The 1895 Boston Public Library: Monumentality

Home , Boston Public Library, Charles Follen McKim

Adam Robinson

2017

THE 1895 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY: MONUMENTALITY,

COSMOPOLITANISM, AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

IN THE ‘PALACE FOR THE PEOPLE’

Adam Robinson

ABSTRACT

Completed in 1895, the Boston Public Library at Copley Square conveys the bold cultural nationalism of the United States at the turn of the century. Created through the collaborative efforts of an impressive roster of leading American architects, artisans and artists, the building’s design and decoration claims a heightened status for American artistic achievement in an era of unprecedented economic, technological and cultural progress. The library’s architects and designers navigated a delicate balance between the needs and wishes of a diverse group of stakeholders—the cultural elite, the institution itself, and a rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse metropolis—fundamentally shaping the concept of the large municipally-funded public library for the rest of the United States. Their choices reveal overlapping and sometimes opposing ideals of the American Renaissance, City Beautiful, and Public Library Movements during this period.

Various scholars have already tackled the topic of the Boston Public Library, frequently focusing on its celebrated architecture or individual aspects of its decoration—the murals by

Puvis de Chavannes, Edwin Austin Abbey or John Singer Sargent; the sculptural contributions of

Frederick MacMonnies, Daniel Chester French or Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Instead, this thesis is organized around broad categorical affinities between some of the most prominent artistic and social undercurrents animating the American Renaissance, City Beautiful, and Public Library

Movements at the turn of the century: monumentality, cosmopolitanism, and democratic values. ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... iv

CHAPTER 1 MONUMENTALITY ...... 1

CHAPTER 2 COSMOPOLITANISM ...... 14

CHAPTER 3 DEMOCRATIC VALUES ...... 26

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 43

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 74

iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Untitled (completion of the roof construction of the BPL), ca 1895. Albumen print. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/pj6zovv ...... 43

Figure 2: [Mill dam survey : Boston, Roxbury, Brookline &c.] 1850. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/19575 ...... 44

Figure 3: Southworth & Hawes, Back Bay - 1857 (Back Bay from the dome of the State House), 1856. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/q8ov4aj ...... 45

Figure 4: Whitwell & Henck, Plan of lands belonging to the Boston Water Power Company, 1855. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/12655...... 46

Figure 5: Commonwealth Avenue in process, ca. 1872. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/pyveamj...... 47

Figure 6: No. 1. Commonwealth Ave. Boston, Mass. ca. 1878-1910. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/qfw2c6t ...... 47

Figure 7: O.H. Bailey & Co., The City of Boston, 1879. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/10206. Enclosed area corresponds to Figure 8...... 48

Figure 8: [detail] O.H. Bailey & Co., The City of Boston, 1879. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/10206 ...... 48

Figure 9: Charles Davenport, Proposed Charles River Park [Detail 1, map], 1880. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/10694 ...... 49

Figure 10: Charles Davenport, Proposed Charles River Park [Detail 2, print], 1880. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/10694 ...... 49

Figure 11: Downs, A. E. (Albert E.), Boston, 1899. Map reproduced courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/11180. Enclosed area corresponds to Figure 12...... 50

Figure 12: Downs, A. E. (Albert E.), Boston, 1899 [Detail 1, Beacon Hill and Back Bay]. Map reproduced courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/11180. Enclosed area corresponds to Figure 13...... 50

Figure 13: Downs, A. E. (Albert E.), Boston, 1899 [detail 2, Copley Square]. Map reproduced courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. http://maps.bpl.org/id/11180...... 51

Figure 14: McKim, Mead & White (Architects), Dartmouth St. Facade, construction of the McKim Building, ca. 1890-95, silver print. Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department. http://tinyurl.com/lpma98r ...... 52

Figure 15: Thomas E. Marr (Photographer), Copley Square, 1900. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/lfcxavy ...... 52

Figure 16: The Metropolitan News Co., Panoramic View of Copley Sq., from Public Library Showing Trinity Church, Boston, Mass. [front], ca. 1907-1915. Postcard. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/m724brh ...... 53

Figure 17: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. [front], ca. 1907-1915. Postcard. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/q25gaeh ...... 53

Figure 18: III. Post Card Co., N.Y., New Old South Church, Boston, Mass. [front], ca. 1901- 1907. Postcard. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/p92a3tc .... 53

Figure 19: Charles B. Atwood (Architect), Boston Public Library Competition Drawing [Front Elevation on Dartmouth Street], 1884. Boston Public Library, Fine Arts Department. http://tinyurl.com/qcjyx5r ...... 54

Figure 20: Charles B. Atwood (Architect), Boston Public Library Competition Drawing [Elevation on St. James Avenue], 1884. Boston Public Library Fine Arts Department. http://tinyurl.com/pddzk2v...... 54

Figure 21: Charles B. Atwood (Architect), Architect's rendering of alternative design for Boston Public Library, ca. 1884, silver print. Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department. http://tinyurl.com/ocgdb3b...... 55

Figure 22: McKim, Mead & White (Architect), Architect's rendering of the McKim Building with measuring stick for scale, construction of the McKim Building, 1888. Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department. http://tinyurl.com/qf54lqp ...... 55

Figure 23: Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, ca. 1855-1896. Albumen print. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/oqcorav ...... 56

Figure 24: McKim, Mead & White (Architect), Architect's model of the McKim Building, ca. 1890. Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department. http://tinyurl.com/ot64v8k ...... 56

Figure 25: Tek Che [?] Boston Public Library, Section Drawing. http://tinyurl.com/kvsd6l3. (With my labels) ...... 57

Figure 26: Charles Follen McKim (Architect), Boston Public Library, plan, first floor. http://tinyurl.com/nsqd3vu ...... 58

Figure 27: Charles Follen McKim (Architect), Boston Public Library, plan, second floor. http://tinyurl.com/m9235wh ...... 59

Figure 28: Exterior View of the old Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, built 1858, ca. 1858-1895. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/l6j674r ...... 60

Figure 29: Old Boston Public Library. Boylston Street. Entrance, Corridor and staircase, 1858- 1895. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/om833uw ...... 60

Figure 30: Boston Public Library Central Branch, interior entryway of McKim building showing grand staircase, (undated). Gelatin silver print. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/nae2auy ...... 61

Figure 31: Boston Public Library, Copley Sq. Grand Stairway, (undated). Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/n8xclce ...... 62

Figure 32: Bates Hall in the old Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, built 1858, ca. 1858- 1895. Boston Public Library Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/mhaadzw ...... 62

Figure 33: Newton W. Elwell (Photographer), South end of Bates Hall, McKim building, ca. 1895-1910. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/pu6v42o ...... 63

Figure 34: Daniel Chester French, Governor Vane statue and bronze doors, 1895. Boston Public Library, Prints Department. http://tinyurl.com/mwk8cza ...... 64

Figure 35: A. H. Folsom (Photographer), Upper Hallway Before Installation of the Puvis de Chavannes Murals, 1894-1895. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/nw8t69f ...... 64

Figure 36: John Singer Sargent, Sketch for Sermon on the Mount, Triumph of Religion, 1895- 1924. Painting on canvas: oil and graphite. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/k72mbsx ...... 65

Figure 37: Abbey, Edwin Austin. II. Sir Lancelot and Sir Bors outfit Galahad with his spurs, 1893-1895. Oil on canvas. Boston Public Library and Sheryl Lanzel (photographer). http://tinyurl.com/kcdfbc7 ...... 65

Figure 38: Ralph Adams Cram, architect (1863-1942), Programme for the Decorative Program of Copley Square. watercolor on paper, ca.1893-1896. Boston Public Library Fine Arts Department. http://tinyurl.com/nqwwfxq ...... 66

Figure 39: J.J. Harley. Reading-Room of the Boston Public Library. 1871. http://tinyurl.com/hp2bcgw ...... 67

Figure 40: Boston Public Library, Boylston Street. Reading Room, 1858-1895 (approximate). Boston Public Library Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/hahd3cb...... 67

Figure 41: Bates Hall, ca. 1900. [Cropped] Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/gv83zcr ...... 68

Figure 42: Façade (detail) http://library.artstor.org/library/iv2.html?parent=true ...... 68

Figure 43: (Left) Bacchante and Infant Faun. Frederick MacMonnies, 1893. http://camio.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/MZA/id/2135 ...... 69

Figure 44: (Right) Bacchante and Child Installed in Courtyard, 1896. Boston Public Library, Print Department. http://tinyurl.com/hl5o8jd ...... 69

Figure 45: Boston Public Library Copley Square, Courtyard (approx. 1895). Boston Public Library, Print Department http://tinyurl.com/jedtgb5 ...... 70

Figure 46: (Left) Delivery Room circa 1903. http://tinyurl.com/hzfq3tv ...... 71

Figure 47: (Right) Delivery Room. Photo by Sally E J Hunter. http://tinyurl.com/jmxfpfb ...... 71

Figure 48: Delivery Room (detail). The Golden Tree and Achievement of the Grail. Final panel of Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail. Edwin Austin Abbey. 1895. Photo by Sheryl Lanzel. http://tinyurl.com/jo2rk3c ...... 71

Figure 49: (Left) Sargent Hall (south end). The Triumph of Religion. John Singer Sargent. (1893-1919). http://tinyurl.com/h69hsr3 ...... 72

Figure 50: (Right) Sargent Hall (north end). The Triumph of Religion. John Singer Sargent. 1893-1919. http://tinyurl.com/jpo726o ...... 72

Figure 51: (left) Synagogue, from The Triumph of Religion. John Singer Sargent. 1919. http://tinyurl.com/z2mnkj3 ...... 73

Figure 52: (Right) Church, from The Triumph of Religion. John Singer Sargent. 1919. http://tinyurl.com/zjyrrno...... 73

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Art Center at American University.

