen winged figures, twelve
female (representing the hours) and one male (personifying time) move about in
relation to twenty horses, one for each of the Christian Centuries. "The design
begins in the neighborhood of the nearer left hand corner, and describes a semicircle, with a downward sweep over an effect of clouds, back to the left again, to a
3. This figurerepresenteda considerablereductionin Saint-Gaudens'originalhopes, for a
letter published by Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), p. 70, indicates that in December 1888 Saint-Gaudens
had suggested to McKim $20,000 for the first year, $30,000 for each of the four remaining
years, and $10,000 on completion of the two groups, which he offered to furnish in either
bronze, marble, or stone, as desired. Moore's biography is full of delightful information,
some of which was summarized in my centennial history of the library.
[21]
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point about two-thirds across the canvas, and culminatesin a disk, the sun, before which are the leading horse and the figure typifying the Twentieth Century."4This Elliott allegoryproved to be the least effective of the librarydecorations, for it covered the ceiling of a large but not relatively lofty room that had
originallybeen designed for utilitarianpurposes.As all the other muralpaintings
were in more conspicuous and generally frequented sites of great architectural
quality,they attractedfar more attentionthan did Elliott's.
Arthur Astor Carey, a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, made possible in
1894 the decorationof a Venetian lobby by Joseph Lindon Smith (1863-1950),
a graduateof the Museum of Fine Arts School, who later developedunique skills
in paintingEgyptianarchaeologicalsubjects.The site assigned him was an alcove
on the second floor opening from the main hall, where Puvis de Chavannes'
murals were to be placed, to the stairway leading to the third floor gallery that
Sargentwas to decorate.A comparablealcove at the end of the main stair hall,
leading to the Delivery Room, was decoratedby ElmerE. Garnsey of New York
as a Pompeiianlobby. Smith and Garnsey were the only two artists involved in
the decorationof the librarywho painted directly on plaster; all the other paintings were on canvas,executedelsewhereand shippedto Boston for installation.
Dr. Charles GoddardWeld, a great benefactor of the Japanese collection at
the Museum of Fine Arts, gave a bronze statue of Sir Henry Vane by Frederic
MacMonnies(1863-1937), a student of Augustus Saint-Gaudenswho was working in Paris. This representedgenerous personal kindness, characteristicof the
donor, rather than an integral contributionto the decoration of the building,
for the commissionhelped a promisingyoung sculptor,and the statue was given
in honor of the ReverendJames FreemanClarke, a trustee of the library, who
greatly admired Vane's brief activity as Governor of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony in 1636-1637. When received in 1895, it was placed somewhat incongruously in the center of the BartonLibraryon the third floor; eventually it was
installed in an entrancevestibule niche, where it now is, and where it looks very
handsome(Fig.6).
In July 1894, President Abbott was empowered to execute a contract with
JamesA. McNeill Whistler to decoratethe wall at the northeasterlyend of Bates
Hall for $15,000, and in Septembera $25,000 contractwas authorizedwith Daniel
Chester Frenchfor three pairs of bronze doors (Fig. 7) for the main entrance.
The former authorizationresulted only in frustration; the latter contract produced in 1902 a series of floating, airy-fairy, allegoricalfemale figures, liberally
draped,representingMusic, Poetry, Knowledge,Wisdom, Truth, and Romance.
Unlike most earlier bronze doors, French'swere unpaneled, and in low relief.
Negotiations with Whistler went so badly, however, that by the spring of 1895
the offer of a contractwas withdrawn,to his considerabledisgust. This was regrettable, for McKim had gone to great trouble to provide a very conspicuous
place in Bates Hall for Whistler'sdecorations.The handsomearcadeof the front
of the building, designed aroundthe thirteen great archedwindows of this hall,
4. Handbook of the Boston Public Library (Boston: Association Publications, 1918).
[22]
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Fig. 6. Boston Public Library, vestibule, after 1902, with statue of Sir Henry
Vane by FredericMacMonnies and bronze doors by Daniel Chester French.
Fig. 7. Boston Public Library,vestibule, bronze doors by Daniel Chester French.
