2024 BOOK AWARD

Hell on Color, Sweet on Song: Jacob Wrey Mould and the Artful Beauty of Central Park

by Francis R. Kowsky with Lucille Gordon

In 1855, Jacob Wrey Mould brought color to American architecture, and in the most sensational way imaginable: his All Souls Unitarian Church in New York was a chromatic jubilee—walls of creamy Caen stone, deep red brick, and grayish Indiana limestone, and columns of green, blue, and mottled marble—and it singlehandedly launched the High Victorian movement in American architecture. And yet its author was so swiftly forgotten after his death that, except for one scholarly article in 1969, he has been a nonentity ever since. Now Frank Kowsky’s superb biography gives us Mould in all his erratic and tragic complexity. Born in England in 1825 as the grandson of a “notorious slave trader,” he was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to Owen Jones, the brilliant architect whose Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (1836–45) was the world’s first great work of chromolithography. Mould’s assistance to Jones and his exposure to both vibrant color and exotic architecture would together form the theme of his career.
Making his way to New York in 1852 after an ill-advised marriage, in the same year he made the boldly colored drawings for All Souls that brought him public attention and a torrent of other commissions. Almost all have been swept away. And yet, as Kowsky shows, some of Mould’s finest work is right before our eyes, including many of the most illustrious structures in Central Park, and portions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.

In this selfless work, Kowsky makes clear his debt to Lucille Gordon, a volunteer docent at Central Park who began researching Mould’s life three decades ago, and who was prevented by age from finishing the project; she subsequently died of COVID. It is unfortunate that she did not live to see the publication of this remarkable, and generously illustrated, book; its contribution to the study of Victorian culture is prodigious, startlingly so. – Michael J. Lewis, Board Member

2024 BOOK AWARD

Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French

by Andrew Eschelbacher (Editor), Renée Ater (Contributor), Philip Deloria (Contributor), Donna Hassler (Contributor), Kelvin Parnell (Contributor), Dana Pilson (Contributor), Thayer Tolles (Contributor)

Not only a sumptuous visual treat, this catalog presents nine scholarly articles, each by individual experts in their specific areas of interest. This concentrated volume provides great detail on both Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, addressing topics of biography, cultural and social influences as well as the artistic value of two fascinating, leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. Of particular interest is the 12-page article examining the studio practices and methods of both sculptors. Notably, both were among the first to hire women as studio assistants. Featuring provocative essays, stunning photographs, and an in-depth illustrated chronology, the catalog brings a contemporary perspective to sculptures that have defined and defied notions of American identity. This critical look at the artists’ public and private works considers evolving ideas about race and representation, Indigeneity, civic space, memory, and American history. Truly this is a fine addition to the world of scholarly art studies. – Dr. Anne Taylor-Cahill, Board Member, in conjunction with notes from public synopsis

2023 BOOK AWARD

All about Flowers: James Vick’s Nineteenth-Century Seed Company

by Thomas J. Mickey

For its original research into James Vick, who changed the face of American horticulture even to this day by harnessing the marketing and distribution innovations of the Victorian era.

2023 BOOK AWARD

Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park. New York

by Stephanie Azzarone

For its deep dive into the occasional glamor, changing fortunes and dynamic spaces, places, and people that made this hidden, westernmost edge of New York City a bastion of historic and architectural intrigue.

2022 BOOK AWARD

Architects of an American Landscape:  Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces

by Hugh Howard

“This is a well-researched and thorough book, presented in a readable style. Howard gives both Richardson and Olmsted their due, while taking the reader on a tour of the national landmarks that each created. Many times, the men worked together on projects: Richardson designing homes and buildings, while Olmsted did his magic integrating them to the site. Both had strong but engaging personalities and confidence in their respective work; each recognized the talent in the other and truly worked as a partnership. Each man established his work as a field to be continued after his death. Richardson became the father of distinctly American architecture, and shepherded young talent through his business in a fatherly manner, influencing fledgling architects for decades to come. Olmsted established landscape architecture as a professional field and did likewise with his protégés. While Olmsted has had the advantage of time – his landscapes have endured, grown, and thrived – the Richardson era peaked and ebbed, replaced by others who were influenced in his style and then developed individual approaches to the field, including Frank Lloyd Wright. The book can be useful as a travel guide for people interested in the work of either or both men (hard to separate them) since many of their projects still exist today and are worthy of personal inspection.” – excerpt from public reviewer

2022 BOOK AWARD

Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.

by Medill Higgins Harvey

This informative, richly illustrated volume, the first study of Moore’s life, collection, and influence, presents more than 170 examples from his vast collection, ranging from Greek and Roman glass to Spanish vases, Islamic metalwork, and Japanese textiles. These are juxtaposed with sixty magnificent silver objects created by the designers and artisans at Tiffany who were inspired by Moore’s acquisitions. Included among them are the world-famous Bryant Vase drawing upon Greek examples, a love cup featuring ornate “Saracenic” decoration, and a chocolate pot incorporating novel techniques influenced by Japanese ceramics and lacquerware. The illuminating texts have been enriched by groundbreaking research into contemporary sources such as newspapers and periodicals, the Tiffany & Co. Archives, and a newly identified technical manual and supervisor’s diaries, all of which provide an intimate look at the firm’s design processes and Moore’s role in shaping them.

“Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. introduces the man behind the scenes of many Tiffany designs. Edward C. Moore was a silversmith and prodigious collector.  Many of his personal items –Greek, Roman, Spanish, Islamic and Japanese– were used for Tiffany designs. He often brought his own collected objects to the studios for inspiration. The book illustrates specific objects inspired by his personal connection. A recently discovered technical manual add further insight into Moore’s influence in shaping Tiffany designs.” – Anne Taylor Cahill, Board Member and Nominator

2021 BOOK AWARD

Newport: The Artful City

by John Tschirch

As one of the most historically intact cities in North America, Newport, Rhode Island, has a cultural and architectural heritage of national significance. Each of the city’s districts has its own distinct character with street plans and buildings revealing the political, religious, commercial and artistic forces that have shaped Newport through the ages. Stately Colonial squares and bustling wharves, picturesque Victorian villas and scenic drives, opulent Gilded Age palaces for the few and electric streetcars for the many, and preservation movements to honour the past, and modernist schemes for a metropolis of the future all tell stories of urban beauty and controversy, of eras of lavish building, urban decay and extraordinary revival. A thoroughly accessible, original and valuable source of reference, The Artful City will appeal to the serious scholar as well to all those looking for a highly readable illustrated history of one of America’s most important physical and cultural entities. Maps, paintings, poetry, prose and photographs document and celebrate the development and evolution of this truly artful city.

2021 BOOK AWARD

The Decorated Tenement

by Zachary Violette

As the multifamily building type that often symbolized urban squalor, tenements are familiar but poorly understood, frequently recognized only in terms of the housing reform movement embraced by the American-born elite in the late nineteenth century. This book reexamines urban America’s tenement buildings of this period, centering on the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Boston. 

Zachary J. Violette focuses on what he calls the “decorated tenement,” a wave of new buildings constructed by immigrant builders and architects who remade the slum landscapes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the North and West Ends of Boston in the late nineteenth century. These buildings’ highly ornamental facades became the target of predominantly upper-class and Anglo-Saxon housing reformers, who viewed the facades as garish wrappings that often hid what they assumed were exploitative and brutal living conditions. Drawing on research and fieldwork of more than three thousand extant tenement buildings, Violette uses ornament as an entry point to reconsider the role of tenement architects and builders (many of whom had deep roots in immigrant communities) in improving housing for the working poor.

2020 BOOK AWARD

Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and its Stories

by Barbara Black

Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories examines Victorian London’s grand hotels as both an institution and a culture intimately connected to the urban landscape. In her new study, Barbara Black argues that London’s grand hotels provided an essential space for socializing, fashioned by concerns relating to class, gender, and nationality. Rooted in Walter Benjamin’s “new velocities” of the nineteenth century and Wayne Koestenbaum’s hotel theory, Hotel London explores how the emergence of the grand hotel as a physical and metaphorical space helped to construct a consumer economy that underscored London’s internationalism and, by extension, England’s global status.

Incorporating the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, Florence Marryat, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as contemporary depictions of the hotels in Mad Men, American Horror Story, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Black examines how the hotel supported a corporate identity that would ultimately assist in the rise of modern capitalist structures and the middle class. In this way, Hotel London exposes the aggravations of class stratifications through the operations of status inside hotel life, giving a unique perspective on Victorian London that could only come from the stories of a hotel.

2020 BOOK AWARD

The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York

by Suzanne Hinman

November 1891, the heart of Gilded Age Manhattan. Thousands filled the streets surrounding Madison Square, fingers pointing, mouths agape. After countless struggles, Stanford White-the country’s most celebrated architect was about to dedicate America’s tallest tower, the final cap set atop his Madison Square Garden, the country’s grandest new palace of pleasure. Amid a flood of electric light and fireworks, the gilded figure topping the tower was suddenly revealed-an eighteen-foot nude sculpture of Diana, the Roman Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the country’s finest sculptor and White’s dearest pal.

The Grandest Madison Square Garden tells the remarkable story behind the construction of the second, 1890, Madison Square Garden and the controversial sculpture that crowned it. Set amid the magnificent achievements of nineteenth-century American art and architecture, the book delves into the fascinating private lives of the era’s most prominent architect and sculptor and the nature of their intimate relationship. Hinman shows how both men pushed the boundaries of America’s parochial aesthetic, ushering in an era of art that embraced European styles with American vitality. Situating the Garden’s seminal place in the history of New York City, as well as the entire country, The Grandest Madison Square Garden brings to life a tale of architecture, art, and spectacle amid the elegant yet scandal-ridden culture of Gotham’s decadent era.