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CHAPTER 1

MONUMENTALITY

The City Beautiful and American Renaissance movements were dominant in American art, architecture, and design in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Participants in each movement sought to express grand ideas and improve the quality of daily urban living though the manipulation of civic space on a large scale. Highly interrelated, these ideals permeate the

Boston Public Library’s 1895 building on Copley Square, with City Beautiful values informing the site and structure, and American Renaissance concepts shaping structural design and decoration. Both the library, in its former location on Boylston Street, and the urban development of the Back Bay had flourished independently, but the occasion of constructing the new library building on Copley Square provided motive and opportunity to join these together in a grand statement. Thus the Boston Public Library building fundamentally reflects the monumentality of scale and vision common to both movements.1

The Library Site

The library’s monumentality is a result of both structure and site. The library site lends monumentality to the whole not merely because of its location, but for the fact that this land— and that of the surrounding neighborhood, the Back Bay, was, until the 1860s, only marsh. The process of reclaiming and developing this land was accompanied by significant attention to the commercial and psychological impact of the built environment, a characteristic of the nascent

City Beautiful movement.

1 Monumentality: “heroic scale, timelessness, universality, urban prominence” Jacqueline Gargus, Ideas of Order: A Formal Approach to Architecture (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1994), 354.

Land reclamation projects began in earnest in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century, primarily to address the city’s burgeoning population and to resolve some of its commercial and industrial bottlenecks. Prior to such endeavors, the extent of the city was largely limited by the bounds of the Shamut Peninsula (fig. 2). Surrounded by the Charles River and the Atlantic

Ocean and physically attached to the mainland by only a narrow strip, historic Washington

Street, terrain modification was an important, if inevitable, development strategy. The Mill Dam

(fig. 2), running from Boston’s Beacon Hill to Roxbury and completed in 1821, cordoned off the

Full and Receiving Basins from the Charles River to power a series of mills located to the west of the peninsula. The line of the dam (now Beacon Street), in red on the map, moves from the peninsula toward the upper left, where it intersects Roxbury; continuing the bold red perpendicular line near the middle and toward the left marks the division between the Full

(upper) and Receiving (lower) basins. Less than profitable returns for this particular venture hastened the decision to fill in what had only exacerbated an eyesore, for although the Full Basin was usually full in accordance with its intended purpose, the larger Receiving Basin served as reserve capacity and was routinely brackish, a condition exacerbated by the addition of sewage and refuse to the mixture.2 The resulting smell caused complaint among residents of the Beacon

Hill district that was often downwind, and further encouraged that drastic and decisive action be taken. Southworth and Hawes’ photograph, Back Bay – 1857 (Back Bay from the Dome of the

State House), figure 3, captures a view of the dam and basins from the approximate perspective of figure 2 (i.e. looking from Boston’s Beacon Hill across the water to Roxbury; the Receiving

Basin nearest to the left of the dam).

2 Lewis Mumford, “The Significance of Back Bay Boston” in Back Bay Boston: The City as a Work of Art (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), 18; 24.

The Back Bay land-fill project provided an unprecedented opportunity to plan a new and sizeable section of the city from scratch; to gradually and increasingly incorporate contemporaneous ideals for the urban built environment.3 The area that would become the Back

Bay (fig. 4) was developed in a cooperative effort between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the city of Boston, and a local utility, the Boston Water Power Company. Each entity was responsible for filling a designated section of the bay, and received in return the right to sell the land that they created to recuperate expenses and generate profit. Although not initially conceived with monumentality in mind, planners and commissioners ultimately incorporated grand elements to raise the attractiveness of the new district, including a systematic street grid, well-proportioned buildings, and an elaborate thoroughfare loosely inspired by Baron von

Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, Commonwealth Avenue. A map of the area during the early stages of the reclamation (fig. 4), apart from a general grid layout—here superimposed over the outline of the receiving basin—suggests that these were later and more gradual developments.

Land was added in stages from the east to the west side of the bay, with the sale of property and subsequent development helping to finance continued land fill. A photograph of the Back Bay in progress, figure 5, helps to illustrate the public’s level of interest in the new properties, the homogeneity of housing design, and the patch-work way the Back Bay was built up. A later photograph, looking down Commonwealth Avenue in the opposite direction toward the Public

Garden and Common (fig. 6), shows how the neighborhood appeared once the remaining lots were improved, and demonstrates the growth of the green space.

A signature ideal of the developing City Beautiful movement was asserting the personal and economic benefits of regular personal interaction with natural spaces (albeit ordered and

3 Reclaimed land area is approximately equal to the original extent of peninsular Boston. Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 423. 3

tamed), such as the central pedestrian walkway along Commonwealth. This was doubly important in a context of increasing urbanization such as Boston was experiencing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Apart from the monumental scale of the landfill, the Back Bay reflects the interest of planners and developers in creating these spaces, which were intended to seamlessly link residential and commercial/industrial areas, improve property values, and imbue everyday citizens with a sense of sophistication and well-being.4

The promise of these public improvements informed initiatives undertaken by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and other concerned individuals, including Charles Davenport, to maximize their effect. Olmsted oversaw the dedication and linkage of several of Boston’s smaller park spaces to form a continuous chain, which would be called the Emerald Necklace.

While his efforts in this regard are notable—both for the area under discussion and for the impact of his ideas on the City Beautiful movement, his direct impact, apart from his insistence that the green space of the Back Bay form a connection to those of the Public Garden and Boston

Common, is more likely attributable to points west of the Back Bay—in particular, the Fens.

Charles Davenport’s proposal for the Charles River Park, however (Fig. 9 and 10), represents a significant Back Bay public undertaking, and helped to initiate a series of improvements to the banks of the Charles River on both the Cambridge and Boston sides which were under way by

1887. Although never executed as formally as shown in the lithograph in figure 10, Davenport’s vision for recreational access to the Charles River basin was beginning to be realized by the time construction began on the Boston Public Library’s 1895 building, and following further stages of

4 William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University press, 1989), 29-32.

development in the first half of the twentieth century, the riverine landscape that he suggested

remains in large part today. 5

Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River Embankment were two examples of planned civic spaces on an impressively large scale. Two blocks away from Commonwealth (and the site of the photograph in figure 6), Copley Square was beginning to take form as another significant public space (fig. 7 and 8), albeit one devoted to a wider array of purposes than

(primarily) either residential or recreational. The square was anchored by landmarks such as

H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the New Old South Church

(fig. 16, 17 and 18) by the mid-1870s, and, with the addition of the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology catty-corner to Trinity between Clarendon and Berkeley, it was becoming a hub for cultural and scientific activity. The library’s Board of Trustees, given the financial incentive of a free plot of land along the square, deeded to them by the city, approved a site at Dartmouth Street for their prospective new building, and proceeded to hold a design competition. Area architect

Charles B. Atwood submitted the winning design, but the library Trustees and the City Architect,

Arthur Vinal, later determined that none of the twenty submissions they received was “suitable to build on.”6 Vinal was tasked with moving-forward and producing his own workable plans for a library—subject to Trustee approval, but disagreement and delay between the parties resulted in Vinal’s removal after only having built the foundation. Charles Follen McKim was hired almost immediately thereafter to produce a new set of designs and oversee construction of the building to its completion.

5 This was conceived to facilitate “pleasure riding” and boating, year-round. “The Charles River Embankment and Park,”Cambridge Press Vol. XXII, no. 28 (Oct. 15, 1887): 1.

6 Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston Public Library: A Centennial History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 138.

The Library Exterior

Closing in the last open side of the Copley Square, McKim’s design necessarily engaged the principal structures along the perimeter, responding to their forms in ways that enhanced the library’s monumentality. Among its neighbors, the library contrasts most sharply with the building directly opposite to it, Trinity Church, due to the latter’s vertical emphasis, but stylistic associations also play a significant part. Ralph Adams Cram, reflecting on the design of the square, characterized the stylistic interplay between the church and library as “On the one hand, an almost brutal, certainly primitive, boldness, arrogance, power; on the other, a serene classicism, reserved, scholarly, delicately conceived in all its parts, beautiful in that sense in which things have always been beautiful in periods of high human culture.”7 The architecture of the library’s exterior is likewise reserved when compared to the Gothic-Revival architecture of the original Museum of Fine Arts and New Old South Church.

Preliminary designs by Charles B. Atwood—the initial design competition winner—and

Charles Follen McKim, and comparison of these to the façade as ultimately realized demonstrate how McKim capitalized on the project’s potential for monumentality. Atwood’s competition entry (fig. 19, 20) is distinguished by its classicism and two side entrances surmounted by domes which address the corners of the Square rather than its middle. Practically speaking, his design eliminates unnecessary walking, with public access at Dartmouth Street at either St. James or

Boylston Streets; however, this configuration also dilutes the impact of the entrance. With the bulk of emphasis on the front corners of the building, the sides and front are left comparatively flat and unadorned. Atwood’s alternate entry for the competition (fig. 21) moves even further in

7 Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1936), 35. 6

this direction by removing the visual interest of staggered height and by moving the entrance to the middle. Here the façade features even less variation in wall articulation, with only the portico of the entryway adding visual interest. As in his other entry, Atwood’s design features two openings at either end of the portico leading to what appears to be a central doorway, deemphasizing the monumental potential of this design.