[23]
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turned the corners and continued along Blagden Street with six arches and along
Boylston Street with eleven, the entire length of that northern facade. All contained grilles of the same size and design. The first two windows of the Blagden
Street arcade lighted the southern, semicircular end of Bates Hall, but the first two
on Boylston Street were blind, being filled not with glass but with Levanto marble.
Thus at the northern end of Bates Hall was a great blank panel (Fig. 8), crying out
for Whistler to introduce color into a room dominated by the soft brownish-gray
piers of sandstone, quarried in Amherst, Ohio. Although the panel is still blank
three-quarters of a century later, the Print Department of the library has owned
since 1950 a tiny suggestion of Whistler's for his proposed decoration. As this
watercolor and gouache sketch on a wooden panel5 (Fig. 9), given by Miss Rosalind Birnie-Philip, Whistler's executrix and sister of his second wife, is thought
to date from 1899-1900, it would appear that the artist kept the Boston project
in mind for many years. The subject is the Landing of Columbus, with Queen
Isabel la Catolica of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England on either side of the
main design, although it is so largely a study in blues and grays that the iconography does not spring to the eye. Whistler's death in 1903 closed this chapter,
alas; one of his symphonies in color, regardless of subject, would have subtlely
enhanced the prevailing grayness of Bates Hall.
During the construction of the library, the working aspects of the building
came in for some professional criticism. When the American Library Association
met in Boston in September 1890, William F. Poole said that Bates Hall, "with
throngs of visitors coming to pass comments on the beautiful architecture and
frescoes," would be as unsuitable for quiet study and reading as the street outside
in Copley Square. After citing various grievances, he continued: "Here you will
have, indeed, a beautiful facade, but not a library building." In attempting to
explain how all this came about, Poole continued: "Mr. Greenough acknowledges
he consulted no librarians, for, he says, they are inexperienced persons with bees
in their bonnets. 'I had the advice of architects,' he adds, 'and did as well as I
could.' The result is you have a library building, in the construction of which
librarians, who are generally supposed to know something about such matters,
have not had a thing to say." Indeed, Judge Chamberlain, who had resigned as
Librarian on July 1, 1890, confirmed Poole's allegations, when he said that so
far as he knew no librarian had been consulted, and that he had "had no
knowledge of the plans until they were substantially determined upon." Although some of the working aspects of the building suffered in consequence,
McKim and Abbott greatly enjoyed confecting a handsome Trustees' Room, with
woodwork from a First Empire hotel in Paris, and appropriate furnishings from
the Pavilion at Haarlem that had been a palace of Louis Bonaparte during his
tenure as King of Holland6 (Fig. 10).
5. I owe my knowledge of the sketch, never previously published, to Sinclair H. Hitchings,
Keeper of Prints in the Boston Public Library, who also furnished me the majority of photographs that illustrate this article.
6. The watercolor of the Trustees Room in 1895 by F. H. L. Gebfert owned by the Print Department was made as an illustration for the first edition of Small's Handbook. Instead the
publisher used on page 45 a cut showing the room only partially furnished.
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Fig. 8. Boston Public Library, Bates Hall soon after opening in 1895, showing blank panel provided for decoration
by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Fig. 10. F. H. L. GEBFERT:Watercolor of Trustees'
Room, Boston Public Library, 1895. Department of
Prints, Boston Public Library.
4-
Fig. 9. JAMESABBOTT McNEILLWHISTLER:Study in watercolor and gouache on a wooden panel for decoration of Bates Hall. Department of Prints, Boston Public Library.Gift of Miss Rosalind Birnie-Philip, 1950.
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The building of the library had been a long struggle with public indifference,
municipal economy, political maneuvering, bad taste, the temperament of artists,
the fixed ideas of artisans, the criticism of librarians, the unsympathetic and often
unfair tirades of journalists, and above all, with a lack of popular understanding
of the purposes of the trustees. One might more accurately say, with the purposes
of Samuel A. B. Abbott, who was, as president, not only the sole survivor of the
board charged with the task of construction by the 1887 Legislature but, since
the resignation of Mellen Chamberlain as librarian, the chief executive officer of
the trustees. He was an irascible, domineering man who wanted his own way,
bitterly resented criticism, and, when replying to it, put himself in the worst
possible light. Yet it was Abbott who chose McKim, who worked intimately with
him through all the myriad details, upheld his vision consistently, and was rewarded by the masterpiece of a great architect that still does honor to Boston.
