Arts and Letters

I wish that as a prelude to comment on the career of the distinguished Academician who left us on August 8th, 1941, William Mitchell Kendall, I could bring to you some sense of the charm of his personality. We were friends for years, beginning in the office of McKim, Mead and White, where he was a leading draughtsman, and our alliance was broken only by his death. In all that long period, starting in the early '80s, there was never a diminution of the sweetness of his companionship. He had a warm, generous nature and it was enriched by a quick sense of humor and even by a playfulness which often gave to this tall, slender New Englander, seemingly one of the gravest men in the world, an accent of gayety. I came to love it peculiarly when we foregathered in Rome, many years ago. We wandered constantly amongst the historic monuments and Kendall was an ideal guide to them, an insatiable devotee of the grand style, of which he was to become in due course himself a notable exponent. But though he could be, and was, serious and scholarly in our explorations, he could also be merry and as I remember him then I remember, too, his frequent laughter. He was, in a word, a man of whom to think pleasantly, cheerfully, and it is as such that I would recall him.

There went with his buoyant vivacity a strong inclination toward discipline in the arts, a strong feeling for the fundamental admonitions of the great masters. Born at Jamaica Plain, Mass., in 1856, he went early to Harvard and there fell delightedly under the influence of Charles Eliot Norton. Directly after his graduation from the university in 1876, he passed through two years of severe training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then followed several years of European travel and in 1882 his entrance, well fitted for an architectural life, into the office of McKim, Mead and White. He fell into perfect harmony with McKim's austere genius. He continued with the firm until the end, finally becoming its senior partner. But it is of his spirit in architecture rather than of his official status, so to say, that I would prefer to speak. All his professional life he was in close communion with that grand style to which I have alluded in touching upon our Roman days together. He had an instinct for it, for heroic nobility in mass and for refinement in detail. He knew how to impart stateliness to a design and he could fashion a good moulding, one of the prime tests of an architect's ability. Laboring with the same enthusiasm upon a majestic pile like the New York Post Office or such a little masterpiece as the Morgan Library, he exercised a gift for the simplicity that is never bald, the measured restraint that is never cold.

And he could be versatile, as he showed when he designed the New York Post Office, and the New York Municipal Building. I must cite likewise, as a manifestation of his range, the lovely Arlington Bridge at Washington, which, I may add, was a work done in his later years in which he took particular pride. It is a monumental structure and it is, besides, an illustration of the grace that was within his scope. In all that he did there is expressed something of the magic of Rome, the ancient city and the city of the Renaissance. Rome was, indeed, his spiritual home, though he knew Greece and loved its temples and knew, to be sure, much of Europe. It was by a kind of predestination that he became a Charter Member of the American Academy in Rome, long served as a Trustee and on various of its committees. For the last twelve years of his life he acted as its Second Vice President. It was Kendall who designed the Roman habitation of the Academy. If all this testifies to his affection for the institution founded by his mentor and associate, Charles F. McKim, the founder of the Academy, it testifies as clearly to his unshakable fidelity to the Roman tradition. Kendall was a shining exemplar of that recognition of what is salutary in the lessons of the past which marks the healthily conservative architect.

He studied the past with unremitting zeal, but he lived also, and joyously, in the present. He was an exacting gourmet and he was a discriminating lover of music, especially operatic music. He travelled widely and he was a tireless reader. A finished man of the world, he had stored within himself many of the secrets of the art of living. Best of all, to end as I began, he had the unconscious art of making friends. He left a mark upon the architecture of his time and he left one upon the hearts of those who knew him. Elected to this Academy in 1929, he was one of its most significant members and his memory will be cherished here.