While McKim’s preliminary design (fig. 22) shares the relative low profile, symmetry, and simplicity of Atwood’s alternate entry, it is markedly more monumental on account of the unbroken mass of the façade, which emphasizes the public significance of the entrance portal.

First, the unbroken massive square footprint of the building suggests substance, and by association, a sense of stability and timelessness. Second, the first and last upper window bays are blind and given over to decoration which would be highly visible on approach to the entrance from either street corner or from points along the square. Last, the single, raised and centralized doorway of McKim’s design lends itself to a more ritualistic experience. Each of these elements represents a modification of McKim’s principal source, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-

Geneviève in Paris (fig. 23). Notably, McKim shortens the façade from nineteen to thirteen windows and repeats this on all principal sides to create a square footprint.

In transitioning from a preliminary to more definite design, as in his plaster mock-up of the façade in figure 24, McKim moves further toward the monumental though a series of alterations from his initial proposal. The central rectangular doorway becomes an arcaded portal consisting of three round arches, rhyming the windows above and drawing more attention to the library entrance. Panels immediately above the portals receive a unique treatment, encouraging the viewer to focus on elements such as the library seal above the central portal and peripheral seals or heralds. He returns to the passage of the inscriptions directly below the upper windows

on the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and adopts these more literally, finally incorporating the smaller window on the lower half of the second floor. The columnar pilasters framing each of the upper windows of the proposal are flattened in the later version—a move which enhances the unity of the library’s upper stories. To match the now-wider entryway, McKim broadens the stairs and flanks both the entryway and front edge of the stairs with sculptural elements.

McKim’s design is a prominent example of the Beaux Arts style, which flourished in the

United States in the late nineteenth century. Several finishing touches enhanced the library’s distinctive impression of both public authority and welcome while simultaneously preparing viewers and visitors to enter its ritualistic spaces.8 Black bracketed and wrought-iron spiked lanterns on either side of each doorway replace smaller, less-elaborate light fixtures appearing in the plaster version. On the roof, functionality and ornamentation combine to set off architectural detail. A shell and dolphin motif runs along the cornice and ridge of the roof, doubling as a snow-guard, while griffons embellish lightning rods at the corners of the ridges. Oxidized copper along the cornice contrasts with the red of the terra cotta tiled roof and the muted granite of the exterior, which ultimately serves to draw attention to the running inscription along the entablature: “The Public Library of the City of Boston built by the people and dedicated to the advancement of learning AD MDCCCLXXXVIII,” as well as engage with the more colorful exteriors of the Museum of Fine Arts and the New Old South Church. Through the cumulative effect of these elements, McKim heightened the monumentality of the library’s built exterior.

8 Use of design and decoration to promote an idealized and welcoming civic space that, in the Beaux Arts manner, “[brings] the public the sort of glory otherwise available only to the wealthy,” will be further addressed in chapter three. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 59. 8

The Library Interior

Samiran Chanchani has addressed a lack of surviving evidence of written specifications for the library’s interior spaces, noting that internal criticisms and suggestions for improvements found in internal communications (e.g. writings by the Examining Committee while the library operated at its Boylston Street building), together with unsuccessful attempts by previous architects, nevertheless may have informed McKim’s design objectives, “[clarifying] the programmatic aspects of the design for the institution, [and] leaving McKim to deal with issues of the character and symbolic meanings of the library”.9 Richard Guy Wilson has noted that the form of the library’s 1895 exterior closely approximates a Renaissance palazzo, wherein “all individual elements—the entrance, ornamentation, spatial movement, and function—are subservient to the unity of the total form”.10 That the library’s interior favors form over function certainly heightens the monumentality of the whole but caused difficulties of varied kinds in the library’s working activities. In her dissertation, “The Boston Public Library Building of 1895,”

Claire Fund details the numerous problems that arose from this approach, including, most saliently: inadequate space, department adjacencies, and environmental housing for the library’s special collections, a noisy, cramped, and distracting reading room, a too-small delivery room, and insufficiently-lit Technical Services Department.11

It is telling that while the wider library community anticipated the Boston Public

Library’s success, it remained critical of the architects’ lack of consultation with library

9 Samiran Chanchani, “Architecture and Central Public Libraries in America, 1887-1925: A Study of Conflicting Institutions and Mediated Designs” (PhD diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002). 117-120.

10 Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture, Landscape, and City Planning” in The American Renaissance: 1876-1917 (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 74-109. 103. Wilson’s illustrates his analysis with a helpful contrast of the front elevations and floorplans of the Boston and New York Public Library.

11 Claire Fund, “The Boston Public Library Building of 1895” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1973). 56-68.

professionals with regard to the planning and adjacencies of effective library and work space. In his remarks to the 1890 meeting of the American Library Association, William F. Poole, speaking as ALA president, expressed his reservations about the then-in-progress library for this very reason: “Mr. Greenough [a library trustee] acknowledges that he consulted no librarians…

The result is you have a building, the construction of which librarians, who are generally supposed to know something about such matters, have not had a thing to say.” 12 Narrow focus on the architecture and decoration of the new building, at the expense of more practical logistical concerns, highlights the strong symbolic potential of public libraries at the turn of the century. It can, and has, been argued that the library’s designers had no precedent to look to, however this argument (at least on the surface) overlooks the obvious reference point of lessons learned by staff and administrators during the library’s occupancy of former buildings on Boylston and

Mason streets.

It is more accurate to say that the architects had no monumental precedent for this uniquely-funded, expressly free and public form of library, and that monumentality, rather than practicality, was the guiding principle.13 This notion is supported by the aspects of the library’s layout, entrance, and decorative program. In typical Beaux Arts style, the layout of the building promotes the notion of ritualized space. Elevation becomes associated with greater knowledge, as supported by room function and decoration. Ascending from the street, visitors pass under a bust of Athena, through the entrance hall with its Pompeiian ceiling, up a grand staircase decorated with Puvis de Chavannes’ The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit, the Harbinger of

12 Whitehill, Boston Public Library: a Centennial History, 151.

13 Fund writes that “Trustees were often vague and uncertain as to their conception of the new building. Their only qualification for the building’s exterior was that it should look ‘as much as practicable’ like a library and not a grandiose monument.” As the result is nothing if not a “grandiose monument,” and McKim remained architect throughout, it seems fair to suggest that this desire was ill-served by lack of ready-precedent. Fund, “The Boston Public Library Building of 1895,” 51. 10

Light before arriving at the Reading or Delivery Room to conduct their library business. Moving up to the third floor to the library’s increasingly specialized collections, the visitor is confronted with John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion. Decoration invokes selective periods of

Western art, from Greek and Roman to Romanticism, culminating in the American Renaissance.

Likewise, decorative content functions to establish and promote the array of human knowledge

(entrance hall) its applications (stairway) and pursuit/acquisition (Delivery Room).

Because of McKim’s design decisions, the effect of entering the library at Copley Square is markedly different from doing so at the former Boylston Street building. In the first place, the

Boylston Street library is more modest (fig. 28): the building enjoyed a prominent location across from the Boston Common, but it was in the middle of a block rather than along the full side of a square. In contrast, the 1895 building includes a vestibule (fig. 34), whereas the

Boylston Street library is more utilitarian (fig. 29). The wide stairway of the 1895 building (Fig.

30, 31) is lavish, splitting into two narrower flights before delivering visitors to the second-floor hallway whereas the Boylston Street library presents two unassuming stairways upfront. The lofty interior of the Boylston Street library is offset to some extent by the multifunctional aspect of the space: stacks occupy the left and right sides, catalogs and reading space take up the floor.

The new, compartmentalized 1895 building instead isolates library functions, which draws increased attention to their meaning and provides a basis of departure for decorative themes (e.g. the pairing of Edwin Austin Abbey’s Quest for the Holy Grail and the Delivery Room, wherein patrons requested the materials that they wished to consult in the Bates Reading Room).

Because of these architectural decisions, the decorative program of the new library building, though highly elaborate, remains secondary to the monumentalizing effect of the building at large. This is true for both the sculptural and mural elements. Sculptures are

unobtrusive and function primarily to emphasize space: Bela Pratt’s figures of Art and Science flank the library entrance, guiding visitors toward the central portal while bringing the city into the library and extending the library onto the sidewalk. Niche sculptures in the vestibule heighten the drama of the entrance without diverting attention from the entrance hall and stairway ahead.

Frederick MacMonnies’ Bacchante, in the middle of the courtyard fountain, marks the center the library’s courtyard, becoming a visual anchor as one walks around the arcade along three of the four sides. These works most likely were intended as admirable decorative elements in themselves, but they also underscore, through their content and positioning, the broader ceremonial program of the library.

