J18 M212 909M

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

MEMORIAL MEETING

IN HONOR OF
THE LATE

CHARLES FOLLEN McKlM

HELD AT
THE NEW THEATRE
NEW YORK
NOVEMBER 23, 1909

PRIVATELY PRINTED
NEW YORK

MEMORIAL MEETING

IN HONOR OF
THE LATE

CHARLES FOLLEN McKlM

HELD AT
THE NEW THEATRE
NEW YORK
NOVEMBER 23, 1909

PRIVATELY PRINTED
NEW YORK

THIS MEMORIAL MEETING WAS HELD
UNDER THE AUSPICES
OF THE
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN
AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME
NEW YORK CHAPTER OF THE AMERICAN
INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS
FACULTY OF FINE ARTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS
BROOKLYN INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
MCDOWELL ASSOCIATION
MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY
NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY
NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MURAL PAINTERS
SOCIETY OF BEAUX ARTS ARCHITECTS
ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

MEMORIAL MEETING IN HONOR OF
THE LATE
CHARLES FOLLEN McRIM

MR. GEORGE B. POST
The members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the National Academy of Design, the American Acad
emy in Rome, the New York Chapter of the American
Institute of Architects, the Faculty of Fine Arts of
Columbia University, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters,
the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Mc
Dowell Association, the Municipal Art Society, the
National Sculpture Society, the National Society of
Mural Painters, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects,
and the Architectural League of New York, have called
this meeting in honor of the late Charles Follen McKim.
Were it not that I am to have the honor of introducing
distinguished orators, far better qualified than I to speak
of his character and career, I might well tell you how,
by distinguished ability, great attainments, sterling
worth, singular and insistent devotion to whatever he
undertook, enthusiasm for the good and beautiful and
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hatred of sham, combined with a courteous consideration
for all, he has won the devoted affection of his fellows
and a dominating influence in the profession which he
loved. He won the respectful admiration of the com
munity; his genius has stamped an imprint on the art of
a continent. His life-work was not without public recog
nition. He was a Master of Arts of Bowdoin and Har
vard University, Doctor of Letters of Columbia Uni
versity, Doctor of Laws of the Pennsylvania University,
National Academician, Member of the Academy di
San Lucca of Rome, twice President of the American
Institute of Architects, and Honorary Member of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, whose golden
medal he has received. He was an early member of and
deeply interested in the Mendelssohn Glee Club, and it
is very appropriate that the club should open these cere
monies by a song.
ANTHEM
Great is Jehovah the Lord .... Schubert-Liszt
The Mendelssohn Glee Club

no

HON. JOSEPH H. CHOATE
We have assembled in this wonderful hall to-day, at
the combined invitation of all the organizations for the
promotion of art in New York, to pay a tribute of re
spect and affection to a great artist, a noble gentleman, a
self-sacrificing and public-spirited citizen, and the recog
nized leader for many years of a powerful and brilliant
profession. I deem it a signal privilege and honor, as a
lifelong friend of Mr. McKim, to have been asked by
this great body of his professional colleagues and dis
ciples to address this interested and sympathetic com
pany of his admirers. Interested and sympathetic I
know you must all be, for it was impossible to come into
contact with Mr. McKim without loving and honoring
him, or to be even the most casual observer of his work
without some appreciation and admiration of that.
We have all known him in the zenith of his fame —
long recognized at home and abroad as the foremost of
American architects — creating in rapid succession build
ing after building, public and private, of singular dignity,
simplicity, and beauty; surrounded by all the signs of
affluence and luxury, consulted as the leading authority
on all matters of taste and art, with all sorts of honors
and distinctions heaped upon him, and yet always as
simple as a child, as modest and gentle as a woman —
shunning publicity and shocked at all ostentation.
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It would be interesting to know from what beginnings
all this greatness, this gentleness, this instinct for beauty,
came. Some day I hope his life will be written by some
competent hand.
Recently there were placed in my hands some letters
of his to his father, written in his twentieth year — prob
ably before any person present here to-day Had any
knowledge of him — which seemed to me to shed much
light on the formation of his manly and beautiful char
acter. We know something of the father and the mother,
too — a sturdy abolitionist and a famous Quaker beauty.
It was from her, no doubt, that he got his striking grace
and delicacy of feature. They were both as brave and
fearless as they were plain and simple in life and manner.
To show their faith by their works, they accompanied
the widow of John Brown to Virginia to bring home his
mangled body, which was to lie moldering in the ground
while his soul went marching on.
The letters are from Cambridge in the summer and
fall of 1866, where the boy was searching in vain in the
vacation for a teacher to coach him in chemistry and
mathematics to enable him to enter the Lawrence Scien
tific School in the Mining Department. Mining engi
neering was what he was bent upon, with no more idea
of becoming an architect than of studying divinity.
The Quaker discipline and spirit is stamped upon
every line of his letters. They are addressed to "Dear
Home," and they reveal on every page the simplicity,
the earnestness, the narrow means and self-denial of that
home and of the Writer. Simplicity, quietness, self-
restraint — were not these his guiding motives all through

