Letter to the Editor

Abstract

I enjoyed reading Horatio Joyce's “Disharmony in the Clubhouse” in JSAH 78, no. 4 (December 2019), as it brings new insights on Gilded Age design. However, I must bring to the author's attention an error concerning Harry Allan Jacobs. Joyce refers to Jacobs as a “graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts and a recipient of the Prix de Rome” (432), relying on the biographical dictionary prepared by Henry F. and Ethel Rathburn Withey, who themselves relied on undependable newspaper obituaries.Jacobs received his PhB in architecture from Columbia University in 1894 and a McKim Traveling Scholarship in 1897 (allowing him to study at the American Academy in Rome), but he was never admitted to the architecture section of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts. There is no entry under his name in the authoritative Dictionnaire des élèves architectes de l'École des beaux-arts de Paris (1800–1968) (https://agorha.inha.fr/inhaprod/ark:/54721/0017). The Society of Beaux-Arts Architects listed him among its “associate members” who had spent at least a year in a Paris atelier without entering the École's second class. Jacobs, who studied in the Atelier Paulin in 1896, thus could not claim the official title of ancien élève, which the École conferred on anyone who passed its entrance exam. As stated in “American Architecture Students in Belle Epoque Paris: Scholastic Strategies and Achievements at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” an article I wrote with Marie-Laure Crosnier Leconte for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (12, no. 2, April 2013): “The claim of many American architects to have ‘studied’ at the Ecole has often misled historians. Those having completed the full curriculum with a thesis or diplôme are the only ones who deserved the title of Ecole ‘graduates’” (158).Remaining vague or embellishing one's studies in a Parisian atelier, deliberately or otherwise, has been a rather pervasive (and pernicious) practice in American architectural history. Fortunately, setting the record straight has become far easier with the Dictionnaire des élèves architectes and the digitization of period directories. Realizing that Jacobs's position in the Beaux-Arts academic ladder was not so high strengthens Joyce's argument that, despite his membership on the Harmonie Club's building committee, Jacobs helped steer the commission toward McKim, Mead & White (432). I would also add that selecting the newly formed firm of Herts & Tallant for the 1898 remodeling of the Harmonie Club (428) must have related not only to the fact that Henry Beaumont Herts, an ancien élève with a modest École transcript, was Jewish but also to the stellar École record of Hugh Tallant—the fourth U.S. citizen who “graduated” from the École des Beaux-Arts when he received his diplôme in December 1896.