The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in England in the 1860s in response to the increasing industrialization of production. Factories were turning out everything from furniture and fabric to architectural elements and selling all cheaply. Advocates of the movement believed that these mass-produced items lacked style, beauty, and individuality and desired a return to the unique, high-quality goods made by artisans and artists using traditional methods.
Arts and Crafts ideals migrated to America beginning in the 1880s. In 1897, the first US exhibition of contemporary crafts was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and sparked a design reform movement in the United States. Craftspeople, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts. Architects, artists, and intellectuals were influenced by their studies of old English architecture and design; Gothic Revival and Tudor Revival buildings proliferated in Cambridge and across the country.
The brothers Bertram and Harry Goodhue were early practitioners of medieval Gothic design and helped transform American architecture and art for decades to come.
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924) was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, to Charles Wells Goodhue and his second wife, Helen Grosvenor Eldredge. Bertram attended the New Haven Collegiate and Commercial Institute. He became enamored of the Gothic-style buildings on Yale’s nearby campus. He wanted to become an architect himself but could not afford university, so in lieu of formal training, at sixteen years old he moved to Manhattan to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell. He later relocated to Boston, where he joined other young, artistic intellectuals to found Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts. Through this group Goodhue met Ralph Adams Cram; the two men would be business partners for almost twenty-five years. In 1891, they founded the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth and Goodhue (renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1898 after Wentworth’s death) and became proponents of Neo-Gothic architecture, accepting commissions from significant ecclesiastical, academic, and institutional clients. Their 1902 design of the United States Military Academy at West Point was a major milestone in the firm’s career.
Soon after, the company opened an office in New York where Goodhue would preside, leaving Cram to operate in Boston. At first, the men worked as a productive team, complementing each other’s strengths; later they began to compete, sometimes submitting independent proposals for the same commission. The partnership ended when Cram was selected as the architect of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan– on Goodhue’s supposed turf. When Goodhue left to begin his own practice in 1914, Cram had already created his dreamed-of Gothic Revival commission at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and continued to work in the Gothic style mode for the rest of his career. Goodhue branched out from the Gothic mode which gained him such prominence, and designed notable Byzantine and Spanish Revival buildings all over the country. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-four and at his request was interred in a wall vault at the Church of the Intercession, the building he considered his finest design. The centerpiece of the monument is a life-size effigy of Goodhue in the manner of those preserved in medieval English country churches.
Harry Eldredge Goodhue
Harry Eldredge Goodhue (1873-1918), Bertram’s younger brother, was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, and attended the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1892, at nineteen, he joined the Boston Art Students’ Association and became an advocate for and expert in traditional stained glassmaking processes. Harry began designing stained glass for his brother’s firm and was sent to Europe to study, draw, and collect medieval stained glass. In 1900, Bertram Goodhue’s firm was chosen as the architect of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Newport, Rhode Island; in 1902, Harry began designing their Brown Memorial Window, his first major commission. The window was the first in America to be made of antique glass in accordance with techniques refined in thirteenth-century Europe. From this, Harry became known as one of only three stained glass artisans then reviving the art of medieval glassmaking.
Harry Goodhue opened his own shop at 23 Church Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in 1903, soon after completing the memorial window. He was sought-after by church people and architects who were intrigued by the medieval quality of his translucent and richly colored hand-blown stained glass and preferred it to the opaque opalescent glass that was popular at the time. Opalescent stained glass was developed in the late nineteenth century by John La Farge and Louis C. Tiffany and presents a milky, streaky, and iridescent appearance. In 1903 Harry wrote a piece for the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts’ monthly publication, Handicraft, criticizing the opalescent “American” style as not really stained glass, for it is absolutely different from what has been understood by the term.” In a subsequent issue, the artist Sarah Wyman Whitman (featured previously on our blog) wrote in opposition to Goodhue’s opinion and praised the experimentations of La Farge and Tiffany in the development of the opalescent/American method and claimed that academics and experts varied in their preference.
With additional positive press and commissions from churches and homeowners, Goodhue outgrew his studio on Church Street. When asked, the property owner obliged him by adding an entire floor to the building. The addition was completed in 1907, and Goodhue expanded his company. However, by 1916, Harry’s business was in decline, and he closed his Cambridge shop. 23 Church street would later be heavily altered in 1936 when the top three floors were removed and the building redesigned in the Art Deco style we see today.
After closing his Cambridge shop, Harry became affiliated with Vaughan & O’Neill & Co. that had a studio on Sudbury Street. Harry’s brother Bertram felt that this company was beneath his brother and refused to order windows from them. Between 1903 and his death in 1918, Goodhue created antique stained glass windows for more than seventy buildings in twenty-one states and Canada. During fifteen plus years of perfecting his craft, he trained dozens of apprentices, including his wife, Mary, and their eldest son, Harry.
Mary Louise Goodhue
Mary Louise (Wright) Goodhue (1876-1965) was born in Cincinnati to Juliet and Daniel T. Wright. Her father was a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and her brother, Daniel, held an Associate Justice seat on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Mary married Harry Goodhue in 1904 and had three sons, Harry, Daniel, and William. The couple settled in Cambridge and first resided on Buckingham Place, soon after, relocating to a rental on Martin Street. By 1908 the family had bought a house lot on Fayerweather Street and hired the architectural firm of Newhall and Blevins to design an Arts and Crafts style house. Mary taught singing and violin at her home to young students and assisted her husband in his growing stained glass company.