life? Are they not the very things that the name of
McKim, Mead & White stands for still? Truly the boy
was father of the man. He uses the Quaker style and
vernacular : "Father, does thee think I had better come
home to Thanksgiving, or will it be spending too much ?
I can wait till January if thee thinks it best," but "Do
send mother to see me" is his constant refrain. "Dear
mother, thee must come!" His prevailing thought
seems to have been how best to ease the burden of his
education on the lightly furnished family purse. What
he seems to have intended was one year in the Scientific
School and then two years in Paris— not at all at the
Beaux Arts, but in the School of Mines, where the edu
cation- for his life's calling would be cheaper and better.
The spur of necessity was the goad to his ambition, as it
always has been to most Americans who succeed. Evi
dently he had no love for mathematics or mining, but he
could toil terribly even at that. What it was that in one
short year at Cambridge roused in his soul the dormant
love of art and passion for beauty we cannot tell. But
kindled they were, and at the end of the year he went
straight to Paris and to the Beaux Arts to study archi
tecture and then to travel as long as he could and feast
his soul on all the wonderful and beautiful buildings
which abound in France and Italy. And at last he comes
home, fully equipped for the arduous and fascinating
labors that were to fill and crown the thirty years of his
successful and brilliant career. In architecture, as in
every other profession, opportunity counts for much, and
he found a golden opportunity awaiting him.
When Lincoln at Gettysburg, in the middle of the
war, said, "This nation under God shall have a new birth
[711

of freedom," even he perhaps little dreamt of the mar
velous growth and development which that new birth
should usher in. Not only was slavery to be abolished
and the Union to be rebuilt upon imperishable founda
tions, but upon these was to arise a wholly new America,
of a power and grandeur unknown before, and pregnant
with a progress and prosperity never approached by any
nation in the same period of time. The national energy
and enterprise were to expand and spring forward by
leaps and bounds. A really new people, fired by the
stimulus of success in a great war on which the salvation
of the nation was at stake, were to grapple with the over
whelming problem of national expansion. New cities
and States were to be founded and the old ones rebuilt,
and art and architecture especially were to contribute
to this development as they had never done before.
Some of you are old enough to remember how New
York looked at the close of the Civil War. From the
Battery to Forty-second Street it was covered with
buildings in the construction of which stability and util
ity had been consulted, but very rarely beauty at all.
Architecture was at a very low ebb, and architects were
at a decided discount. Scattered through the city there
were many good churches and some good public buildings,
and there were two actual gems which still exist to chal
lenge admiration — St. Paul's Chapel and our delightful
old City Hall, which has, I believe, but one blemish, that
while all the rest of the building is of beautiful marble,
the rear wall was of brown stone, it being thought in
1795 that nobody would get so far up-town as to see it.
But these two noble examples had been so far forgotten
and overlooked that our new Court-House, hideous in
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its composition as in its history, and the new Post-Office,
another horror, were built right over against them to
hide them from view ; and at tlie other end of the city the
grim Croton reservoir frowned upon us, on the very spot
where the New Library now lights up the whole sur
rounding region.
But for the great fire of London, which laid waste a
whole city for him to rebuild, Sir Christopher Wren
would probably never have been heard of except as the
worthy but obscure professor of astronomy at Oxford.
No other architect in modern history had such an oppor
tunity as that. But McKim and his contemporaries, dis
ciples, and followers had their opportunity, too, when it
fell to their hands to reconstruct our somewhat ugly and
obstinately commonplace city with its long rows of plain
and uniform brownstone fronts, and adorn it with so
many dignified and beautiful structures which we now
take pleasure in showing to strangers.
The architects of the last thirty years have not only
built for us a noble city, but have raised their own pro
fession into a brotherhood which almost outranks all the
others in efficiency and utility.
When McKim came home in 1872 to offer his services
to his countrymen as an architect of recognized quali
fications, only a very few of the many societies which
have been united in inviting you here to-day to do honor
to his memory had come into existence. The Metropoli
tan Museum of Art, which heads the list, had but just
been founded, and was leading a precarious existence,
with no idea of the possibility of its ever attaining its
present splendid position.
I shall not in this presence undertake to draw any com-
[93

