Genteel poverty is one of the best friends of historic preservation. This is certainly a characteristic of Maine where port cities were thriving in the eighteenth century and then suffered a twofold economic downturn in the wake of the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812. To make matters worse, as the nineteenth century progressed, ever-larger ships made some of the shallower harbors obsolete. Houses built by members of the mercantile elite in these ports during prosperous periods remained largely unaltered because their owners and their descendants could not afford to "improve" them.
These handsome colonial and Federal style houses remained intact during the latter half of the nineteenth century when Maine became a vacation destination, accessible by steamship and later by rail. They were then joined by colonial revival and shingle style houses then in vogue. The latter were large rambling asymmetrical structures that were erected in the suburbs and along the coastline. Buildings in the colonial revival style made a nod to the past, and yet all these buildings incorporated the latest modern conveniences.
The second in a series of three exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art examines these two architectural styles as they developed in Maine. Entitled The Shingle Style and the Colonial Revival, 1875-1925, it is on view until June 12 and includes architectural drawings, plans, elevations, and related works on paper that illustrate how professional architects relied on their accomplished skills as draftsmen and their refined aesthetic approaches to attract the attention of potential clients. Architects were professionally trained both at newly established schools here, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Columbia University in New York City, and abroad, for example, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and many of them had completed courses in life drawing and other subjects usually associated with an artist's training. In addition, these well-rounded architects sketched at firsthand everything from quaint villages in New England to the great architectural monuments of Europe. Many of these architects continued to draw or paint portraits or landscapes during their architectural careers. And in the practice of their profession they used the various mediums of the artist: graphite, ink, pastel, oil, watercolor, and charcoal.
Well-known architects from outside Maine, like Carrere and Hastings of New York City, Peabody and Stearns of Boston, and Wilson Eyre of Philadelphia, built summer houses in Maine for their clients, while at the same time a number of Maine architects came into prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the best known is John Calvin Stevens, who is represented by the largest number of drawings in the exhibition. He worked in both the shingle and colonial revival styles--the former for domestic structures and the latter mostly for public buildings like schools and libraries. Stevens exhibited his drawings and watercolors, and they were illustrated frequently beginning in the 1880s in the first periodical for professional architects, the American Architect and Building News, published in Boston.
The curators of the exhibition are James F. O'Gorman and Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., who are working on a book about Maine architecture, which will be published at the time the third part of this series goes on view next spring.
