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 V I I I “ E I T H E R I N B O O K S O R A R C H I T E C T U R E ” Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in the Nineties James F. O’Gorman In a letter of 28 June 1894, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869–1924) reported to the photographer-publisher F.Holland Day that he was experiencing a momentary lull in his labors, “either in books or architecture.” Within three years of his arrival in Boston, then, Goodhue was looking for work in two specialized fields, the two on which his fame principally rests, and the lull he then remarked was the last he was to enjoy for many years. In preparing a brief profile that emphasizes his double-barreled career in the 1890s, I have visited some of his major buildings, held in hand some of his finest volumes, and cast an eye on some of his original decorative drawings at the Grolier Club and elsewhere, but I must confess to having drawn primarily on the work of other, more specialized scholars. Whoever seeks the historical Goodhue must use and acknowledge the contributions of such recent students as the late Richard Oliver, whose monograph of the architecture is currently definitive; Susan Otis Thompson, writing on the influence of William Morris in American book arts; Estelle Jussim on the career of that “slave to beauty” F. Holland Day; Beverly Brandt on the local Society of Arts and Crafts; and Nancy Finlay in her fine exhibition catalogue on artists of the book in Boston. Collectively, these publications provide an indispensable context for Goodhue’s career. In short, I hold no special brief in the study of design in Boston in the mid-1890s; I draw upon the work of 196 james f. o’gorman others and here attempt merely to make whole again that which specialized scholarship has tended to pull asunder. We generally split art history in a way that separates fields such as architectural design from book decoration, and rarely do we discuss the two at the same time. But Goodhue was not the first to excel in both areas (I am thinking particularly of his Boston progenitor, Hammatt Billings), and in his case, at least, books and buildings must be thought of as variant flowers from a common stem. One cannot approach his bookwork without recognizing his origins, early development, and ultimate career as an architect as well. Born in Pomfret, Connecticut, Bertram Goodhue was the scion of old New England stock. He was from his early years a student of design in all its phases, with special attention to the medieval. Oliver reports that at the age of ten, Goodhue set up a studio in the attic of his parents’ house and painted its windows in imitation of stained glass. Although allowed to grow up unburdened by much formal learning, he was bookish, reading the Arthurian legends and other romantic literature. His precocious talent as a graphic artist led him at fifteen to an apprenticeship in New York with the architectural firm of Renwick,Aspinwall & Russell, whose principal partner, James Renwick Jr., was, with Richard Upjohn, a leading figure in the early Gothic Revival in this country. Renwick has provided Manhattan with two of its finest midcentury medieval churches: Grace on lower Broadway , begun in the 1840s; and Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, begun in the 1850s and completed a few years before Goodhue’s arrival in New York.It was this neo-Gothic world into which the budding designer plunged in 1884. Grace and Saint Patrick’s, like Upjohn’s Trinity at the head of Wall Street, represent the earliest phase on this side of the Atlantic of a design movement that originated in England, so far as Americans were concerned. Its chief voice was that of Augustus Welby Pugin, whose vision of an exclusively Gothic world (filled with churches of his own design) appears as frontispiece to his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture (1843).Through Renwick,Goodhue’s professional lineage reached back to Pugin, the theoretical rock upon which rested the English medievalism of the later nineteenth century, whether championed by Ruskin or Morris, the High Victorians, or the Arts and Crafts movement. Pugin’s influence went far beyond mere building design. In his view, reform was all-encompassing, and from his feverish talent stemmed drawings for churches and everything they contained. Another plate in the Apology...

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