Roadboys Travels: BPL - One Magnificent Library

The BPL and its Singer Gallery

Boston is an easy city for an architect to fall in love with. It has seemingly everything: history, a waterfront, stunning architecture, world class medical, cultural and educational facilities all served up with a well integrated public transit system.

Oh, and did I mention great food?

Team Roadboy arrived midweek on a post covid (i.e. oversold) American Airlines flight to spend a few days of "pre-trip" sightseeing before joining chums on an organized Vermont Bike Tours cycle adventure of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard (posts forthcoming).

Free (yes free) accommodations were provided at the Residence Inn Downtown / South (Roxbury) courtesy of a Marriott Bonvoy visa card. The property was new, immaculately clean, well equipped and close to Copley Square and the Museum of Fine Art (MFA).

The day began with a walk to Copley Square to admire Trinity Church (HH Richardson's Romanesque masterpiece). Sadly it is still closed.

Directly across Copley Square stands McKim, Meade and White's 1895 wing of Boston's superb Public Library (referred locally as the BPL). This is America's first urban, municipally funded, free public library. It contains one of our nation's largest research libraries.

It is a national treasure.

The entrance to the building has a playful cornice with dolphins and seashells over the word's "Free To All".

The BPL's front entry plaza is flanked by two large draped bronze sculptures; one representing science, the other art. In a nation now skeptical of science and derisive to art, I found the symbolism of having the entrance leading to knowledge guarded by science and art refreshing.

Science

The library's 1,500 pound bronze entrance doors present figures of music, poetry, knowledge, wisdom, truth and romance.

Upon entry you are presented with a limestone staircase embedded with fossils. The staircase hall is clad in highly polished yellow Siena marble and presided over by two giant unpolished stone lions memorializing Massachusetts casualties in America's war to end enslavement. The tails of the lions shine from being touched by generations of library visitors for good luck. Murals in the stairway represent philosophy, astronomy, history, chemistry, physics and poetry.

Yellow Siena Marble Entry Staircase

The Civil War Memorial Lions

Lions Left Unpolished at The Request of the Civil War Families

At the top of the staircase is the entry to Bates Hall. The hall was named for Joshua Bates the first major benefactor to the library. Mr. Bates imposed the conditions that the new library be "warm, light filled, seat at least 150 and be free to all".

The magnificent English walnut bookcases and tables in Bates Hall are original to the room.

Bates Hall

Although I came specifically to view the librarys John Singer Sargent murals, I soon found myself spending a full afternoon in rapt admiration of the entire building and its art.

Stairs to the Sargent Murals

John Singer Sargent

Sargent is one of my favorite painters. His life was astounding. He was an American born in Florence (where his parents waited out the cholera pandemic).

His passion for art led to his acceptance in 1856 to Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he completed his formal art education.

From the start his work met with broad critical acclaim at Paris Salons. He was applauded for exceptional technical skill and an uncanny ability to capture the nuanced personalities of his portraiture subjects.

In 1884 Sargent spent an entire year painting an uncommissioned portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau. He considered it a personal achievement and submitted it to the Paris Salon. The Salon, however, was shocked at Madame's scandalously dangling shoulder strap. Singer kept the portrait in his studio for his entire career. The painting, now referred to as Madame X, hangs in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The furor over Madame X resulted in Singer losing Parisian clients. So he decided to relocate to London. where his fame grew and kept him wealthy.

Over his life his personal wealth, wanderlust and his multi-lingual skills allowed him to travel and live throughout the world. As part of his travels he formed a bond with Boston through close contacts with many of its most influential citizens including Isabella Stewart Gardner. Boston rewarded Singer with important commissions including the murals for the BPL which he began in 1895.

His work, always expressed a bright impressionistic realism I find joyous. But in the twenties it began to annoy avantgarde art critics whose interest now veered toward modernism / cubism. Singer's work and style was increasingly derided as "dated.

In 1907 he closed his studio and began to focus more on landscapes than portraits. From 1915 to 1917 Singer lived in the United States and painted portraits of John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt and James Deering (while living at Deering's palatial Vizcaya estate on Miami's Biscayne Bay).

Singer also kept producing his BPL work portraying the "progress of religion over paganism". It met with success until his frieze portraying Judaism (entitled Synagogue) was unveiled. Deemed objectionable by Boston's Jewish community it was defaced requiring Singer to repair it. Controversy faded after his announcement he'd abandon the final Sermon on the Mount pane.

Now, late in his career, Singer again returned to England in 1918. As WWI raged he was commissioned to paint scenes from a world at war. The large chilling piece entitled "Gassed" is a result of that period.It was also the year he came to mourn the death of his niece who perished in a Good Friday shelling of a church.

Larger than life, Singer's personal life was always subject to speculation. Many art scholars assume, due to his relationship with Albert de Belleroche and sensitive portrayal of male nudes, that Singer was gay. And, despite the criticism of his work in the Boston Library, he was frequently derided as "The Painter of Jews" at a time when the world was growing dangerously anti-semitic.

At the time of Singers death in 1925 his life's portfolio was being widely characterized as the work of a "past master".

Decades after death his stature found rehabilitation began and legions of new followers including Andy Warhol who commented that Sargent made "everyone look glamorous. Taller. Thinner."

Various retrospectives of Singer's work were mounted at The Whitney, Boston's MFA and the National Galleries of Washington and London.

Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" Murals at the BPL

The Singer murals represent 29 years of work. They were painted elsewhere and then attached to the BPL's plaster walls using lead and linseed oil in a process called marouflage. Here are samples of the Murals.