2019 BOOK AWARD

Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines

by George E. Thomas

Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated. To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional mannerist creating an eccentric personal style that had little resonance and modest influence on the future of architecture. By placing Furness in the industrial culture that supported his work, George Thomas finds a cutting-edge revolutionary who launched the beginnings of modern design, played a key part in its evolution, and whose strategies continue to affect the built world.

In his sweeping reassessment of Furness as an architect of the machine age, Thomas grounds him in Philadelphia, a city led by engineers, industrialists, and businessmen who commissioned the buildings that extended modern design to Chicago, Glasgow, and Berlin. Thomas examines the multiple facets of Victorian Philadelphia’s modernity, looking to its eager embrace of innovations in engineering, transportation, technology, and building, and argues that Furness, working for a particular cohort of clients, played a central role in shaping this context. His analyses of the innovative planning, formal, and structural qualities of Furness’s major buildings identifies their designs as initiators of a narrative that leads to such more obviously modern figures as Louis Sullivan, William Price, Frank Lloyd Wright and eventually, the architects of the Bauhaus.

Misunderstood and reviled in the traditional architectural centers of New York and Boston, Furness’s projects, commissioned by the progressive industrialists of the new machine age, intentionally broke with the historical styles of the past to work in a modern way—from utilizing principles based on logistical planning to incorporating the new materials of the industrial age. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes more than eighty black-and-white and thirty color photographs that highlight the richness of his work and the originality of his design spanning more than forty years.

2019 BOOK AWARD

Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas

by Donna Lucey

In this seductive, multilayered biography, based on original letters and diaries, Donna M. Lucey illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects’ lives.

Elsie Palmer traveled between her father’s Rocky Mountain castle and the medieval English manor house where her mother took refuge, surrounded by artists, writers, and actors. Elsie hid labyrinthine passions, including her love for a man who would betray her. As the veiled Sally Fairchild—beautiful and commanding—emerged on Sargent’s canvas, the power of his artistry lured her sister, Lucia, into a Bohemian life. The saintly Elizabeth Chanler embarked on a surreptitious love affair with her best friend’s husband. And the iron-willed Isabella Stewart Gardner scandalized Boston society and became Sargent’s greatest patron and friend.

Like characters in an Edith Wharton novel, these women challenged society’s restrictions, risking public shame and ostracism. All had forbidden love affairs; Lucia bravely supported her family despite illness, while Elsie explored Spiritualism, defying her overbearing father. Finally, the headstrong Isabella outmaneuvered the richest plutocrats on the planet to create her own magnificent art museum.

These compelling stories of female courage connect our past with our present—and remind us that while women live differently now, they still face obstacles to attaining full equality.

2018 BOOK AWARD

First in the Homes of his Countrymen: George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the American Imagination

by Lydia Brandt

Over the past two hundred years, Americans have reproduced George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation house more often, and in a greater variety of media, than any of their country’s other historic buildings. In this highly original new book, Lydia Mattice Brandt chronicles America’s obsession with the first president’s iconic home through advertising, prints, paintings, popular literature, and the full-scale replication of its architecture.
Even before Washington’s death in 1799, his house was an important symbol for the new nation. His countrymen used it to idealize the past as well as to evoke contemporary–and even divisive–political and social ideals. In the wake of the mid-nineteenth century’s revival craze, Mount Vernon became an obvious choice for architects and patrons looking to reference the past through buildings in residential neighborhoods, at world’s fairs, and along the commercial strip. The singularity of the building’s trademark piazza and its connection to Washington made it immediately recognizable and easy to replicate.

As a myriad of Americans imitated the building’s architecture, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association carefully interpreted and preserved its fabric. Purchasing the house in 1859 amid intense scrutiny, the organization safeguarded Washington’s home and ensured its accessibility as the nation’s leading historic house museum. Tension between popular images of Mount Vernon and the organization’s “official” narrative for the house over the past 150 years demonstrates the close and ever-shifting relationship between historic preservation and popular architecture.In existence for roughly as long as the United States itself, Mount Vernon’s image has remained strikingly relevant to many competing conceptions of our country’s historical and architectural identity.

2018 BOOK AWARD

Henry James and American Painting

by Colm Toibin, Marc Simpson, and Declan Kiely

Depicting characters like the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson and spaces like the crowded galleries in The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this book, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of The Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.

The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the novelist’s artistic and social milieu. They show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanors and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably about the work of his friend Sargent.

A refreshing new perspective on a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, Henry James and American Painting reveals a James whose literary imagination, in Tóibín’s words, “seemed most at ease with the image” and the work of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.

Criteria

1. The book must be published in the year preceding the award.

2. Chronology & subject should be in the period 1837-1917.

3. Evaluation of the book will include content and the following:

Overall design

Production quality

Editing

Source material (footnotes, bibliography, etc.)