Home > John Russell Pope

Pope was born in New York in 1874, the son of a successful portrait painter. He studied architecture at Columbia University and graduated in 1894. He received a scholarship to attend the newly-founded American Academy in Rome, a training ground for the designers of the " American Renaissance." Pope travelled for two years through Italy and Greece, where he studied and sketched and made measured drawings of more Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance structures than he did of the remains of ancient buildings. Pope was one of the first architectural students to master the use of the large-format camera, with glass negatives. Pope attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1896, honing his Beaux-ArtsBeaux Arts was an architectural style that was popular in the early twentieth century. The name comes from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where this style was practised. The emphasis was towards producing quick sketch schemes involving beautiful drawin style, returning to New York in 1900, to spend a few practical years in the office of Bruce Price before opening a practice.

Throughout his career, Pope designed private houses (including for the Vanderbilt familyThe prominent United States Vanderbilt family was founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the fourth of nine children born to a Staten Island, New York family of modest means. His great-great-great-grandfather, Jan Aertson (1620-1705), was a Dutch fa: see Vanderbilt housesFrom the late 1870s to the 1920s the Vanderbilt clan employed America's best Beaux-Arts architects and decorators to build an unequalled string of New York townhouses and East Coast palaces in the United States. Many of the Vanderbilt houses are now Natio), and other public buildings besides the Jefferson Memorial and the NGA, such as the massive Masonic Temple of the Scottish Rite(1911 - 1915, also in Washington, and the triumphal-arch Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural HistoryThe American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History is a landmark of Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York, at 79th Street and Central Park West. The museum has a staff of more than 1,200. The museum sponsors over 100 special f in New York CitySkyline, with Statue of Liberty New York, New York" redirects here. For alternate meanings, see New York, New York (disambiguation). New York — officially named City of New York and often called New York City to distinguish it from the state of New York,. In 1919 he provided a master plan for the future growth of Yale UniversityYale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third oldest American collegiate institution (or fourth, if St. John's College, Annapolis is included) and one of the most prestigious in the world. The Univer, one that was significantly revised by James Gamble Rogers in 1921 with more sympathy for the requirements of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, but which kept the Collegiate Gothic unifying theme offered by Pope. Pope's original plan is a prime document in the City Beautiful movement in city planning.

Pope's designs alternated between revivals of Gothic, Georgian, eighteenth-century French, and classical styles. The Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art were both neoclassical, modelled by Pope on the Roman Pantheon.

Less known projects by Pope include Union Station, Richmond, Virginia (1919), with a central rotunda capped with a low saucer dome, now housing the Science Museum of Virginia; Baltimore Museum of Art ; and in Washington the Masonic Temple of the Scottish Rite (1911-1915), Constitution Hall, Pharmaceutical Building, and the National Archives Building. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin he provided a severe neo-Georgian clubhouse for the University Club (1926). He designed additions to the Tate Gallery and British Museum in London, an unusual honor for an American architect, and the War Memorial at Montfaucon, France.

in 1991 an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, "John Russell Pope and the Building of the National Gallery of Art" spurred the reappraisal of his work, which had been scorned and derided by the critics of International Modernism.