Henry Bacon (November 28, 1866 – February 17, 1924), an American Beaux-Arts architect, is best remembered for his severe Greek Doric Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (built 1915–1922), which was his final project.
Education and early career
Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois to father civil engineer Henry Bacon and mother Elizabeth Kelton Bacon, both of Massachusetts. Bacon was largely raised in Wilmington, N.C., where his father settled down and served as a government engineer in charge of the Cape Fear River improvements. At age 15, Henry Bacon was sent north to Boston's Chauncey Hall School. In 1884 he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but left within a year to launch an architectural career in the office of Chamberlin & Whidden in Boston as a draftsman. Bacon was soon hired into the office of famed McKim, Mead & White in New York City, the best-known American architectural firm of its time.
While at McKim, Mead & White (MMW), Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, Charles McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Fair in Chicago, where MMW was at work designing certain buildings for the World's Fair.
In 1897, Bacon left the office of (MMW) to found, with a younger MMW architect James Brite, a new partnership Brite and Bacon Architects, where Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Henry Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library, the Hall of History for the American University at Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences. The partnership was selected to build two private residences in 1897, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, NC. The "La Fetra Mansion" was designed and built by Henry Bacon, and published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's Greek and Roman architectural predilections. His simple, austere, elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions gave rise to a feeling of presence of divininy, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection. While the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, NJ bears Bacon's signature style, the Georgian Mansion "Laurel Hill" was most probably designed by Brite.
During 1897 , Bacon was approached by a group which was organized with the intent to raise public and private funds to build a monument in Washington DC to memorialize President Lincoln. Bacon began his conceptual, artistic, and architectural design for the Lincoln Memorial that year, and continued with significant passion in the effort, even though the funding for the building of the project did not materialize until years later. The Brite and Bacon Partnership dissolved in 1902 partly resulting from Brite's disagreement over Bacon's passion and countless unpaid time-spent on the Lincoln Memorial. After that, Bacon practiced under his own name with extraordinary success, building a very large number of famous public buildings and monuments, until his death in 1924. Brite also practiced alone successfully until his retirement in 1930, designing homes for a large and wealthy clientele.
Bacon's connection with McKim, his winning of the Rotch Scholarship, and other circumstances which brought him intimately into the sphere of Greek culture, contributed toward the formation of his architectural predilections. He was a devoted adherent of the theory of Greek architecture and his work is profoundly marked by that influence. If his technique was somewhat austere, the lofty divine elegance and spirituality sufficed to win him such laurels as few architects have enjoyed during their life time. The history of American Architecture records no more impressive occasion than that on May 18, 1923, when Bacon stood, under the evening sky, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and received from President Harding, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest distinction it was in the power of his fellow craftsmen to confer. There had been only 6 architects in the history of the Institute, to whom the Gold Medal was awarded. Henry Bacon was the only award that was preceded by an all day National Parade, celebration, and a ceremony to dedicate his creation as the National Shrine, and the only award that was presented by the presiding American President.
Union Square Savings Bank, New York (
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Mature work
Aside from the Lincoln Memorial, the list of Bacon's significant and well-loved monuments and public buildings is very long. Among the long list, are the Danforth Memorial Library in Paterson, New Jersey; the Train Station in the style of an Italian villa in Naugatuck, Connecticut; the Observatory, Olin Library, the Eclectic House, many dormitories and other buildings at Wesleyan University; the Union Square Savings Bank, New York City; his Ambrose Swasey Pavilion (1916) is one of the architectural highlights of Exeter, New Hampshire; Chelsea Savings Bank, Chelsea, Mass; Halle Brothers Department Store, Cleveland, Ohio; Waterbury General Hospital, Waterbury, Conn; National City Bank, New Rochelle, NY; Citizens & Manufacturers National Bank, Waterbury, Conn; First Congregational Church, Providence, RI; Gates for the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Woodmere High School, Woodmere, NY; Public Bath, Brooklyn, NY;.....
Program from AIA Gold Medal Award honoring architect Henry Bacon, 1923
Bacon was very active as a designer of monuments and settings for public sculpture. He designed the Court of the Four Seasons, for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. He designed the World War I memorial at Yale University. He collaborated with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the Sen. Mark Hanna Monument in Cleveland, Ohio, and with Daniel Chester French on numerous monuments, notably the Lincoln Memorial's pensive colossal Lincoln. The Olin Library, one of Bacon's buildings at Wesleyan University, houses many of Bacon's documents and blueprints of the Lincoln Memorial.
Architect Henry Bacon rarely found time for private residences. There are two known residential projects that are clearly his work. First is the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, New Jersey, designed and built under the firm Brite & Bacon from 1897 to 1900. Bacon skillfully integrated into a residential setting many of his signature Greek Revival and Roman Renaissance elements and proportions. The resulting elegance, peace, tranquility, and sense of divine protection exuding from the comfort and functionality of a private residence, is astoundingly masterful. The La Fetra Mansion was commissioned by industrialist Harold A. La Fetra of the Royal Baking Powder Company, which later merged with RJR Nebisco. The La Fetra Mansion became the residence of publisher Harry W. McGraw in the 1920s, and then the Reeds (of the Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, New Jersey) family residence.
The other Henry Bacon private residence is the Chesterwood House, which Bacon designed for his friend and famed sculptor Daniel Chester French as his summer home and studio at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Daniel Chester French summer home's exterior bears similarity to Bacon's earlier private residence, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, NJ.
In May, 1923 President Warren G. Harding presented Bacon with the American Institute of Architects's Gold Medal, making him the 6th recipient of this honor.
A Liberty Ship of the US Navy was built and named after architect Henry Bacon: SS Henry Bacon, commissioned on November 11, 1942. The ship's captain and crew served during World War II with the utmost honor and heroism, many sacrificing their own lives to deliver 19 Norwegian refugees to safety under heavy attacks from 23 German torpedo bombers. SS Henry Bacon downed at least 5 of the German bombers before it succumbed to the huge number of torpedoes dropped by the 23 bombers.
Henry Bacon_Summit, NJ 1901
Architectural settings, bases and exedra for sculpture
Bacon died of cancer in New York City, and is buried at Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington, North Carolina.
During World War II a Liberty ship was named after him.
Resources
- The American Institute of Architects
- The American Academy of Arts & Letters
- Thomas,Christopher, the Lincoln Memorial and its Architect
- Thomas, Christopher, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life, 2002
- The Olin Library, Wesleyan University
- Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, America's Monuments, unpublished manuscript
- Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor, The Preservation Press, Washington D.C., 1976
- Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, 1980
- Tolles, Bryant and Carolyn, New Hampshire Architecture: An Illustrated Guide, New Hampshire Historical Society, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1979
- Wilkinson, Burke, and David Finn, photographs, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego 1985
- Wilson, Richard Guy, The AIA Gold Medal, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1984
See also
External links