parison between him and any other of his brethren, or to
measure or analyze his merits. I shall leave all that to
his professional brethren. I only know that, by common
consent of them all, he was for years recognized, ad
mired, and honored as their leader and master ; that many
of the chief ornaments of this and other cities are his
personal work, or that of the firm of which he was the
head and moving spirit; and that not only in his own
country, but in England and in Italy, the highest author
ities in art have selected him to receive their special
honors. And how modestly and meekly he bore all those
accumulating honors ! I remember when he came to
London in 1903, when at the very top of his profession,
to receive the Royal Gold Medal for services to archi
tecture the world over, how modestly and timidly he
bore himself. He was really all of a tremble, and noth
ing would do but that Mr. Henry White and I, who had
been his friends for many years, must stand by him
through what he regarded as a terrible ordeal, and so
we held up his arms. And when it was all over, ancT he
began to receive the congratulations of his friends from
home, he cabled back : "Thanks ! many thanks ! but I still
wear the same hat !" And that was the beauty of it and
of him. No matter what happened, no matter what he
achieved in the way of success and fame, he always wore
the same hat — his head never swelled; he carried it all
off with absolute Quaker simplicity. It required all his
early training to bear meekly the flood of applause and
adulation which, with many men, would have called for
a hat of colossal proportions.
When he took into his hands the British Gold Medal,
he said that he accepted it as an honor due not to him-
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self, but to his profession in America, whose representa
tive he was proud to be, and I am sure that he would not
be content to-day if we failed to recognize the encourage
ment which he received from those who went before him,
and the constant aid and support of those who shared his
labors and his triumphs. It is impossible to-day to for
get his indebtedness to Richardson and Hunt, those two
brilliant masters and examples to whom he was proud to
declare his allegiance and loyalty. It was in Richard
son's office that he began his professional life, and al
though few traces of the influence of that distinguished
forerunner are visible in his work, he never ceased to be
grateful to him for smoothing his first steps. And work
ing side by side in the same city with Hunt, that ardent
and intrepid spirit whom he cheerfully recognized so long
as leader and chief, it was impossible but that each
should give much to each other— much aid, much en
couragement, and much inspiration. Let us not for
get that Richardson and Hunt led and blazed the
way in which McKim so modestly and triumphantly
followed. Another important factor in McKim's life-work was
the founding and maintenance of the professional firm
in which the names and labors of Mr. White and Mr.
Mead were indissolubly linked with his own. For more
than twenty-five years they were like brothers, brain to
brain and heart to heart, sharing each other's labors and
designs and triumphs. It was impossible often to tell
where McKim's work ended and the others' began, or
how much of any given piece of work was done by
the one or the other, or which contributed the more im
portant part. At a great banquet, when Burnham, who
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was presiding, attributed to McKim the great merit of
Madison Square Garden, McKim is said to have inter
jected, "White," and that was the only word he uttered
on that occasion. McKim always imputed to his part
ners a full and equal share of the credit and merit of
what was done in their joint names, and during the
whole existence of the firm no single piece of work was
undertaken except in their joint names, but upon almost
every piece of their joint work the impress of McKim's
peculiar personality and fine genius is indelibly stamped.
The truth is that the three stood together at the head of
the profession, and the city and the nation owe to their
joint labors an everlasting debt of gratitude. Each relied
upon the other, and their mutual devotion and admira
tion knew no limits.
And there was another personal association and ever-
abiding influence which McKim enjoyed in all his later
years — in the friendship of Saint-Gaudens. I do not
suppose there ever was a closer union, or a more active
sympathy, between three great artists of kindred tastes
and the same exalted aims, as that which bound together
McKim, Saint-Gaudens, and White — working together,
helping each other, criticizing each other, and all intent
together upon the same end — to elevate the artistic stand
ard which it was the great object of their lives to pro
mote and advance. All three have passed away together
in three short years. As they were united in life, they
were not far divided in death, a triple calamity and loss
to the city and the country.
The secret of McKim's professional eminence was not
far to seek. There was nothing strange or providential
about it.
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Emerson attributes to the greatest of architects a sort
of special divine inspiration :
The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Himself from God he could not free.
He molded wiser than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
And another poet, two hundred years before Emerson,
had explained the first miracle in a similar figure of
speech : The conscious water saw its God and blushed.
But, in the sober prose of modern life, conscious stone
is as rare as conscious water, and architects must work
out their own salvation. McKim did this by the hardest
of hard work, by concentrating his whole mind and heart
and feeling upon his work as an architect, never turning
to the right or the left, or trying his hand at any other art.
Evelyn, writing from Rome, says: "Bernini, the Flor
entine sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, a little before
my coming to Rome, gave a public opera wherein he
painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines,
composed the music, Writ the comedy, and built the
theatre." And it has been happily said of Michelangelo
that he wore the four crowns of architecture, sculpture,
painting, and poetry.
McKim was satisfied with the crown of architecture
only, and to win and wear it he gave his life's blood.
I asked Mr. Mead what he thought was McKim's
chief motive and object in life, and he said : "Perfection
in whatever he undertook to do."
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To this single lofty aim he devoted all his powers —
his fertile imagination, a memory richly stored with
treasures, a patient study of all the best examples of an
cient and foreign art, a self-control which enabled him
to persuade and control others, an insatiable love of
beauty, and that sweet reasonableness which was an
essential part of his nature. And with all this, in spite
of occasional moods and apparent lapses, he had that un
yielding tenacity of purpose which kept the end in view
always from the beginning, and which is the invariable
trait of leadership in all professions.
But, besides being a great artist, McKim was a great
educator. The influence which his work and the work
of his firm exercised upon the public taste and judgment
was of incalculable value. Scattered through many cities,
each building they designed was an object-lesson to the
public in dignity, harmony, and beauty. How can even
the casual observer stop to gaze at such buildings as the
Boston Library, the Rhode Island State House, or the
Columbia or Morgan library without being deeply im
pressed ? I am sure these are creating an enthusiasm for
beautiful buildings, which is sure to grow and never to
die out among us. And yet I fear that not one in five
of this company of his admirers has gone out of his or
her way as far as Seventh Avenue to study the last and
perhaps most marvelous of all their works, the new
Pennsylvania Station.
I must leave it to others to tell you how much he has
done to elevate the standard and the dignity and the
value of his own profession — how large a proportion of
the younger architects of to-day have graduated from his
office, and have carried with them into actual work
