Golden shot

In 1885 John Gass exhibited over 200 photographs of American architecture at the RIBA which he had garnered on a transatlantic trip as recipient of the RIBA’s Godwin Bursary. The photographs caused a huge stir, none more than those showing works by Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) among them Trinity Church, Boston (1877) (pictured) and the Crane Memorial Library, Quincy, Massachusetts (1882).

It was appropriate that Richardson’s British reputation should have been boosted by photography in this way as he was a keen exploiter of the medium, using it both to publicise his own works – especially through collotype reproductions in the American Architect and Building News – and to amass a body of inspirational exemplars. He avidly collected photographs, primarily of historical French, Spanish and Italian architecture but also of the works of his British contemporaries, most notably Richard Norman Shaw, William Burges and Alfred Waterhouse with whom he shared a passion for the muscularity of the Romanesque.

As his daughter recalled, stricken with Bright’s disease, Richardson would work from his bedroom which “had hard cork walls … on which he could thumb-tack photographs of the special subject he was studying at the moment – towers, doorways, windows, bridges, et cetera.”

In the wake of the RIBA show Richardson was promptly made an Honorary Corresponding Member of the Institute and, according to Waterhouse,  only his lavishly mourned death the following year prevented him from becoming the first American to receive the RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal.

Robert Elwall
More images online at www.ribapix.com