Murals, while dramatically situated, are similarly determined by and subservient to their allotted spaces. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ nine panels depicting foundational areas of human knowledge: Epic Poetry, Dramatic Poetry, Pastoral Poetry, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry,

History and Philosophy, are designed to fit into the basic unit of the arch which is repeated from the building’s exterior (for a better sense of this, return to the section drawing in figure 25), and his Enlightenment mural on the wall of the second-floor hallway reflects the same rhythmic concern (fig. 35). Similarly, the Edwin Austin Abbey murals stay within their dedicated spaces along upper walls in the delivery room, and reflect the architecture of the room to a greater extent, as the artist uses the architectural features (e.g. rafters, doorways) to shape and enhance composition (e.g. in the panel Sir Lancelot and Sir Bors outfit Galahad with his spurs, figure 37).

In Sargent’s The Triumph of Religion series, (fig. 36), the arrangement and form of his decorative program is similarly determined by available surfaces, even as he adds texture and

richness by experimenting with three dimensional elements that blur the lines between painting, sculpture, and architecture.14

Through the impact of these design decisions, the cumulative effect of experiencing the library as a structure, enhanced by the latent and conspicuous meanings of site and the elaborate, albeit secondary decorative program, asserts its authority as an artistically cohesive and monumental whole. The library’s monumentality, a product of its designers’ interest in City

Beautiful and American Renaissance ideology articulated through deliberate architectural and artistic choices, serves as a crucial foundation for the expression of cosmopolitan and democratic values, the focus of the next two chapters.

14 While several scholars have more closely and completely examined these mural cycles, the focus here is on their effect on the social impact of the building’s design choices and less on the specifics of their content. For more detailed discussions of each cycle, see Aimée Brown Price’s Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Ferris Greenslet’s The Quest of the Holy Grail: an Interpretation and a paraphrase of the Holy Legends and Hirshler’s “A Quest for the Holy Grail: Edwin Austin Abbey’s Murals for the Boston Public Library (Abbey), and Sally Promey: Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of religion at the Boston Public Library. 13

CHAPTER 2

COSMOPOLITANISM

“A liking for the new Public Library is a test of a person’s culture” 15

It is encouraging to take account of the fact that the Public Library is lodged in one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, possibly the most beautiful library building, and that it will no longer be possible to say that America has no structure of Continental dignity and impressiveness… a belief in the coming greatness of Boston is just now needful, not to assign to it the respectful appellation of a second Edinburgh or the Athens of America, but to beautify it, to revere it, to make its politics and its inner life as wise and pure as its outward appearance is destined to be fair. In all this coming welfare, the noble structure on Copley square will receive and contribute its full share.16

The design and decoration of the Boston Public Library was overwhelmingly shaped by the cosmopolitan values of the late nineteenth-century American elite, despite being funded by taxpayers and intended for popular use. Although they stood to gain differently, the aristocratic

Boston Brahmins, as well as the library’s architect, Charles Follen McKim, and the artists responsible for the library’s decorative program, coordinated by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, all had an interest in representing themselves as cosmopolitan. The library project provided an opportunity to establish and enhance these personal and professional reputations on a grand scale.

The previous chapter addressed the library’s monumentality as the result of organic and planned city development as well as deliberate architectural and artistic strategies. In the next two chapters I will consider how such monumentality functioned to convey these messages by

15 “Contributions to history and discovery: the new Boston Public Library” Current Literature (Nov. 1892): 307.

16 Lindsay Swift, “Significance of the Library,” in Handbook of the New Public Library in Boston, Herbert Small editor, 78. 14

examining the socioeconomic and cultural influences behind the library’s elite cosmopolitan visage and, later, the potential incongruity between this homogenizing register and the diverse reality of people for whom the library was allegedly intended. Before analyzing the degree to which the library’s democratic ideals were advanced or hindered as a result of the design and decoration, it is important to establish a greater sense of the forces which fundamentally shaped the artists who were responsible, so that we can better distinguish between the intended and substantive effect of their ensemble. No force was as singularly influential on the library’s design and decoration as cosmopolitanism, for reasons we turn to now.

Cosmopolitanism has historically been associated with the idea of a cultural openness: a greater receptivity to non-local ideas, values or commodities in comparison to local and more familiar ones.17 Scholars Zlatko Skrbiš and Ian Woodward highlight the notion that a cosmopolitan identity depends on one being both “geographically and culturally mobile …

[with] the capacity to interpret things as cosmopolitan.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, this kind of mobility would have almost necessarily have required membership or proximity to the upper class, where the ability to discern and act upon cosmopolitan influences would have served the practical purpose of asserting social or professional status. In addition to being discerning, cosmopolitans are selective in the elements of an outside culture they chose to take in or assimilate. As Skrbiš and Woodward write, “otherness is valued, but at the same time they [cosmopolitans] tend to value only certain forms of otherness, frequently for the purpose of enhancing the self…this is not a wholehearted and holistic acceptance of cultural difference, but necessarily partial and contextual.”18 In other words, cosmopolitan openness is fundamentally

17 Zlatko Skrbiš, and Ian Woodward, “Cosmopolitan Openness,” in The Ashgate Reasearch Companion to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, 53-68. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

18 Skrbiš, and Woodward, “Cosmopolitan Openness,” 63. Emphasis added. 15

conditional, with the potential to serve overt as well as covert means. Whatever the motive, this characteristic manifested as a selectively eclectic and idealistic mode in late nineteenth century

American art and architecture.

The Boston elite had reason to cultivate a cosmopolitan image. Establishing, supporting, and being associated with cultural institutions provided means to consolidate and legitimize the political power of later-generation members of Brahmin families. In his thesis “The Boston

Brahmins: Their Influence on the Built Form of Boston (1850-1900),” Keith Ross characterizes the Boston Brahmins as “a class of New Englanders who claimed hereditary and cultural descent from English Protestants who founded the city of Boston,” a people who, he states, collectively,

“believed in American ideals but … also cherished European principles.” 19 Owing to this complex hybrid-identity, Brahmins were uniquely primed and motivated to embrace outside influences as a means of asserting and maintaining their social and political dominance; sometimes adopting but more often adapting European ideas to suit elite American tastes.

Brahmins’ tendencies to idealize the Old World cultural values frequently worked against

American ideals. Ross, summarizing the impression of a 19th century English visitor to the city writes that “Brahmins’ cultural pretensions and social exclusivity were at odds with the democratic ideals of America’s egalitarianism and inclusive citizenship.”20 Frederic Cople

Jaher’s comparative study, “Nineteenth-Century Elites in Boston and New York,” cites Brahmin nepotism and conservatism as a basis for their sustained political control of the city, even where

19 Keith George Ross, “The Boston Brahmins: Their Influence on the Built Form of Boston (1850-1900). Diss., California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2008. 1-2.

20 Ross, “The Boston Brahmins,” 4.

these strategies eventually undermined the city’s competitiveness and relegated it to a regional,

th rather than national metropolis in the latter part of the 19 Century.21

In spite of the slow and relative decline of their influence, the insular nature of the

Brahmins gave them unprecedented control over the city’s cultural sphere, which they perpetuated by establishing and governing educational and cultural institutions such as the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (opened 1865), Museum of Fine Arts (1870), and Boston

Symphony Orchestra (1881).22 All three were originally located in the Back Bay, and two—the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Museum of Fine Arts—were adjacent to Copley

Square. These joined existing Brahmin enclaves such as Harvard University (1636) and the

Boston Athenaeum (1849), not to mention other social organizations and clubs catering to

Brahmins’ more exclusive interests. According to Julia Rosenbaum, the Boston Public Library at Copley Square fit within this “network of bourgeois social structures” geographically and ideologically even as it was distinguished for being publicly financed and for “[reaching] out to a lower class constituency.”23

Brahmin, and thereby cosmopolitan influence was pervasive in the Back Bay. The degree to which the Boston elite genuinely invited the full participation of lower and immigrant classes

21 Frederic Cople Jaher, “Nineteenth-Century Elites in Boston and New York,” Journal of Social History 6:1 (Autumn 1972): 32-77.

22 Betty G. Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth Century Boston (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 31.

23 Julia B. Rosenbaum, “Ordering the Social Sphere: Public Art and Boston’s Bourgeoisie” in The American Bourgeoise: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum. (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 201. In terms of geography, Brahmins were concentrated in the Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhoods of Boston. Although Keith Ross suggests that both are European-inspired, it is important to distinguish between latent and calculated similarity. Entirely free of Boston’s colonial legacy, the Back Bay neighborhood was more deliberately fashioned after European precedent, as discussed in chapter one. That, as Ross notes, the majority of Back Bay streets are named for English counties should be taken as further indication of intensified regard for Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Keith Ross. “The Boston Brahmins: Their Influence on the Built Form of Boston (1850-1900). 4

into civic engagement is debatable. One might argue that the public cultural institutions

Brahmins supported and established served as concessions, playing a superficial role by mollifying rather than explicitly addressing the lower class. In the case of the library, for the reasons raised by Rosenbaum, it is harder to defend this perspective, for reasons which will be expanded upon in the next chapter. Even as members of the upper classes had limited need of the library’s resources, they benefitted by association with the library’s prestige, which they also helped to cultivate (e.g. as benefactors conferring their private collections of art, literature, and archival materials). However, stemming from its design and decoration as much as from these elite influences, the library’s cosmopolitanism functioned to serve the architect and artists as much the upper class.