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throughout the country the impress and the influence of
his large imagination and his abiding inspiration. You
will hear from them, I doubt not, of his ever-living sense
of public duty and responsibility; how freely he gave of
his time, his thought, and his influence to the great work
of the improvement of the Capitol and the laying out of
the city of Washington ; and, more than all the rest, how,
remembering the difficulties that beset his own career at
the outset, he labored in season and out of season in the
founding of the American Academy at Rome, which in
life and in death was the darling object of his hopes.
Who knows but that those hopes may be speedily and
finally realized and completed by some timely helping
hand? The name of an architect is generally lost in his works.
Of all the great buildings and structures that survive
from a remote past, only a very few have brought with
them the names of the great geniuses who must have
designed them. "Here lies one," wrote Keats in his own
epitaph, "whose name is writ in water." But those
whose names are writ in stone are hardly as lasting. I
doubt whether one in fifty of this audience can give the
name of the truly eminent architect who designed our
City Hall at about the time that Keats, whose fame has
ever since been growing, was born. Now and then there
is a signal exception. The name of Agrippa, on the
portico of the Pantheon, has kept his fame alive as a
great builder for centuries after his military achieve
ments are forgotten. The ashes of Wren, happy in
death as in life, enshrined in the great cathedral that he
restored, surrounded by what remains of the beautiful
churches that he rebuilt, are marked with that matchless
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inscription: "Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice." "If
you seek for his monument, look around you." Hunt's
statue upon the roof of Mr. Vanderbilt's house — his
masterpiece— so unique and characteristic, will keep his
features in view as long as that beautiful house shall
stand; but his monogram "R. M. H." must be stamped
upon it to tell future generations who he was. Indeed,
there is no sign manual for architects as there is always
for painters. But McKim's spirit and memory will sur
vive not only in the masterly and beautiful works of his
hands, but in the new life that he inspired in his great
profession, in the valued services that he rendered to
his country, in the ever-growing idealism which he fos
tered and encouraged in the American people.
Perhaps this is hardly the occasion to dwell upon those
innate traits and qualities that made him so dear and
precious to his friends, and his loss so deeply and widely
lamented. But in truth he was one of the most charming
personalities that America has ever known. Wherever
he came, he always brought light and warmth and sym
pathy, which seemed to flow from him whether he spoke
or kept silent. It was impossible to know him and not
to love him, and, to borrow the language of St. Paul, it
may truly be said of him :
"Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are
honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things
are of good report ; if there be any virtue and if there be
any praise, we think of these things" as all embodied
and transfigured in the life and character of Charles
Follen McKim.
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MR. ROBERT PEABODY
Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen:
It does not seem so very long ago that there came
into our little circle of architectural students in Paris a
charming youth, fresh from Cambridge, from the Scien
tific School and the ball-field— a merry, cheerful friend,
an athlete, a serious student. We lived a simple, frugal
life in the splendid Paris of Louis Napoleon, working
hard, and he especially with a dogged earnestness. There
were, however, happy interludes in this working life be
tween charrettes. When on rare occasions ice formed
on the lakes in the Bois, he, a perfect skater, was the
center of admiring throngs. When in the Luxembourg
Gardens beneath our windows we passed around an
American base-ball, the Parisians lined up three deep at
the tennis courts to see him throw the ball to incredible
heights. Fired by his enthusiasm, we even joined gym
nasium classes, and, though that now seems improbable,
we became proficient on the flying trapeze. In summer
we rowed on the Seine, and in the ever-to-be-remem
bered trip for several days down that river no one,
French or American, joined with greater enthusiasm
than the comrade we used to call affectionately "Follen,"
or the Frenchmen — by some unrecognizable perversion
of the name so hard for French lips — McKim.
In view of his later career it doubtless sounds strange
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to say that for a long time it was harder for McKim
than for most foreigners to find himself in sympathy
with the atelier and the ficole des Beaux Arts. What
little experience he brought with him had been obtained
with Mr. Russell Sturgis in New York. That master
and Mr. Babb were his ultimate arbiters. Mr. Ruskin
was the prophet of all that was good and true in art.
Plunged into a world that did not know these masters
even by name and that looked on Victorian Gothic as
romantic archaeology, but in no possible sense as archi
tecture, McKim's inflexible nature had some hard rebuffs
and conflicts. It required time and other influences to
bring him to a sense of the great worth of the underlying
principles of the Parisian training, but his sympathies
were always more with the earlier than the later French
masters. He never really liked modern French taste,
and he was, in fact, more close to Rome than to Paris.
Often the active and feverish artistic life that is creat
ing a renaissance of art in New York to-day makes us
think of the brilliant periods of that other Renaissance
in Tuscany. I would not claim for McKim the character
of universal genius which history attributes to many of
the early sons of the Italian Renaissance; but when we
read how Alberti, that forerunner of Leonardo, was
skilled in arms and horsemanship and all bodily exercises
proper to the estate of a young nobleman— that he en
joyed feats of strength and skill, that he possessed a sin
gularly sweet temper and graceful conversation, that for
music he had genius of the highest order — we are re
minded of our friend. Still more, when we find this ac
complished son of the Renaissance fusing classic art with
the medieval standards of taste and introducing Roman
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arches and Corinthian pilasters to a world that had long
forgotten them, we are again brought back to New York.
These two artists were alike even in the principles that
guided their art. They did not seek an architecture rair
sonnie. They were not greatly interested in logic. They
sought beauty. They found it in its most perfect forms
in classic art, and they each applied it to the structures
of their day. It is enough for most of us that their art
was beautiful, and we find ourselves debating whether
our friend and his associates were more charming in
their earlier work when in the Herald Building and the
Century Club they dealt with the loveliness of the early
Renaissance, or when the noonday splendors of the
great Roman orders appeared at Columbia College and
the Pennsylvania Railroad Station and rivaled not only
the Renaissance but ancient Rome itself.
In all of these, however, we see McKim, as in the case
of Alberti, the handsome gentleman, the cultured scholar,
making his city beautiful, and adapting the beauties of
classic architecture to the life of his day.
By the dogged determination and the unfailing pa
tience with which he clung to his convictions, coupled
with his persuasive charm of manner, he had brought
many loyal clients to build better than they knew or had
dreamed of, and he had reached the top ranks of the
profession when that delightful company of artists, the
Board of Design for the Columbian Fair, was called to
Chicago. At the first dinner our friend John Root (the
architect whose sad death we so soon deplored), refer
ring to the appropriations for the fair just made by the
government, said: "Congress has just given us the
avoir-faire. We have brought you to Chicago to furnish
no"

