Henry Adams and Henry Hobson Richardson

Abstract

HENRY ADAMS' INTEREST in the visual arts contributed vastly to his writing on history, that of his own time in The Education of Henry Adams and that of the past in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Even his chiefly political History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison gave wider scope to the arts of this period than any other publication of this kind. This vital interest in the arts made Adams a patron of the contemporary American scene. He gave commissions to its most outstanding and most representative artists. The monument to the memory of his wife in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the conception of which Adams had a decisive share, has emerged as one of the finest works of American idealistic sculpture in an otherwise very materialistic period. Adams also influenced profoundly the aesthetics of one of the leading artists of the second part of the nineteenth century, John La Farge, painter, designer of stained glass and critic with whom he travelled to Japan and the South Seas and who instructed him in watercolor. The three men formed