In designing the Library, Charles Follen McKim capitalized on his proficiency for working in a cosmopolitan mode, in the process advancing a national architectural mode based on the measured, neoclassical forms of the Beaux Arts School. Somewhat ambivalent about his career path, McKim had studied at Harvard’s Scientific School before traveling to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts from 1867 to 1870. Like a generation of American architects, study abroad offered McKim formal training, as well as exposure to current trends and centuries of development. Instead of passively receiving outmoded European trends secondhand, training abroad allowed American architects such as McKim to actively engage these trends at the source; to confidently express both a certain maturation and vitality of American architectural practice. As Mosette Broderick has noted, “Architects trained abroad could bring their patrons into the world of contemporary Europe by drafting new designs in keeping with the latest work in Paris” and “interpretations of older European buildings calculated to give clients a sense of

fitting in with the greatness of the past through a sophisticated Americanization of a classic moment in European architecture.”24

On his semi-reluctant return to the United States in 1870, McKim worked briefly at the firm of the Henry Hobson Richardson before partnering with William Rutherford Meade and

(later) Stanford White in New York. In March of 1887, the year White joined the firm, McKim was awarded a contract to design the Boston Public Library.25 This commission was partly a product of his wife’s family’s connections, and partly the result of McKim Stanford & White’s demonstrated proficiency in the Italian Renaissance style, as in the Villard Houses, designed and built by White in 1882-4 in New York.26 McKim desired to return to Europe for inspiration, but would instead rely on previous travels to inform his preliminary design, potentially informed by the exteriors of the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve in Paris and Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini.

Alfred Hoyt Granger, then a student of H.H. Richardson, sought the professional advice of McKim in January 1888, just as McKim would have been beginning his work on the Boston

Public Library. In his 1913 memoir treating the life and work of Charles McKim, Granger recalled the advice he was given— advice quite similar to McKim’s own experience— which included two years of part-time study at the École des Beaux-Arts, significant travel in Italy

“carefully studying, measuring, and drawing out the great architectural triumphs of the older days,” and working for two to three years in a large American firm before moving into individual

24 Mosette Broderick, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 13-14.

25 In addition to his experience in Boston under Richardson, McKim married into the Appleton family, members of the Brahmin class. Although his marriage to Julia was cut short by her death in childbirth in January of 1887 after only a year and a half, the couple had lived for a time at her family’s home at 53 Beacon Street, and McKim would return here to work on his plans for the library.

26 Broderick, Triumvirate, 267.

practice.27 Such advice confirms the practical value McKim attributed to European artistic and architectural training and travel as a both prerequisite and springboard for effective American architectural practice.

Cosmopolitanism dominates not only the architectural design but also the decorative program of the library; it is reflected not only in the artists chosen, but in the profile of their individual assignments and in the form and content of their executed works. In her essay “Late

Nineteenth-Century American Painting: Cosmopolitan Concerns and Critical Controversies,” H.

Barbara Weinberg identifies two opposing currents in nineteenth-century American art: an early one, advocating fundamental independence from European influences, gradually giving way to another, which favors learning from Europe in order to achieve a comprehensive and suitable foundation for a national art.28 Her analysis of American artistic cosmopolitanism features an outline of skills American artists learned via formal European training, including, beyond form and technique, historical appreciation of Western artistic development and freedom to experiment and pursue art for its own sake. Within the context of the library’s decorative program, artists drew heavily upon their European training, working in an international style and favoring European source material. High regard for European artistic achievement resulted in a hierarchical distribution of the library’s decorative commissions which favored artists based on their proximity (geographically and stylistically) to this European ideal.

For what is arguably the library’s most choice commission, a series of murals decorating the grand staircase and second floor landing, McKim engaged the services of Pierre Puvis de

27 Alfred Hoyt Granger, Charles Follen McKim: a Study of His Life and Work. (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1913), 4-5.

28 H. Barbara Weinberg, “Late Nineteenth-Century American Painting: Cosmopolitan Concerns and Critical Controversies,” Archives of American Art Journal 49:1-2 (2010): 68.

Chavannes, the French Symbolist painter.29 Toward the end of the nineteenth century and his own career, Chavannes’ mixed reputation in Europe was improving, but he was particularly well-regarded by younger American artists such as Kenyon Cox and John La Farge who praised his modern sensibility, respectively citing his embrace of the fundamental flatness of his medium and the abstracted purity of his allegorical representations.30 His contribution was executed and shown in France to great acclaim before being shipped to Boston for installation. Securing works by artists of the caliber of Puvis de Chavannes (his only mural commission outside of France) would have carried special significance for the library’s decorative planners, who were willing to pay the artist the “unparalleled” amount of 250,000 Francs.31 This enthusiasm for a European artist’s involvement illustrates the one-sided nature of the European-American exchange, with

McKim and Augustus St. Gaudens more eager to secure Puvis de Chavannes’ participation than perhaps he was himself to be included.

After Puvis de Chavannes, American artists with strong European connections enjoyed the most prominent commissions, providing murals and sculpture which adorned functionally important library spaces, including special collections, the delivery room, Bates Hall (the reading room) and the library’s courtyard. John Singer Sargent, at the time one of the most internationally-known American artists, received an accordingly choice commission to produce a series of murals for the library’s Special Collections Hall, Edwin Austin Abbey completed his

29 Rafael Gaustavino, the Spanish architect, was engaged for his patented Tile Arch System, but this is primarily a structural contribution; Domingo Mora, a Spanish sculptor, carved the medallions set into the spandrels of the window arches.

30 Robert Goldwater, “Puvis de Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation,” The Art Bulletin 28:1 (March 1946): 40.

31 Teri Hensick, Kate Olivier and Gianfranco Pocobene, “Puvis de Chavannes’s Allegorical Murals in the Boston Public Library: History, Technique, and Conservation,” Journal for the American Institute of Conservation 36:1 (Spring 1997): 60.

Quest for the Holy Grail cycle for the delivery room, James Abbott McNeill Whistler was approached to do a mural for the Bates Hall reading room (though this was never realized), and

Frederick MacMonnies produced a statue of a Bacchante for McKim, which McKim intended to serve as a keystone for the library’s courtyard.

A third tier of American artists rounded out commissions for the library’s decorative program, filling in prominent but nevertheless lower-profile spaces (Augustus Saint-Gaudens,

Louis Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Kenyon Cox, Bela Lyon Pratt, John Elliott). All received training of some kind in Europe, many at the École des Beaux-Arts. Of these, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens played the most significant role, less by direct artistic contribution—here limited to the exterior bust of Minerva and carved seals of the

Commonwealth, city, and library above the main entrance—and more as the principal coordinator of the library’s decorative program. Daniel Chester French was commissioned to sculpt three sets of ceremonial bronze doors between the library’s vestibule and entrance hall, a contribution at once prominent and inconspicuous, as noted by at least one contemporary critic who praised their execution while lamenting the fact that they were difficult to fully appreciate in situ (i.e. always open). Each set consists of a pair of allegorical figures (music and poetry, knowledge and wisdom, truth and romance). On a similarly prestigious level, Augustus’ brother

Louis was called on to carve a pair of seated marble lions to flank the grand staircase and memorialize the Civil War service and sacrifice of members of the Second and Twentieth

Massachusetts Infantry regiments.

While both Eliott’s and Pratt’s contributions were, like their more nationally-known counterparts, inspired by cosmopolitan forms, skillfully executed, and favorably-received, neither achieved the same degree of recognition. As artists with primarily local reputations, they

received minimal national attention in press coverage of the library’s construction and early operation. In part, this is easily explained by the later completion date of their works, however, their relative obscurity in the context of the overall project additionally serves to emphasize the degree to which cosmopolitanism was pursued not purely for its own sake but in service to a greater narrative of national artistic achievement, a narrative largely accepted by the time these contributions were made (1901 and 1912, respectively). John Eliott was born in England, but married an American and Bostonian, Maud Howe, and lived and worked for a considerable period in the United States. His ceiling mural Triumph of Time required considerable and agonizing study in Europe, as detailed in the extensive correspondence between husband and wife during his sojourn.32 Bela Lyon Pratt had studied under Augustus Saint Gaudens and was a sculptor as well as professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1890s, when he was initially considered for what was ultimately Daniel Chester French’s commission. After Saint-

Gaudens’ died before completing a pair of groupings to flank the library entrance, Pratt was brought in to design and execute his own conception, Art and Science.

All of this cosmopolitan impetus—influencing architect, artists, and the social elite, came together shortly after the library finally opened its doors to the public, and is reflected in the form of an exclusive gala, held by McKim in honor of the artists’ collective achievement and the

Library’s commemorative Handbook. The gala, held after the library closed (early) for the evening on April 25, 1895, demonstrated how the library, as executed, also served the more exclusive needs of the assembled elite; a fashionable occasion to affirm cosmopolitan values, as recounted in the diary of Thomas Russell Sullivan:

32 Maud Howe Elliott, John Elliott: Portrait of an Artist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930).

There were two hundred guests, men and women, forty of whom came over from New York for the night. It was a splendid affair of brilliant jewels and costumes which can never be repeated, for the building now becomes the people’s palace, making further fashionable exclusion there impossible. An orchestra played on the landing of the marble staircase, up and down which the pretty women strolled in all their glory of satin, lace, and diamonds. It happened to be a very warm night, and through the open windows of the court the fountain flashed and sparkled, throwing the tallest jet almost to the roof. The Abbey and Sargent pictures overwhelmed us all.33

Public fascination with cosmopolitan values was also reflected in a publication designed to capitalize on the public’s interest in the ornate design and decoration of the library, Curtis and

Company’s Handbook of the New Public Library in Boston, compiled by Herbert Small. The handbook reproduced and explained intricate elements for visitors and enthusiasts. The scope and tone of the volume catered to middle and upper class interests, while advertisements throughout directly targeted this audience with an enticing array of luxury goods, including fine musical instruments, books and serials of local, national and international focus, foreign photographs, fine art, prints of the library, private and college-preparatory schools, Harvard

University, and furs. If not literally a ‘test of one’s culture’, association with and appreciation of the artistic dimension of the library lent cultural cachet to both established and aspiring members of the social elite.

