Henry Hobson Richardson
American architect
1838 CE to 1886 CE
Henry Hobson Richardson (September 29, 1838 – April 27, 1886) is a prominent American architect who designs buildings in Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities.
The style he popularizes is named for him: Richardsonian Romanesque.
Along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture".
(O'Gorman, James F. (1991).
Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865-1915.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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The William Watts Sherman House, a notable house in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by American architect H. H. Richardson and built in 1875-1876, with later interiors by Stanford White, is generally acknowledged as one of Richardson's masterpieces, and the prototype for what later will become known as the Shingle Style in American architecture.
The house is two and a half stories in height and basically rectangular, about fifty-three feet by eighty-one feet in dimensions, with a porte-cochere on the east facade, and two principal entrances on the west.
Its first story is faced in pink granite ashlar, with higher stories of brick, shingle, and half-timbered stucco, diamond-panel windows grouped in long, horizontal bands, and five massive red brick chimneys.
Trim materials include reddish sandstone and brownstone.
The roof is steeply gabled, with a broad single gable in front and multiple sharp gables to the rear, all originally shingled in wood.
Its interior organizes clusters of rooms about a spacious central stair hall.
Boston's current Trinity Church complex—its former site on Summer Street having burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872—is erected under the direction of Rector Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), one of the best-known and most charismatic preachers of his time.
The church and parish house have been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and construction has taken place from 1872 to 1877, when the complex is consecrated.
Situated on Copley Square in Back Bay, Trinity Church is the building that establishes Richardson's reputation and is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower.
This style will soon be adopted for a number of public buildings across the United States.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens's monument to Admiral David Farragut (1881, Madison Square Garden, New York), the base of which is designed by Stanford White, is the most important work of his early career.
Working with La Farge, Saint-Gaudens creates two caryatids for a fireplace in Cornelius Vanderbilt II's residence in 1881.
Born in 1848 in Dublin to a French father and an Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens had moved with his family to New York City when he was an infant and at age thirteen had been apprenticed to a cameo cutter.
He had earned his living at this craft, while studying at night at Cooper Union (1861-65) and the National Academy of Design (1865-66) in New York.
In 1867, he had traveled to Paris and been admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts.
Along with Olin Levi Warner and Howard Roberts, Saint-Gaudens had been one of the first Americans to study sculpture in Paris.
Late in 1870 he had set out for Rome, where, still supporting himself by cameo cutting, he had worked for two years copying famous antique statues on commission.
He had also started to create his first imaginative compositions during this period.
After 1875, he had settled in New York, where he has befriended and collaborated with a circle of men who form the nucleus of an American artistic renaissance: the group includes the architects Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White, and Charles Follen McKim and the painter John LaFarge.