the savoir-faire." McKim furnished his full share of
knowledge and skill and sympathy to this enterprise, and
he was a great factor in creating that spirit of harmony
and generous emulation which pervaded the whole enter
prise and which was the foundation of its success.
These are but the slightest reminiscences of a life full
of artistic activity and achievement. They are what are
most prominent in my memory. I am happy in this op
portunity to testify on the part of all my profession to
our admiration for the character McKim displayed in
constantly and persistently seeking a high artistic goal,
and to the added influence that has accrued to the whole
profession because of the dignity with which he endowed
his own part in it. For my own personal part I am still
more happy to speak of my love for this great artist and
generous gentleman.

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HON. ELIHU ROOT
The very few words which the requirements of the
program permit from me should properly be in recog
nition of Charles McKim's public service. Without ever
holding a public office, without ever binding himself to
service by an oath, he had the genius of public service.
In the building of the Army War College at Washing
ton ; the plan and construction of the Engineers' School ;
in the design for the enlargement and rebuilding of the
government station at Governor's Island which is now
in progress; in the restoration of the White House,
which saved our country from having that noble
expression of the spirit of .the days of Washington and
Jefferson perverted from a gentleman's home on the
banks of the Potomac to garish mediocrity; in the
making of the great plan for the future of the Metro
politan Museum of Art; in the organization and promo
tion of the American Academy at Rome; in the long
years of patient and devoted labor to the great and mon
umental work of the commission for the extension and
perfection of the park system of Washington, which has
revivified and given life to the great designs of L'Enfant
and Washington; in the numerous cases in which we
used to call upon him to help our incompetency in de
ciding upon designs for buildings and for memorials and
monuments for the national capital— in all of these
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things and in the multitude of other matters that did not
come within my personal observation, he was apparently
indifferent to personal credit, thoughtless of emolument,
inspired by patriotic, humanitarian love, not merely of
his art, but of the mission of his art.
As some men have the vision of their country rich and
prosperous, and some men the vision of their country
great and powerful, his imagination kept always before
him the vision of a country inspired and elevated by a
purer and nobler taste ; and unselfishly, with enthusiasm,
with persistency and high and noble courage, he devoted
himself to that work. The sensitive quality of his na
ture, which made him shrink from conflict, from all the
harsh contacts of life, made the prosecution of this work
by him courageous beyond the ordinary capacity for con
ception. That gentle, diffident, and hesitating manner
seemed always to be yielding to opposition and before
assault, but always, though he swayed to and fro, always
he stood in the same place, immovable. However much
he suffered— and he did suffer; however hard it was, he
never could surrender what he believed to be right in
art. He never could surrender. It was impossible for
his nature to yield in what he believed to be best for the
future of art.
Gentle and heroic soul, happy country which has the
character to recognize such a man, which has the fiber
into which can be woven such a thread ! Fortunate are
we to have known him and to have called him our friend.