Affluence was a significant factor fostering the general cosmopolitan culture of Boston— and its perceived position at the forefront relative to the rest of the nation—and was both a cause and consequence of the intensified cosmopolitan spirit in the late 19th century. Yet at the same time, while international connections had afforded a new generation of American architects and

33 Whitehill, Boston Public Library, 167-7. According to Noah Sheolah and the Boston Athenaeum, Sullivan’s great grandfather was a governor of Massachusetts and the first president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston Athenaeum, January 2012 http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/library/book-recommendations/athenaeum- authors/thomas-russell-sullivan 24

artists with the training necessary to pursue the “right pathway to a consummate art,” their aspirations to express cosmopolitanism, as well as those of their patrons, may be read as a potentially hobbling influence on the democratic values the library was meant to embody.34

34 Quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg. “Late Nineteenth-Century American Painting: Cosmopolitan Concerns and Critical Controversies,” 68. 25

CHAPTER 3

DEMOCRATIC VALUES

“The library ostensibly and self-consciously offered the same resources to everyone (serving the monolithic “people” of the façade inscription). In practice, however, the institution made different things available to different people and expected different outcomes of them. The library’s message for the individual patron differed depending on the patron’s relation to high culture. For those who had already achieved it, their familiarity with the library’s treasures of art and culture bestowed approval on their valuable acquisition; for those still on the way, the puzzle of the unfamiliar text, the unrecognized object or item, set out the challenge and recommended the individual effort necessary to acquisition.”35

The design and decoration of the Boston Public Library’s 1895 building reflected not only the cosmopolitan ideals of that era, but simultaneously and sometimes adversely, affected the democratic impulse of the burgeoning free library movement. Though well-established prior to the height of this movement, the occasion of the library’s expansion, in the form of the 1895 building, provided an opportunity to incorporate the movement’s democratic spirit through bold artistic choices, ultimately serving to immortalize the American public’s faith in public libraries as vital civic institutions at the close of the nineteenth century.

The free (municipally-supported) library concept spread steadily in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thanks to technological and social advances. In the introduction to their anthology on Gilded Age librarianship, Leonard Schlup and

Stephen Paschen attribute the remarkable growth of libraries during this period to the convergence of four key technological factors: scientific/technological advances (electrification, light, telephones), developments in publishing (faster/cheaper production and distribution of printed material), professionalization (founding of the American Library Association and the

35 Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 154. 26

advocacy of library luminaries), and rapid industrialization/urbanization.36 Socially, public libraries enjoyed broad community support by appealing to notions of self-improvement and self-actualization and as natural extensions of an emerging national public education system. By availing themselves of library services, all citizens might take steps to address an incomplete or inadequate education, thereby improving their own station. Furthermore, for those, like youths, considered among the most susceptible to the tempting “dangers of the street, the saloon, [and] the low amusements of the poor”, the library provided an accessible (and, it was hoped) edifying alternative.37

The Boston Public Library channeled the democratic spirit of the growing Free Library movement, expanding traditional notions of library access to suit the needs of an increasing number and variety of Bostonians. Importantly, it made the greatest strides toward this ideal through a series of innovations in approaches to library collections, services, and spaces.

Recognizing the value of a more literate populace, the Boston Public Library developed distinct circulating collections in tandem with dedicated reference and special collections. The decreasing cost of books, and unprecedented ease of acquiring them allowed for acquiring multiples of particular volumes, making it easier to supply growing public demand for the library’s collection. In addition to making it possible for the library to better supply existing demand, abundant availability of printed material allowed the library to become more responsive to public taste by meeting the public’s need for entertainment as well as enlightenment.

36 Leonard Schlup and Stephen H. Paschen, Librarianship in Gilded Age America, 2-3. In Massachusetts alone, seventy towns established their first public libraries between 1890 and 1895.

37 James M. Hubbard, “Are Public Libraries Public Blessings?” In Librarianship in Gilded Age America: An Anthology of Writings, 1868-1901, ed. Leonard C. Schlup and Stephen H. Paschen, 107-112. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2009), 108.

As with the library’s artistic offerings (as we will later see), the notion of accommodating lowbrow tastes in literature initially produced considerable anxiety, most frequently framed in terms of the move’s potential negative impact on children. Catering to the demands of an

‘uncultivated’ public, it was thought, would risk “[exposing] a hundred other children to the danger of forming a taste for the lowest class of novels.”38 Some individuals were willing to make concessions for popular material given requisite care in collection development, strict oversight and a strong reader’s advisory service. James M. Hubbard, a former employee of the

Boston Public Library (1875-1887) expressed this sentiment in his 1889 essay, “Are Public

Libraries Public Blessings?”:

Strictest control over the reading is absolutely necessary. The dime-novel, the sensational story, must be succeeded by one of a slightly higher grade, and if this process is rigidly carried out, possibly now and then a street boy, if he possesses exceptional abilities, may be brought to an intelligent appreciation of the classics of romance… to imagine that this same result could be produced by giving such a lad the free range of a great collection of novels, good, bad, and indifferent, is

simply the mark of ignorance of human nature.39

Despite such apprehensions, consensus gradually settled in favor of accommodating popular (if lower-class) taste for the greater purpose of promoting public literacy. This was no small ideological reversal for an institution whose founding gift was expressly given to further enlightenment and combat idleness; to, in the words of its chief benefactor, Joshua Bates: “save those, who, left to themselves, [would] waste their time in railroad literature, chiefly American novels.”40 Such a compromise, it should be noted, was not made for the library’s decorative program.

38 Hubbard, “Are Public Libraries Public Blessings?” 110.

39 Ibid., 109.

40 Ibid., 108. 28

In conjunction with collections-level innovations, the Boston Public Library pioneered the branch public library system, improving public access to resources by establishing a network of smaller libraries in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods across the city. To serve the needs of a growing populace, branch libraries opened beginning in 1870, with the East Boston branch, and followed by branches in South Boston, Brighton, and the South End within the decade.41 By the time the 1895 building opened, this network had expanded to include the both the North and West Ends, along with several smaller reading rooms and delivery stations.

The Boston Public Library reinforced democratic values through the provision of commonly-held public spaces commonly held and intended for all, as expressed most symbolically in the Bates Hall reading room, a single, generously proportioned room, lined with egalitarian tables where members of various classes might co-mingle in their individual pursuits of information. Responding to concerns that lower class citizens might feel uncomfortable rubbing elbows with members of the upper classes in a common reading room, Library Trustees emphasized that “the new building is built for the accommodation of all the citizens of Boston, without reference to the so-called ‘class’ or condition.”42 Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter address the alignment of this “promiscuous mingling” with Progressive Era reforms, noting how:

“bringing together individuals usually separated by neighborhood, the public space of the library allowed immigrants and the destitute to identify with their social betters, offering them examples of self-improvement and propriety necessary to their own upward mobility.”43

41 Each of these neighborhoods (least, perhaps, Brighton) was home to significant immigrant populations.

42 Whitehill, Boston Public Library, 155.

43 Thomas Augst and Kenneth E. Carpenter, Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 170.

Clearly secondary to the more pressing matters of advancing literacy and librarianship, it is hardly surprising that art in early public libraries was often perfunctory. Gradually, however, art would come to be recognized as appropriate and even desirable in public library spaces; ultimately proving ideal for communicating the library’s more lofty democratic ambitions. The

Boston Public Library received artwork through the munificence of the citizenry at various points immediately following its founding, however, these works were not actively acquired, nor so deliberately displayed as to approach the scale of the decorative program in the 1895 building.44 At the Boston Public Library’s Boylston Street location, for example, display of art was markedly more muted. In this regard, the haphazard approach to acquisition was almost certainly an underlying influence, but here also, art was downplayed by design. Weighing in, the

Boston Public Library’s 1865 Examining Committee considered the inclusion of artwork, both

“pictorial and plastic” to be “wholly inappropriate” and fundamentally distracting in reading rooms, stating that, while “Beautiful in themselves, they excite—nay, seem to demand— conversation and criticism.”45

An 1871 engraving by J.J. Harley published in the Boston weekly, Every Sunday,

“Reading-Room of the Boston Public Library” (fig. 39), illustrates a level of visual clutter the

Committee likely sought to avoid. Allowing for artistic license, which may be responsible for the convenient orientation of the framed prints which hang from each column, the overall impression of the space in the print is markedly different from its sparse equivalent in an undated, but likely

44 Among these, Walter Whitehill references portraits of Benjamin Franklin by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Joseph- Siffred Duplessis, William Wetmore Story’s Arcadian Shepherd Boy, and John Singleton Copley’s Charles I Demanding the Five Impeached Members of the House of Commons. Whitehill, Boston Public Library, 61, 93.

