Arts and Letters

William Rutherford Mead, who died on June 20th, 1928, had been a member of the Academy since 1910. When he was elected to this body he brought it into relation with an architectural tradition of singular importance. He had aided in the renovation of an art in the United States.

He was of old New England stock, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on August 20th, 1846. He received a thoroughgoing education, first attending the Brattleboro High School, then spending two years at Norwich University, and entering Amherst College in 1863. He was graduated in 1867, with the degree of A.B. For this college he had a tenacious, life-long attachment. He was President of the Alumni Association in New York City from 1899 to 1909. In 1902 his Alma Mater gave him an honorary degree of LL.D. In his later years he especially interested himself in plans for the introduction of art study at the college. No memoir of him would be complete without some allusion to his fidelity to the seat of learning which had finally fitted him for life. It sent him forth into the world with fixed habits of straight thinking.

He began the study of architecture under Russell Sturgis in New York in 1868. Three years later he went to Italy, staying chiefly in Florence, and spent some months in diverse European wanderings. On his return to America he was ready to embark as a practising architect and in 1872 formed a partnership with Charles F. McKim. Stanford White joined them in 1878 and under the firm name of McKim, Mead and White the careers of three men were merged in a unity extraordinarily effective, as I have indicated, in the making over of American architecture.

It needed rehabilitation in the late '70s and all through the '80s. Public and private buildings erected just before and directly after the Civil War denoted a sad level in artistic taste and skill. The new firm, starting with an attack upon domestic problems, substituted for the old "Queen Anne" country house, with its fearsome roof and jig-saw decoration, a charming type of dwelling, faintly suggestive of the picturesque French manor farm, and in urban architecture Mead and his colleagues replaced the "brownstone front," of ugly memory, with a kind of house fairly exquisite in its delicate proportions, its restrained ornamentation and its judicious arrangement of well chosen materials. More than one of these beautiful designs has disappeared but many New Yorkers will recall, for example, the Coleman Drayton house on Fifth Avenue above 34th Street, which demonstrated the really artistic potentialities of stone and brick. One monument of peculiar salience in the annals of McKim, Mead and White happily remains to this day, the great cluster of houses on Madison Avenue, back of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which revives the dignity of a Renaissance palazzo.

McKim, Mead and White had immense success—and a commensurate influence upon the architecture of their time. I may cite briefly here a few of their buildings: the Boston Public Library; the Rhode Island Capitol; the Madison Square Garden; Columbia University Library; the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York; the Municipal Building in New York. These do not begin to exhaust the list of their achievements and on many things in that list, like the Tiffany Building or the Gorham Building, the University Club or the Morgan Library, it is tempting to pause for particular analysis. But my purpose is rather to emphasize the effect which the whole great mass of work had upon a period in American architecture.

It counted heavily in the development of the younger generation. The architects who received their training in the office of McKim, Mead and White and have worthily carried on the principles of their masters form a resplendent company. And the firm did more than raise up a school. It refined and steadied public taste. It put ideas of architecture as a fine art into the air. It contributed mightily, in short, to the creation of a new epoch.

Through all these operations Mead carried himself with a notable efficiency and generosity. Like McKim and White, he was helpful, inspiring, to the men in his office. He was that, indeed, to the entire building fraternity. When the Gold Medal of Honor was conferred upon an architect for the first time, in 1913, "for distinguished service in the creation of original work in architecture," it went naturally to Mead. When in 1909 he was made President of the American Academy in Rome there could have been no other choice for the office. Inevitably he received constant testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his fellow architects. They knew his steadfastness, his uprightness, his artistic rectitude. He endeared himself to a host of friends through his qualities as a man, a personality, and through the work he had done in a long life to maintain a noble architectural standard.