Mrs. Goodhue was the president of the Cambridge Musical Club, as well as a suffragist. When Harry died in 1918, she took over the stained glass company; she fulfilled commissions and taught their eldest son the art of making antique glass. In a 1920 Boston Globe article, Mary explained her ability to take over the family business so quickly. “Having worked so much with my husband, it comes easy for me to carry on the business. I have hundreds of his designs to guide me and find little trouble in selecting portions of them for the work I get. I know all about his ideals and became so impregnated with his imagination and genius that I love the work, even as did he.” She continued, “when he [Harry] died, I simply had to take up the practical part of the work, but as I was well taught in the artistic part, I found no trouble in mastering the business part.” The article listed Mary as the only female, stained glass maker in America and highlighted her winning proposal for a memorial window to be placed in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in celebration of the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary. She had bested dozens of male artists to win the commission.
Mary Goodhue is credited with stained glass windows in churches in the Boston area and as far as Providence and Detroit. Her memorial windows at Pilgrim Hall and the First Parish Church of Brookline are her most notable. When Harry, the oldest, came of age, he took up the family business, and Mary returned to her other passion, music. In 1935 she wrote “Stagefright and its Cure“, to help musicians and public speakers understand the psychological reasons for stage fright and ways to overcome it. Mary lived at the family home on Fayerweather Street until her mid-80s. After the Great Depression, when her children had left home, she converted the single-family to a duplex and rented out one side for income. She died in Braintree, Massachusetts, at eighty-eight years old.
Harry “Wright Goodhue
Harry Wright Goodhue (1905-1931) closely followed his father’s footsteps in medieval stained glass artistry, but in order to distinguish himself from his father, he went by Wright Goodhue, his middle and mother’s maiden name. Growing up in Cambridge, Wright spent most of his free time in his father’s studio, learning how to make stained glass windows the old way. Wright’s “studio” was described in a newspaper account published when he was 11 years old. “In a corner of the roomy studio where his father works, young Harry set up his easel and his drawing board. Here he spends long hours depicting the deeds of the Round Table knights, the battles of biblical heroes…”
He attended the Russell School before attending the Cambridge Latin School, leaving after two years. Instead of a conventional education, Wright attended evening classes at the Boston Normal Art School and worked as a draftsman at the architectural firm of Allen & Collins during the day at just 16 years old.
His first two professional projects were executed in 1921 at just sixteen years old. He designed the ornamental details for the wooden doors at Lindsey Memorial Chapel (an addition designed by Allen & Collens to Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury Street, Boston, and he designed his first stained glass window – the chancel window for his uncle Bertram’s First Cong. Church, Montclair, New Jersey. Soon after, while working as a draftsman under Allen & Collens, Wright was asked to design 36 stained glass medallions for the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, a commission the practice was working on. This commission allowed Wright and his mother to purchase a studio space in Boston, when Wright was just eighteen.
Soon after, when his employer received the contract to design the Second Universalist Church (now St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine) in Boston, he was asked to provide windows for the Gothic style building. Together with his mother, the artist, in his teens, furnished designs and made the windows. Soon after, stained glass commissions came in rapidly. Window commissions overwhelmed the small operation included an 18-foot rose window for the Sacred Heart Church in Jersey City. Wright completed three commissions in Cambridge. He designed six circular clerestory windows as part of Allen & Collens’ 1923 restoration of Bigelow Chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Josephine Peabody Marks window for Radcliffe College, and the Martha and Lazarus Window at St. James Church in North Cambridge. Wright began to regret his lack of formal education, and even as his workload grew, he began to study for the entrance exam for admission to Harvard. He was admitted to Harvard in 1927 at the age of 22. Spread thin between his work and schooling, he left at the end of two years, without a degree.
As his prominence in the field grew, the young man became consumed with work. His career hit a crescendo when Allen & Collens were selected to collaborate on the design of the 22-story Riverside Church in Manhattan, with Wright asked to design and make some of the windows for the massive edifice. The Riverside Church was modeled after the 13th Century Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France, a building Wright understood well from his earlier trip to Chartres and other medieval towns and cities in Europe. Wright’s 1924 passport application explained he would be visiting France and England to “study”. This trip was possibly inspired by the Riverside Church commission and from his father’s writings about the Chartres Cathedral and it’s renowned 12th-century stained glass windows.
In 1930, Wright married Cornelia Evans, an academic and writer, who studied at Lasell Seminary for Young Women and Wellesley College, both in Massachusetts, and later Columbia University, New York City. The couple resided in Greenwich Village. Tragically, in 1931 just one month after his 26th birthday, Wright Goodhue died by suicide at a hotel in Providence. He was buried in the family plot in the Old North Cemetery in Pomfret, Connecticut. After his death, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, featured his work in an exhibition. His mother also donated some of his works to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In his 1936 autobiography, Ralph Adams Cram, an architect who worked with Wright on numerous commissions, recalled Wright’s “great, unhappy, and unique genius”. Cram reminisced about Wright’s genius in a 1932 piece in Stained Glass Magazine, where he mentioned Wright’s final completed piece, a wood sculpture “Madonna and Child”. Cram writes, “There is something mystical about this last work of his which, in a way, links it with the shadow that came heavily and increasingly upon him during the last years of his life…”