45 Whitehill, Boston Public Library, 93-94. They would go on to say that “Conversation, save what is absolutely necessary in the obtaining of books, is, of course, wholly inadmissible.”

later, photograph (fig. 40).46 The two sets of figures facing the salon-style hanging of prints between each window appear to be engaged in just such conversation or criticism, in contrast to the seated figures all around them absorbed in their reading. From the corresponding text, it is clear that the engraving is not intended as a historical or nostalgic view of the reading room but rather, as a contemporary view conveying the popularity and success of the “Boston notion” of public librarianship; evidence in support of the initiative to begin opening the library’s reading room on Sundays.47 It is unclear whether the state of the reading room in the print should be read as a temporary lapse in the enforcement of the Examining Committee’s position, delayed policy implementation, or a reflection of the Committee’s proscriptive nature.

In any case, the Committee’s position was fundamentally undermined in the design and decoration of the 1895 building, for although the newer reading room remained all but architecturally unadorned, the building’s overall artistic dimension introduced its own form of disruption. Scholars such as Henry Carrington Bolton, visiting from New York, strongly opposed the distracting spectacle the library as art created for library users:

The introduction of the much-lauded decorations by eminent artists is a great drawback to the undisturbed enjoyment of the privileges for which the building is primarily erected, the throngs of people who crowd the grand staircase to visit the splendid building are not content with gazing at the wall decorations by Abbey, Sargent and others, but must needs tramp through Bates Hall as well, clicking their heels on the stone floor throughout its entire length. One morning, as I sat at a table in the reading-room, I noted, within the space of one hour, a troop of eleven women tourists, two bands of school-girls personally conducted by their mistresses, besides scores of individual sight-seers of all ages, alone or in groups of varying numbers.48

46 Overhead electric lighting has replaced the prominent gas fixtures.

47 “Illustrations. Reading-Room of the Boston Public Library” Every Saturday, January 28, 1871, 78, 81. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030073921;view=1up;seq=80.

48 Whitehill, Boston Public Library, 175-176.

With his irritation squarely directed at the layperson—the women, girls, and tourists who regularly cycle through the reading room without yielding to its intended purpose—Bolton’s critique presupposes a hierarchy of legitimate library use that favors scholarly activity above casual library-going, and accords those engaged in the latter with a lesser sense of belonging.

More broadly, in the extreme, the intrusion of ‘outsiders,’ welcomed to the library in policy, and, emphatically, by design, was viewed as a threat to societal, and even public health: “fear of outsiders in the temple of culture—children and immigrants, the homeless and tourists—became outright fear of physical and moral contamination, as with the idea that books circulated in the slums would spread cholera to the suburbs, like pathogens of class break down.”49 Certainly, the library’s design and decoration was originally intended more for the tacit appreciation of library patrons than ogling by tourists and passersby; its broader appeal no doubt contributed to the library’s popularity while significantly compounding the problem of ‘excitement’ that the 1865

Examining Committee could have only begun to anticipate. Significant decoration was limited to select rooms and more neutral spaces; however, a curious public was inclined and entitled to explore and experience the whole.

Far from merely distracting library users, there is evidence to suggest that library design and decoration, as a whole, functioned to promote democratic values. In an oft cited passage from Mary Antin’s 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land, Antin recalls the impact of the

Boston Public Library on her as a young immigrant. Whereas Bolton points to constant onlookers as a major inconvenience, they enforce for Antin a sense of belonging which is enhanced by the overall splendor and dynamism of her surroundings:

49 Augst and Carpenter, Institutions of Reading, 171.

It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: Public Library – Built by the People – Free to All. Did I not say it was my palace? Mine, because I was a citizen; mine though I was born an alien; mine, though I lived on Dover Street. My Palace – Mine! I loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out. Groups of children hushed their chatter at the entrance, and skipped, whispering and giggling in their fists, up the grand stairway, patting the great stone lions at the top, with an eye on the aged policemen down below. Spectacled scholars came slowly down the stairs, loaded with books, heedless of the lofty arches that echoed their steps. Visitors from out of town lingered long in the entrance hall, studying the inscriptions and symbols on the marble floor. And I loved to stand in the midst of all this, and remind myself that I was there, that I had a right to be there, that I was at home there. All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books – I and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours.50

Especially key to this dynamism is the convergence of all manner of people: children, ladies, tourists, and scholars. Here, in sharp contrast to Henry Carrington Bolton, Antin delights and finds connection to all library-goers based on their common possession of such a “noble treasure house of learning,” identifying, in turn, with the curiosity, reverence, and studiousness each exhibits within the space.

In defense of the artistic aspect of the Boston Public Library and its contribution to overall library mission, Herbert Putnam, then head librarian (1895-1899), reinforced the intentionality behind its execution, stating that “there has been a definite and pronounced design to produce a work of art. Such a structure has in itself undoubted educational value… it represents chiefly a sort of apotheosis of the confidence which the American people have come

to feel in the public library as a branch of education.” 51 Accordingly, a deliberate and heightened

50 Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 341.

51 Whitehill. Boston Public Library, 176. 33

emphasis on art in the 1895 building served to promote the public library as a mature democratic and civic institution, both in 1890s Boston and America.

Taken as a whole, the decorative program of the library functions as Putnam asserts, promoting democratic values, yet examined individually, component works often fall short of this same ideal. Put another way, democratic values are advanced through the monumentality of the library’s design and decoration, even as they are frequently undermined through its cosmopolitanism. To recall Sally Promey’s words from the epigraph, expectations for viewers were variable according to a viewer’s level of cultural awareness; the decorative scheme promoted the ideals of high culture instead of making concessions for lower-class taste. Larger- scale aspects of the Boston Public Library’s decorative program –particularly the idealized sculpture and mural paintings proclaiming a contemporary (and sustainable) American golden age—quickly ran aground of the shifting societal attitudes regarding gender, class, and religion at the turn of the twentieth century. Public and critical reactions to MacMonnie’s Bacchante,

Abbey’s Quest for the Holy Grail, and Sargent’s Triumph of Religion revealed deeper disparities between the homogenous society put forward by high culture and the diversity of Bostonians’ lived-experience.

Frederick MacMonnies’ sculpture Bacchante and Infant Faun (fig. 43, 44), intended as a last-minute addition to round out the building’s courtyard (fig. 45), would instead ignite controversy surrounding the appropriate representation of women in public art. Associated, in title and attribute, with Greco-Roman mythology, and sufficiently cosmopolitan (to the extent that a replica was desired, and attained, by the Luxembourg Museum by the French

Government), MacMonnies’ statue nevertheless invited protest by some members of Boston

society who found it at odds with the supposedly cultivated and enriching atmosphere of its immediate surroundings.

Julia Rosenbaum’s essay “Displaying Civic Culture: The Controversy over Frederick

MacMonnies’ Bacchante” posits that opposition to the statue was not an automatic response to its determinedly unapologetic nudity, but rather symptomatic of a larger conflict seated in “deep anxiety over changing identities and shifting hierarchies within the city.”52 Fueling this power struggle was the brazen and ambiguous quality of the Bacchante figure itself, which was problematically “[distanced] from the safe haven of the idealized world”.53 In not conforming to the traditional late-nineteenth century standard for female representation—i.e. by eschewing allegorical association—MacMonnies’ Bacchante promoted, or at the very least permitted, an

“undesirable” view of womanhood, female sexuality and motherhood.54 Women—like libraries—however beautiful, were expected to be “[repositories] for higher virtues.”55

The statue overcame an initial round of opposition when it was accepted by the Board of

Trustees, but sustained a blow when it was rejected by the city’s art commission. Supporters of the Bacchante, with the advocacy and expert opinion of Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester

French, succeeded not only in reviving the issue with the commission, but in advancing the debate to include a private, and subsequently public viewing of the work in situ (November 14-

52 Julia Rosenbaum, "Displaying Civic Culture: The Controversy over Frederic MacMonnies' ‘Bacchante,’" American Art 14, no. 3 (2000): 43-44.

53 Rosenbaum, “Displaying Civic Culture,” 52.

54 Ibid., 51-52.

55 Richard Guy Wilson, “Presence of the Past,” in The American Renaissance (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1976), 46.

16), whereby it was allowed to stay by a unanimous vote.56 Smart points out that the celebratory headlines (e.g. “Boston’s Gay Bacchante Finally Accepted on the Ground that Figure Is Not That of an Intoxicated Person… No one in the slightest degree under the influence of wine would possibly assume so difficult and well-balanced a position”) expressed the relief of the majority, who had supported the statue all along, but so incensed and mobilized the vocal minority

(including prominent leaders of the city’s clergy, universities, and social organizations) that when the statue was moved into seasonal storage on November 30, it did not return the following

spring, or for that matter, for nearly a century. 57 The original Bacchante was reluctantly returned to McKim and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the summer of 1896.58

One reporter expressed this loss as a blow to the harmony of the design: “It is idle to lament the Bacchante now, yet one cannot but remember with regret how ideally it was suited to its place in the court of the library. It gave the most delicately right note of the joy of life which was needed to light the intellectual character which marks the court both in architecture and in ideal.”59 This tension between intellect and joie de vivre in art recalls the earlier struggle to define the library’s role with regard to providing books for instruction or entertainment.

Edwin Austin Abbey’s subject for the Delivery Room mural cycle, King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail, carries egalitarian connotations; however, his style catered more effectively to

56 Mary Smart, A Flight with Fame: the Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) (Madison CT: Sound View Press, 1996), 169.