The contributions of the painters and sculptors only enhanced, rather than created, the beauty of the building, for its true origin lay in Charles McKim's feeling
for space, his sense of proportion, and his uncanny flair for the texture of materials. Royal Cortissoz rightly said that to McKim "building materials were
what pigments are to the painter; he handled them with the same intensely
personal feeling for their essential qualities that a great technician brings to the
manipulation of his colors, and he left upon his productions the same autographic stamp." The remarkable beauty of the rouge antique and Levanto marbles of the doorway in the Delivery Room was due to no happy accident of a
contractor, while anyone who studies with care the subtle gradations of saffron,
topaz, and half a dozen shades of yellow in the Siena marble of the grand staircase will detect in them the same "autographic stamp." Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
who first saw the staircase finished in November 1894, in company with his
brother, expressed a feeling that has echoed for more than seventy-five years
when he wrote McKim: "We were completely bowled over by it; it is a splendid
piece of work and even as it is, without the paintings of Puvis, I know nothing
to equal it" (Fig. 5).
Perhaps today one might say that even with the paintings of Puvis (Fig. 11),
there is nothing to equal it, for the subtlety of Charles Follen McKim's design and
texture has outlived the appeal of his coadjutor's contribution. These allegories
of L'esprit humain, executed in the pale blues, the greens, and the white dear to
their creator in a neo-Grec mood that still recalls the pre-Raphaelites, carry less
conviction than the architecture, or the marvelously selected panels, the columns,
and the pilasters of Siena marble. The largest of them, Les muses inspiratrices
acclament le genie, messager de lumiere, was installed during 1895. By October
1896 the last of the panels arrived from Paris. On the right-hand wall Virgil
personifies pastoral poetry, Aeschylus and the Oceanids dramatic poetry, and
Homer crowned by the Iliad and the Odyssey epic poetry. On the left-hand wall
History attended by a torch-bearing Spirit calls up the Past, Chaldean shepherds
observing the stars personify Astronomy, while Plato, summing up the eternal
conflict between Spirit and Matter in the phrase "Man is a plant of heavenly, not
earthly growth," represents Philosophy. In the allegories of Chemistry and
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Fig. 11. Boston Public Library, main staircase after installation of Puvis de Chavannes murals, showing lion
by Louis Saint-Gaudens.
Fig. 12. Boston Public Library,delivery room, soon after final installation of Edwin Austin Abbey murals in 1902.
The American Art Journal
Physics that flank the courtyard windows, telegraph poles and wires bring the
song of the Muses down to date.
Many of these decorative projects required years for their completion; some
never materialized. Louis Saint-Gaudens had his fine lions in place by 1894, but
his brother, Augustus, was never able to complete the group of figures for the
main entrance. It was not for want of trying, for the project was close to his
heart. He planned first a male figure personifying Labor, between females signifying Science and Art, on one pedestal, with a male likeness of Law between
female Religion and Force (or Power) on the other. He went about his commission so conscientiously as to set up painted reproductions of the figures in front
of the library facade to determine the proper scale. Eventually the design changed
to Law, flanked by Executive Power and by two figures personifying Love, on
one pedestal, with the other devoted to Science, with Labor and Art (in the guise
of Music) as the subsidiary figures. Although Saint-Gaudens, a sick man when
he returned to Paris in 1898, continued intermittently to work in his rue de
Bagneux studio upon these plaster models, they proved too exacting an assignment. He did, however, carve in pink Knoxville marble and install over the three
arches of the main entrance, panels depicting the seals of the Library, the City,
and the Commonwealth (Fig. 18).