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MR. WALTER COOK
Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen:
On Sir Christopher Wren's tomb in St. Paul's there
is a Latin inscription, to which Mr. Choate has referred,
which says, "If you seek his monument, look about you,"
and we may well repeat these words when we think
about Charles McKim. It is useless to enumerate all the
buildings, in this city and elsewhere, which bear witness
to his talent, his almost unerring taste, and his loving
care. And it is one of the rewards which his and my pro
fession offers, that when we are gone, our monuments,
whether they be great and imposing structures or not,
stand in the great open-air museum of city or country, to
be seen by all men, and are not shut up in galleries. "If
you seek his monument, look about you."
All this production of a most active career he has
left as a heritage to his country; but more especially
is it the heritage of the architects who follow him.
To them it is a very precipus one; for with these
examples before us, we cannot fail to approach our work
with something of the love and devotion to the beautiful
which he possessed in so high a degree. And in thinking
over the names of those who have gone before him in our
time — of Richardson and Hunt and the other masters
— it seems to me that no one of them has left a stronger
and more definite message to their successors than our
friend in whose honor we are gathered here to-day.
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In all the arts, and especially in the arts of the present
time, there is such a striving for the individual note, for a
different mode of expression than any one else has used —
a different language I might say — that this desire threat
ens sometimes to destroy all other impulses. Let us at
least be different, is the cry, even though we may not be
beautiful. Architecture, in common with the other arts, has suf
fered from this malady. But we in this country have
not been the worst offenders; and that we have not been
so, I think is due more to the influence of McKim than
to any other one cause.
I have followed his work from the beginning to the
end; and ever since those little cottages at Elberon, at
the beginning of his career — such a wonderful contrast
to the work we know him best by— one guiding principle
was always his. He, too, sought as earnestly as the
rest of us for individuality ; and when I think how easy it
is to recognize his hand, I cannot but think that he at
tained it. But above all was his unwritten law — never,
in the name of originality or with an ambition to be hailed
as the daring innovator, to create anything which did not
primarily appeal to him as beautiful.
From this he never swerved an instant. And I believe
that this loyalty to a pure and unselfish ideal will live as
an example, as a good tradition among us long after his
generation has disappeared; and that McKim dead will
preserve us from as many monstrous and grotesque cre
ations as McKim living did.
As a kind and generous friend to all of us, his fellow-
workers, it is needless for me to speak to you of him. I
knew him when he was at Harvard, I knew him when he
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was studying his art in Paris and was full of that gener
ous enthusiasm which never failed him, I knew him
during the whole of his brilliant career in this country.
And it is hard for me to think that I shall look into his
kind eyes no more.