57 Smart, A Flight with Fame, 170.

58 The Bacchante’s exit was described to be “very like a funeral.” According to The New York Times: “The Bacchante was borne from her secluded chamber to the main hallway and laid carefully—which gave the effect of tenderly—in a long, strong box. The cover was nailed down, and then some burly teamsters acted as bearers, and slowly carried her out to the waiting truck.” Ibid., 173.

59 Ibid., 172.

cosmopolitan than to popular taste. On account of the library’s closed stacks system, the delivery room was an important destination for all patrons seeking to consult particular volumes in the course of their inquiries. Here, materials were requested, subsequently to be retrieved (via an ingenious system of pneumatic tubes, cables and rails)60 and delivered by library staff to the waiting patrons at their indicated tables in the Bates Hall reading room. Viewed within the broader context of the room’s function as the origin of an intellectual journey, Abbey’s choice of the story of King Arthur appears apt, as recognized by at least one critic: “Is not the search for the Holy Grail by the pure heart most appropriate? Does it not express the noble and long preserving study and self-denial of all those who by night or day come to this room to find the object of their search?”61 Some critics, however, took issue with aspects of the cycle’s cosmopolitan elements.

Abbey was initially tasked with producing a representation of a Shakespearean theme or another motif of his own choosing. This flexibility afforded Abbey ample opportunity to pursue one of his primary artistic strengths: rendering scenes—largely drawn from historical events or literature—using striking and historically-accurate detail. The anglophile’s ultimate choice to paint scenes from Arthurian lore angering some critics, who responded negatively to the English and esoteric aspect of his work. One critic dismissed the King Arthur narrative as little more than

“an Inappropriate Anglicism,” finding Abbey’s murals to be a missed opportunity for highlighting the contribution of Boston’s own literary elite: “Why was it necessary to go overseas for subjects of inspiration? Boston’s particular pet pride is her extensive production of poets and orators and literary men generally. Why should not the decorations of her great library

60 “The Boston Public Library” in the Nov. 9 1895 issue of Scientific American details these inner-workings.

61 "A Criticism of Boston's Library," The Watchman 76, no. 28 (July 11, 1895): 16. 37

do honor to the men who did honor to the town?”62 The same critic was quick to praise the technical execution of Abbey’s work, but unyielding in their opinion that the subject matter was not only highly irrelevant but determinedly uninspiring as chosen: “it seems absurd and ridiculous to us that a great institution of learning, situated in the cradle of American liberty, should find no more suitable decoration than these studies that commemorate a period of ignorance, oppression and superstition in a foreign land.”63

A second critic was harsher in expressing displeasure over the perceived lack of a homiletic dimension to the murals:

King Arthur and his knights, while to a degree legendary beings, were still men, and men controlled by earthly longings and passions, and so it is not easy to consider Mr. Abbey’s frieze as a lesson, and to most it will always remain a mere story. It will always be one of those things that require a printed explanation and an outline diagram pasted on cardboard and left in the chair or on the table by the last inquiring body who dimly imagined that there possibly was some purpose in the artist’s mind when he introduced into a modern public library—an American one, too—such scenes as these.64

Seen in this instance as antiquated, base, and un-American, the King Arthur Legend was judged to poorly convey both the modern spirit and lofty ideals of the American Renaissance to ordinary people.

Further tipping the scales in favor of cosmopolitanism and against ‘the people’, it is worth noting that Abbey’s signature mode, history painting, had already peaked in popularity in

62 “An Inappropriate Anglicism,” Puck 37, no. 943 (April 3, 1895): 103.

63 Ibid. Abbey’s murals, on account of their source material, readily encapsulated tensions between the local and international. Local figures and contributions, such as the first critic describes are tellingly diminished in favor of a more cosmopolitan roster. A handful of names are recorded on the ceiling of the entrance hall but these hardly compare to the parade of Western thinkers recorded on the building’s façade.

64 “The Boston Public Library (II),” The American Architect and Building News 49, no. 1020 (July 13, 1895): 70.

the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast to Puvis de Chavanne’s modern classicism, Abbey’s murals deliberately eschewed the modern and indulged in the textures and essence of the medieval era. Elisa Tamarkin has situated Abbey as one of few American history painters still working in the late nineteenth century, arguing that his conservative or indulgent stubbornness produced an art that was ultimately irrelevant and disconnected from contemporary life wherein

“immigration, class stratification, and rapid internal growth had dissolved the sense of a shared civic order.”65 For Tamarkin, the only modern element of Abbey’s work was his

Cosmopolitanism—an element which did more to serve the needs of the elite than the people at large—subjecting the latter to “a tyranny of high culture, to a single and codified aesthetic standard made current in the grand civic gestures of the rich.”66 As we have seen, some criticism of Abbey’s murals hinged on the perceived intelligibility of their message for a lower-class audience.

The designs for Sargent’s Triumph of Religion series (fig. 49, 50), whose themes constituted a departure from the success of his well-known society portraiture, grappled with the development of Western religion, seeking to form a symbolic iconography through a series of panels ranging from the Pagan gods through the Synagogue to the Church. The location of this highly specialized cycle, a floor above Puvis de Chavannes’ encyclopedic allegorical figures and

Abbey’s broad allegory of information-seeking, would have enforced Sargent’s already elevated subject matter. One critic wrote: “Mr. Sargent … selected as his theme a subject than which none can be more lofty and ennobling [sic]. The demand made upon the mind and soul, and still

65 Elisa Tamarkin, “The Chestnuts of Edwin Austin Abbey: History Painting and the Transference of Culture in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Prospects 24 (Oct. 1999): 419.

66 Ibid., 433.

more upon the imagination, in trying to grapple with the meanings of religion is the most strenuous that can be made.”67 Coming up the stairs from the second floor loggia, one would come face to face with the Dogma of the Redemption: Trinity; Crucifix and Frieze of Angels and look behind to see the The Israelites Oppressed lunette and Frieze of Prophets on the opposing wall. As the public access point for the library’s special collections at the uppermost level of the library, Sargent’s murals could hardly have been associated with anything more elite.

In keeping with the American Renaissance tendency to borrow liberally from the civilizations of antiquity, Sargent traced humanity’s relation to religion through the visual forms of Egyptian, Assyrian, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. Like Frederick

MacMonnies, Sargent did not simply copy the classical visual vocabulary of the past, but reinterpreted it in manner which was altogether more modern and American. Although praise for the murals was generally high, Sally Promey has commented on this same (reversed) modern sensibility as but one reason for its limited popularity beyond the second decade of the twentieth century. She writes: “abstraction (Sargent’s mode for the ancient, the violent, the ritualistic) increasingly allied itself with the ‘modern’ and ‘advanced,’ while late-nineteenth century naturalism (Sargent’s mode for the contemporary and ‘progressive’ took on associations with the

‘conventional’ and ‘traditional.’”68 As with Abbey, dissonance between style and the zeitgeist hindered some of the work’s appeal for contemporary viewers.

Because Sargent installed his murals in several phases, they were not, at the outset, particularly controversial. This would change, however, with the 1919 addition of his panels depicting allegorical figures of Synagogue (fig. 51), and The Church (fig. 52). Originally

67 “The Boston Public Library (II),” 71.

68 Sally Promey, Painting Religion in Public, 205.

intended to flank a representation of the Sermon on the Mount—thereby completing the cycle’s overarching celebration of the modern western ideal of personal religious autonomy—these panels instead invited accusations of anti-Semitism, prompted public outcry and political action

(including legislation to seize the panels by eminent domain), and were the target of vandalism, to the extent that the project, as visualized, was never fully completed.69

In his (limited) personal defense of these representations, Sargent would fall back on iconographic precedent, a point which was criticized on account of the unfortunate impression created and enforced by the incomplete mural cycle. Promey describes the incident as a reflection not of “[Sargent’s] unique personal prejudice against the Jews, but a largely unexamined appropriation of a wider cultural ambivalence.”70 This cultural insensitivity was, to borrow a phrase from Coleman Silbert, who proposed the bill against the murals, contrary to the

“broad spirit of Americanism” –an affront to the multicultural reality of a Boston that the library was meant to acculturate, educate and inspire.71

Expressing the fundamentally democratic impetus of the Free Library Movement artistically proved challenging against the backdrop of rapid social change in Boston. Whereas the library as an institution pursued this ideal proactively through its collections and services, artists had greater difficulty reconciling competing demands of higher and lower class constituencies.

Monumentality—in scale and vision—enabled the Boston Public Library’s 1895 building to advance, seemingly paradoxically, both cosmopolitan and democratic ideals at the turn of the

69 Sally Promey, Painting Religion in Public, 177.

70 Ibid., 207.

71 Ibid., 201.

century. Cosmopolitan values motivated the artists and architect to produce, and elite society to demand, an opulent and unified work. The library’s extensive decorative program and luxurious interior, by virtue of being open to all and held in common, simultaneously proclaimed the intrinsic value and belonging of all Bostonians and served as a vehicle which allowed the elite to reinforce and project their values onto the masses. The democratic values attributed to the institution itself and evident in aspects of the decorative program (particularly its scale) have ultimately outlasted the pervasive cosmopolitan influence which was so strong in the late nineteenth century, allowing the library to gradually and more closely represent what it was always intended to be: a ‘palace for the people

42 ILLUSTRATIONS

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