The library device, originally suggested by Kenyon Cox, consists of two nude
boys, holding torches of learning, and supporting a shield, which bears an open
book and the dates of founding and incorporation of the library. Above is the
motto
OMNIUM
LUX CIVIUM,
while in the background
are dolphins
and laurel
branches. This pleasant composition, although of the most idyllic and highminded nature, was presently denounced in 1894 by newspaper reporters as
a major indecency, because of the innocent nakedness of the small boys. The
Boston Evening Record crusaded vigorously for fig-leaves or chisels, even going
so far as to denounce the entire building (not yet open to the public) as a "stench
and an eye-sore"; this flaunting of virtue was too ridiculous to succeed even in
Boston. Saint-Gaudens' seal consequently remains, with its little boys neither
clothed nor castrated. So for that matter does his well-clothed bronze portrait
medallion of Robert Charles Billings, a benefactor of the library, installed in
the courtyard in 1901, which never aroused any controversy.
The library was at last opened for public use on March 11, 1895, although the
decoration contracted for was not to be completed for another two decades.
During April 1895 Edwin Austin Abbey and John Singer Sargent brought to
Boston the first of their paintings for the library. When they were installed, McKim, Mead and White, with the permission of the trustees, invited a group of
friends to inspect them, after the usual closing hour, on April 25. The effect of
the decorations is best described in the journal of Thomas Russell Sullivan. "The
Abbey and the Sargent pictures overwhelmed us all. Five of the former's Holy
Grail series are finished, covering half the wall space. They are brilliant dramatic
scenes, well composed, glowing with color."
Abbey's work was a frieze, 180 feet long and 8 feet high, placed above the
dark oak paneling of the Delivery Room. He first considered dividing the walls
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between panels celebrating poets, but rejected this in favor of the Quest of the
Holy Grail, which he proposed to treat "not precisely in what is known as a
decorative fashion, but to represent a series of paintings, in which the action
takes place in a sort of procession (for lack of a better word) in the foreground.
The background is there all the same but I try to keep it without incidental
interest. Galahad's figure, in scarlet, in the brilliant recurring note, all the way
round the room." The reds and golds of Abbey's frieze glittered, mysteriously
and marvelously above the oak paneling, and echoed the superb rouge antique
marble that McKim had chosen for the door frames and mantle. The painting
and the architecture merged into a unified whole. Even in 1895, when only five
of the fifteen panels were in place-the last were installed only in 1902-the
success of his effort was so striking that the American Institute of Architects
elected Abbey an honorary member (Fig. 12).
The synthesis of Grail legends achieved in this Arthurian "Gospel according to
Abbey" was widely admired and disseminated. When the first five panels were
shown in London before shipment to Boston, Henry James wrote a brief summary of the plot. After the whole series was installed, Ferris Greenslet in 1902
published The Quest of the Holy Grail, An Interpretation of the Holy Legends,7
handsomely printed on Ruisdael paper, with fine photogravure plates of the
paintings and some of Abbey's preliminary drawings, while in 1904 Sylvester
Baxter wrote a more modest, unillustrated description.8 Curtis and Cameron, who
published both of these books from their offices in the S. S. Pierce building, for
years did a thriving business in color reproductions of the Abbey and Sargent
paintings,9 which found their way into many homes, and gave many local
children (including me) their first taste of Arthurian romance. The Abbey paintings were, indeed, very striking and moving. Today's visitor must be reminded
that they were designed for the relatively low-power electric lighting that McKim
provided. More recent lighting engineers have brilliantly illuminated the Quest
of the Holy Grail, only to make it seem a rather banal magazine illustration. The
frieze was never meant to be seen fully in strong light, any more than prehistoric cave paintings were. I remember Abbey's work as he and McKim conceived
it, dim, remote, a touch of color and romance that completed a superb room. I
hope that in the future the candlepower may be reduced, to the advantage of the
paintings and the saving of electricity. Too much lumiere, even without accompanying son, can be distracting and distorting.
To return to Thomas Russell Sullivan and the evening of April 25, 1895:
"Sargent chose for his subject 'The World's Religions' and has put up one niched
7. (Boston: Curtis and Cameron, 1902).
8. The Legend of the Holy Grail as set forth in the frieze painted by Edwin A. Abbey for the
Boston Public Library, with description and interpretation (Boston: Curtis and Cameron,
1904).