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PROFESSOR H. LANGFORD WARREN
Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen:
Harvard University gladly joins in doing honor to
the memory of Charles Follen McKim. Mr. McKim's
relations to the university were close. He had been a
student in the Lawrence Scientific School in 1866-67,
and, though his residence was so short, he always looked
back to that period with pleasure and thought of Har
vard as his alma mater. His brilliant career as an archi
tect, reaching as he did the position of recognized leader
of his profession, led the university in 1890 to give him
the honorary degree of Master of Arts.
The university is fortunate in having from his design
three important structures, the Harvard Union and
Robinson Hall, built for the Department of Architecture,
both completed in 1901, and the Foot-ball Stadium on
Soldiers' Field. But the general aspect of the university
buildings in Cambridge has been more profoundly af
fected by the noble fence and series of gates which he
designed and which, built from year to year by different
college classes, are still incomplete.
His interest in the Department of Architecture was al
ways keen. He followed its work sympathetically, and in
1904 founded in honor of his wife the Julia Amory Ap-
pleton Fellowship in Architecture, which provides an
annual stipend of one thousand dollars for a traveling
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student. But his interest in architectural education,
which had led him also to endow a similar fellowship
at Columbia, was chiefly shown in his being the virtual
founder of the American Academy in Rome, in which
the university has been greatly interested, which has been
the home of its traveling fellows in architecture, and
which may justly be regarded as the culminating school
of the American system of architectural education.
Harvard University, therefore, has special reasons for'
grateful recognition of Mr. McKim. But the university
desires chiefly to join in honoring his memory as that
of a great artist, whose splendid work has done more
perhaps than that of any other American architect to
raise the standard of taste throughout the country.

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MR. JOSIAH H. BENTON
The city of Boston owes its beautiful Public Library
building to the wisdom and the courage of a board of
trustees who sought the best architect without reference
to where he lived. This building was the first important
public building designed and constructed by McKim,
Mead & White. It was the first building in the United
States designed as a complete work of art, com
bining architecture, sculptural decorations, and mural
painting. As such it certainly ranks among the first, and
we believe is the first, of the inimitable creations of
that great architect Charles F. McKim.
Like many great works of art, its proportion, its out
lines, and its color are so harmonious and perfect that
it does not produce its effect at the first view. The peo
ple of Boston received it with the cautious hesitation with
which they receive most things, but as they have lived
with it and come to know it, they appreciate its rare
beauty more and more. It is the finest ornament of our
beautiful city, and our people are more and more proud
of it as the years go by.

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PRESIDENT NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
Mr. McKim belonged to our university in a peculiarly
intimate and personal sense. In his going we mourn the
death of a great artist and a noble citizen, but we add to
that a deep sense of personal bereavement and loss at
the passing of a dear colleague and friend. From the
day when, thirty years ago, the study of architecture was
first systematically begun with us, it had his interest, his
guiding counsel, his generous and consistent support,
and when the time came for the university to enter upon
the construction of its new and permanent home, the
task of making it was his. His mind seized the under
lying principle and conception of a great home and
school for scholars in the metropolis of a modern democ
racy as no mind had ever done before. McKim knew
that under those conditions he could not plan and build
something remote, detached, suburban; he knew that he
must plunge his institutional home into the city's life,
that its scholars might be part of the city. He knew
that it must have an entrance broad and spacious and
free as the invitation which it offered to every one who
would drink at its fountain. He knew that it must not
turn its back or its side to the great population, but that
it must look it straight in the face and tell its own story.
He knew that the university of the twentieth century
must own its dependence upon the world's learning and
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the world's lore by building itself about a great library
which represented the accumulated scholarship of the
ages that had gone. All these things McKim saw, all
these things McKim and those associated with him did.
It was a great service, not alone to the university, but to
our democracy.
We like to think of him as a member of the great
tradition, the one great tradition that has shaped the
intellectual life and the esthetic aspiration of the West
ern world; the great tradition which, despite all chang
ing, fitful tempers, all alterations of scene and passings
of time, remains the one pure well of art and literature
undefiled, the tradition which bears the name of Greece.

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MR. JOHN L. CADWALADER
Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen:
It is far too late, if it were in my power, to speak of
Charles McKim as an architect, or to attempt to place
him in the rank that he should occupy in his own pro
fession; but perhaps I may be allowed to speak for a
single moment on two aspects of McKim's professional
life. I refer first to his pride in his profession. Above
every other thought in his mind and every other expecta
tion during all his life was his pride in his profession and
his labor to fuse all its workers into a real profession.
McKim had tried as an architect to teach at least one
single lesson, that architecture was an art governed by
rule and not by fancy, and that beauty at least was
simple, and that simplicity itself was beautiful.
And next I must call attention to McKim's profes
sional generosity. It seems that by some almost strange
arrangement of this program I am asked to speak of
Charles McKim as representing the Public Library, the
one, the largest disappointment of his life.
As a matter of fact, this illustrates the generosity of
the character of Charles McKim. In the arrangements
for the building of the Public Library there was a com
petition. As a part of that competition it was provided
that the architect should follow a scheme laid out for
the interior administration of the library, and all were
CsO