9. The Copley Prints were sold in the Pompeiian Lobby of the library in my childhood, although Curtis and Cameron's offices were just across Huntington Avenue in the S. S. Pierce
Company. The senior partner, Benjamin Franklin Curtis (Harvard 1888) was an early collector of American antiques, who pioneered in the reclamation of the north slope of Beacon
Hill by moving to 76 Revere Street nearly fifty years ago.
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J
sf;
:2r_=,;if
l.
Fig. 13. Boston Public Library,Sargent Gallery, looking north.
l
/- v
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u
Fig. 14. Boston Public Library,Sargent Gallery, looking south.
end of the Hall leading to the Special Libraries, a confusion of pagan symbolisms
in arch and lunette, with a frieze of prophets below (Fig. 13). In the center of the
lunette the children of Israel, in a strong group, plead for help under the rod of
Egypt and the Assyrian yoke. Assyria raises his hand to strike them down, but
the hand of God arrests his arm. To right and left are pagan attributes and idols;
above the seraph's crimson wings. To Moloch and Astarte the vaulted arch is
given, with Nut, the Vault of Heaven Goddess, above and behind them, dominating all. The scheme is tremendously ambitious, and to be understood must be
studied carefully. It is a powerful and most original work, which will hold its
own with any decorative masterpiece of modern times. The prophets are superb
figures, wonderfully painted, with great folds of drapery, white, black, and brown.
Moses stands in the center, worked out in high relief, holding the tablets. The
group on the left despairs; that on the right looks toward the light with outstretched arms, and these figures are incomparable."
Sullivan's enthusiasm was so widely shared that within a few months Edward
Robinson, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, was successful in raising among
local admirers of the decorations a subscription of $15,000 that would permit
Sargent to continue his work. In 1903 his Dogma of the Redemption was unveiled at the gallery's opposite end (Fig. 14). There in the lunette is a great
Crucifixion, with a frieze of angels below, as counterparts to the Prophets of the
Old Testament, with the inscription FACTUS HOMO
DEMPTORCORPOREUS REDIMO CORPORA CORDA DEUS,
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FACTOR HOMINIS
FACTIQUE RE-
adapted from the text that ac-
The American Art Journal
Fig. 15. Boston Public Library, Sargent
Gallery, Mater Dolorosa. Photograph
owned by David McKibbin.
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Fig. 16. Boston Public Library, Sargent Gallery, east wall.
companies the mosaic of Our Lord in the apse of Cefalu. In the niches are
representations of the Virgin as Ancilla domini, holding her child, and as Mater
dolorosa, a hieratic figure with seven swords piercing her heart, who stands on
the moon, behind a screen of tall candles. Above these Virgins are, appropriately, allegories of the Joyful and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. At
both ends of the gallery Sargent used modeling, which in the distant upper
reaches of his paintings, enhances the dramatic effect. This is particularly striking
in the Mater dolorosa (Fig. 15), where the screen of candlesticks is so highly
modeled as to give actual perspective. This not carried into the paintings along the
lateral walls, where the shadows are less extreme. The three lunettes along the eastern wall depict Gog and Magog, Jehovah's Law, and the Messianic era; the opposite
spaces on the west are devoted to the Christian Heaven, Judgment, and Hell. The
decoration of the gallery was completed only in 1916, when the somewhat less
fortunate allegories of the synagogue and the Church were placed on the east
wall, above the stairway (Fig. 16).
Like Abbey's frieze of the Grail, the Sargent paintings especially the serried
rank of the Prophets, deeply moved generations of readers. Curtis and Cameron
sold countless reproductions of them. Ernest F. Fenollosa left his contemplation of
oriental art to write an essay Mural Painting in the Boston Public Library, in
which he claimed that "by this first blaze of achievement, we set Boston as the
earliest of the seats of public pilgrimage, the veritable Assisi of American art."'0
Fenollosa assessed the pictorial sumptuousness of Abbey's frieze, the bald abstractions of Puvis de Chavannes' decorations, reserving his superlatives for the
third-floor gallery where "in his treatment of the prophets Sargent proves himself absolute master. He stands side by side with the greatest creators of all
times.""l Here is the proof of Fenollosa's thesis that "mural painting liberates the
creative spirit, and affords opportunity for genius." Although only one end of
the gallery was completed when he wrote, Fenollosa prophesied: "This wonderful
experiment of Sargent's must penetrate American opinion like an irrigating flood,
and stimulate directly and indirectly a long series of splendid native works: so
that some day, when its walls are filled by his epoch-making achievement, this
gallery shall have become, like of old the Brancacci chapel at Florence, a shrine
for the pilgrimage of artists."12 Younger and simpler visitors were also moved
by the murals for the reaction of Mary Antin, who progressed from a South End
ghetto to Radcliffe College by way of the Boston Public Library, was not unique.
In her autobiographical The Promised Land, published in 1912, she wrote: "I
visited every part of the building that was open to the public. I spent rapt hours
studying the Abbey pictures. I repeated to myself lines from Tennyson before
the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the 'Prophets' in the gallery above
10. (Boston: Curtis and Company, 1896), p. 9. After a dozen years in Japan, Fenollosa came to
Boston in 1890 to establish a Japanese department in the Museum of Fine Arts, then in
Copley Square. Having divorced his wife in 1895 and remarried, his connection with the
museum, and with Boston, abruptly ended in 1896.
11. Fenollosa, p. 25.
12. Fenollosa, p. 28.
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I was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms I had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of my consciousness."
Abbott and McKim, who had brought all this unity of the arts into being, were
poorly rewarded for their efforts. The evening opening of April 25, 1895, which
had created an artistic excitement and enthusiasm unprecedented in Boston, was
variously viewed by the newspapers. The Transcript and Herald were warm in
their praises, but the Journal and Traveler undertook to snipe at the architects for
having given the reception, and at President Abbott for having permitted it. This
latest hue and cry, under the headline wHOOWNS LIBRARY?was one too much, and
on May 1, 1895 Abbott resigned. The vision of the building was his; he had
seen it through to completion; it was in working order, and there was no longer
any reason why he should, to the detriment of his own affairs, give endless time
and thought to the library, only to receive by way of thanks brickbats thrown by
sensational journalists. The more sober newspapers expressed regret at his decision and genuine appreciation of his services. Boston saw little of him thereafter, for in October 1897, at the instigation of McKim, Abbott became the first
Director of the American Academy in Rome.13 Although he continued in that
post only until 1903, he lived chiefly in Italy until his death in 1931. The record
of his accomplishment remains in Copley Square, although few Bostonians recognize it as such.
Charles F. McKim received equally unsympathetic treatment from a segment
of the Boston press. As early as 1890 he had expressed the desire to give a
fountain for the library courtyard as a memorial to his Bostonian second wife,
Julia Amory Appleton McKim, who had died in January 1887. His offer having
been promptly and gratefully accepted by the trustees, he devoted especial care
and thought to a decoration that was to be at once the final adornment to his
beautiful court and a fitting personal tribute. He designed a shallow, quadrangular basin, framed in a broad rim of marble, that would reflect the surrounding walls and the courtyard above. Although only a jet of water was
contemplated at first, McKim decided that the fountain should be adorned with
sculpture. For several years he searched for the right piece, finally concluding
that a nude dancing Bacchante that Frederic MacMonnies was working on in
Paris, would be ideal. McKim's appreciation was shared in Paris, for, on finding
that the original bronze was destined for Boston, the French government ordered
a replica for the Luxembourg. It was a lively, exuberant figure; the dancer holding in her left arm a child that gazes with eagerness at the bunch of grapes, held
aloft in her right hand.
A reduced model of Bacchante14was submitted to the Boston Art Commission
in July 1896 so that their approval might be obtained before the full-scale statue
was shipped from New York. Apparently the lady was too naked and too ex13. See Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim, chapters XIII-XIV, for Abbott's
connection with the Academy.
14. In "The Vicissitudes of Bacchante in Boston," New England Quarterly, XXVII, 435-454
(December 1954), I described this episode in far greater detail than had been possible in
my history.
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IL
I.
I
V.
.
'
i
.
g(
4i
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.
I
Fig. 17. Boston Public Library, courtyard fountain in November 1896 during temporary installation of Frederic
MacMonnies' Bacchante. Photograph
owned by Boston Athenaeum.
. .
-A~~~~~
i~~
0?