told with great frankness that he who departed from
that scheme, unless he improved the whole arrangement,
could not expect to succeed in that competition.
Now Charles, whether he had a great conception or
not as to the uses of the scheme, had no idea that any
person not an artist should dictate to him in what man
ner a building which he was to erect should be used, and
he changed the entire scheme, and not to its improve
ment, and his plan was thrown out. And what did
Charles do ? Did he sulk in his tent, did he retire to the
Century Club and denounce the committee? By no
means. Within some very reasonable time after the
awarding of that contract to the distinguished gentlemen
who have built the building, he came to me and asked
under what circumstances he might examine their plans,
which he did over and over again in the hope that he
might offer them some help, by suggestion or otherwise,
to the advantage of that building.
In the presence of the distinguished men who com
pose a large part of this audience, all of us profes
sional people, acute, active, sometimes jealous, I com
mend that gallant gentleman to your distinguished
recollection. And now what shall be said of the personality of
Charles McKim? With my relationship with him for
years and years, I am unable, almost unable, to enter on
that subject. It seemed to me he was almost the most at
tractive personality I have ever known. I defy any man to
attempt to oppose McKim when he was really disposing of
some subject in which he was largely interested. His man
ner, his smile, his treatment of the subject, were all con
clusive, and I defy any man to fail to enlist where Mc-
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Kim was the recruiting officer. I know that I myself
over and again have followed fruitless quests, things I
hardly understood and things I doubt whether any one
understood, because Charles was the leader and told me
where to go.
In the sunshine of his presence, acquaintance warmly
blossomed into friendship. In the charm and shadow of
his smile, a statement became a demonstration, difficulties
passed away, things that were uncertain took a certain
shape and became possible and natural, and imagination
became actuality.
He really burned out life's candle in the effort to ele
vate his own profession. He has passed away. That
high-strung, gentle life is ended. That timid, fluttering
soul has ceased to beat against the bars of life. His body
is at rest, and yet we know —
"The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

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PROFESSOR WM. M. SLOANE
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It has been my duty to compress into a few short reso
lutions something of what has been expressed here this
afternoon so ably and so brilliantly.
Fourteen associations, artistic, technical, and literary,
here unite to commemorate the distinction of Charles
Follen McKim as a citizen, as a craftsman, and as an
artist. To this end they join in recording these convic
tions. His life was an example of that which a creative
architect must imperatively choose. His secondary train
ing completed, he devoted ten years to his professional
education : five to that of discipline, five to that of know
ledge. He was stimulated to great thoughts, and he had
acquired the power to express them.
His genius was exhibited in his supreme power of
collaboration; he linked his work and fame inseparably
with those of his two original partners, primarily for the
sake of comprehensive mastery, but thus incidentally for
the perfecting of achievement by each singly as well as
by all in combination.
By such means were attracted a great body of im
portant clients, individual, corporate, and national;
among these he easily commanded a leadership which
they as readily accepted, and from its consequences he
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never shrank, assuming responsibility to any extent for
design, procedure, and results.
His choice of style was predetermined by ancestry,
temperament, and training, for his soul was akin to that
highest form of civilization which is marked by dignity,
repose, and proportion. As the great painter elaborates
on the basis of strong drawing, whether of brush or pen
cil, so this great architect imagined and used structure
that was itself poetic, the degree of elaboration and
ornament being determined by adaptation to use and en
vironment. To the ancillary arts of the engineer, the painter, and
the sculptor his indebtedness was freely acknowledged,
and their splendors are nowhere more manifest than in
the buildings of his firm, because of the opportunity
there afforded and the zeal they there exhibit to be parts
of a harmonious whole.
His work, like that of all true artists, was the ex
pression of his manhood. His character was strong as
it was pure ; his disposition affectionate and self-sacrific
ing; his mind vigorous, helpful, and noble. He was a
lover of his kind, discerning reality behind the ideals of
his fellow-Americans, intolerant only of pose and sham.
Because of his strong and courageous heart he was genial
but modest ; joyous, even gay, and gentle.
There is no perfection in humanity, but the nearest
approach to it in a man is discernment of tendencies,
emancipation of uplifting qualities, and the interpreta
tion of a community to itself. Holding this as self-
evident truth, we are firmly convinced that the loving
and grateful memory in which his generation holds him ;
that the beneficent institutions which he founded or vivi-
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fied; that the structures, public and private alike, which
he designed and built and which testify to the aspira
tions of an epoch, — that these all bear witness that as
man, citizen, and artist there is the highest fame, per
manent and deserved, for Charles Follen McKim.

ANTHEM
Prayer of Thanksgiving  Krenfer
The Mendelssohn Glee Club

VALE

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