~
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-
Fig. 18. Boston Public Library, Copley Square facade after installation of sculptures by Bela Lyon Pratt.
-
uberant for 1896 Boston, for the commission invited a "Committee of Experts" to report their individual opinions on the artistic merits of the statue.
After wasting more than two months, this group came up with five pro and four
contra. Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French were among those
in favor, but the supposedly infallible Professor Charles Eliot Norton was on the
other side. After considerable debate, the Boston Art Commission voted four to
one to disapprove the acceptance of the statue on the ground that "while recognizing the remarkable technical merits of Mr. MacMonnies' statue ... as a work
of art, this Commission does not regard it as suited to the Public Library building." Unfortunately former Mayor Frederick 0. Prince, who was both a trustee
of the library and a member of the commission, and who had cast the only
favorable vote, admitted to an Advertiser reporter that no questions of artistic
merit or nudity had troubled the commission, but only the appropriateness of
placing "a monument to inebriety" in the library. This comment immediately
caused poor Bacchante, who was simply on trial as a work of art, to be placed
in added jeopardy on grounds of intemperence and immorality. It also caused
other cities to laugh. Two of the library trustees so vigorously taxed the commission with decision upon insufficient knowledge that it was agreed to have
Bacchante temporarily installed in the courtyard so that she might be seen in
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situ with the fountain playing. Consequently she was installed on November 15,
1896 (Fig. 17). After seeing the statue, the Art Commission's "experts" wavered,
seven approving and two (one of whom was Norton) continuing in absolute opposition. In view of this change of heart, the Art Commission reversed its former
decision, and on November 17 approved the statue by a vote of four to one.
Bacchante thus remained on public view during the rest of November before
being removed to winter quarters in the library basement while a permanent
pedestal was being prepared.
Crusading clergymen and newspapermen now began a violent campaign of
abuse, Congregationalists and Baptists being particularly vociferous. All of Boston went into camp, for or against poor Bacchante, raising such a furor of inanities that in May 1897 McKim withdraw his gift, and presented it to the
Metropolitan Museum in New York. He then wrote MacMonnies in Paris: "Removed from Puritan surroundings to this Metropolis, where she belongs, I think
we may regard the question of her virtue as settled for all time." Not a few
Bostonians, including the staff of the institution, still hope that she may one
day return to the fountain in the Public Library, where they-if not their grandparents or McKim-think she belongs. Few gestures would gain more friends
for the Metropolitan Museum than the deposit of this now almost forgotten
bronze in the Boston fountain that Charles F. McKim designed for her.
The most obviously unfinished element in the decoration of the Boston Public Library was the main entrance, where great pedestals awaited the bronze groups
that Augustus Saint-Gaudens found it so difficult to complete. In 1905 the
library trustees threatened to cancel the contract, but the sculptor talked them
out of it and continued his work upon the clay models.15 His death in 1907
brought an end to all hope, for the reduced scale models were not sufficiently
detailed to permit completion of the bronze groups by another hand. Charles L.
Freer, however, paid $15,000 for bronze castings of Saint-Gaudens' studies.16
When I was last in the Freer Gallery in Washington, these bronzes were obscurely placed in a basement corridor. Finally in May 1910 the Boston Public
Library trustees commissioned Bela Lyon Pratt, an instructor at the School of
the Museum of Fine Arts, to execute seated bronze figures, personifying Art and
Science, that have since the summer of 1912 occupied the pedestals on either
side of the central doorways (Fig. 18). They are far simpler than the groups that
Saint-Gaudens struggled with, and were executed far more promptly. Upon the
payment to Pratt of $30,000 for these, the total cost of construction and decoration of the building amounted to $2,558,559. Reserving $10,000 for the final
payment upon Sargent's work, the building account was closed and $14,640.44
that remained from the appropriations transferred to the sinking fund. David
McCord summed up McKim's achievement succinctly when he wrote: "Meanwhile, like St. Paul's in London it continues to dominate the square that bears an
artist's name and its immortality seems assured."
15. Louise Hall Tharp, Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era, pp. 366-368.
16. Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim, p. 72. Mrs. Tharp reproduces one
of the FreerGallery bronzes on p. 232.
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