Charles Adams Platt

Born in New York City, Charles Adams Platt became a noted etcher, painter, writer and architect. He studied first at the National Academy of Design, then at the Art Students League in New York and in Paris at the Academie Julian with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre.

In 1880, Platt was taught etching by his friend and fellow artist, Stephen Parrish in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Platt often depicted this area in his etchings and from 1880 to 1890 he created over one hundred etchings.

As an architect, he began working in 1916 through the patronage of William Astor. Platt designed the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. when in 1913, Charles Lang Freer asked him to design a new museum for his collection of American and Asian Art. The Freer Gallery was a "single-story building with a rusticated facade in the style of an Italian mannerist building. The interior was designed with a central courtyard enclosed by interior corridors and gallery spaces." Delayed by World War I the museum opened to the public on May 2, 1923.

In addition, Platt designed the Lyme Art Association in Old Lyme, CT and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum building in New London, CT. Platt was a part of the Old Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut.

During his career Platt received many awards, including the bronze medal from the Paris Exposition of 1900. He was a full member of the Society of American Artists (1888), the National Academy of Design (Associate, 1897: Academician, 1911), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Institute of Architects, the New York Etching Club and the London Society of Painter-Etchers.

Source:

Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"

http://www.150.si.edu/sibuild/freer.htm

Charles Adams Platt was a prominent artist, landscape gardener, landscape designer, and architect of the "American Renaissance*" movement. His garden designs complemented his domestic architecture.

Born in New York City, Platt's training was as an artist of landscapes. He trained as an etcher* with Stephen Parrish in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1880. Other training came at the National Academy of Design* and the Art Students League* in New York, and later in Paris at the Académie Julian* with Gustave Boulanger and with Jules Joseph Lefebvre. In the Paris Salon* of 1885, he exhibited his paintings and etchings and gained his first audience. In the decade 1880-1890 he made hundreds of etchings of architecture and landscapes. He received a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle* of 1900.

A trip to Italy in 1892 in the company of his brother to photograph extant Renaissance gardens and villas led to a marked development in Platt's aesthetic approach. Platt published many of these images in his influential book Italian Gardens (Harper & Brothers, 1894), the outcome of two articles published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in the summer of 1893. The volume was strong on the surviving gardens of the Renaissance and Baroque and made no attempt to describe their history or their designers. (Platt was unaware of the first history of Italian gardens, W.P. Tuckermann's thorough Die Gartenkunst der italienischen Renaissance-Zeit, Berlin 1884.)

As well, the influences of Reginald Blomfield's The Formal Garden in England (1892) and gardens by Gertrude Jekyll illustrated in Country Life further refined Platt's style. The impact of Platt, and of Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) can be seen in the switch among stylish Americans from country houses set in lawns with shaped beds of annuals, swept drives and clumps of trees typical of 1885 to houses in settings of gravel-lined forecourts, planted terracing, formal stairs and water features, herbaceous borders and pergolas that are typical of the early 20th century.

Platt was a member of the group that gravitated to the Cornish Art Colony*, which formed around Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire. His own garden in Cornish, made between 1892 and 1912, exemplifies a new style, essentially an Arts and Crafts setting for Beaux-Arts* Neo-Georgian and Colonial Revival architecture.

Platt designed a grand country estate for Edith Rockefeller McCormick at "Villa Turicum" in Lake Forest, Illinois (1912, demolished).

In 1907 he designed a townhouse for Sara Delano Roosevelt on East 65th Street in New York. Eleanor Roosevelt called Platt "an architect of great taste", who with the townhouse had "made the most of every inch of space."

In 1912 he designed "The Causeway", Washington DC, a Neo-Georgian house in an extensive wooded landscape setting.

Platt also designed a large manor house and grounds, built in 1915 in the City of Little Falls, New York (extant, in private ownership) for Mr. J. Judson Gilbert, owner of the Gilbert Knitting Company and several other than very prosperous factories in the Mohawk Valley region of Upstate New York.

The MIT Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts is another Platt-designed mansion built for H. Wendell Endicott in 1934, in use today as a conference center for Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Beginning in 1906, Platt had begun to receive numerous commissions from the estate of Vincent Astor. Platt turned to professional help in surveying large-scale projects from the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. He also received detailed planting plans to fill his borders from Ellen Biddle Shipman, whom he had come to know through her gardening at Cornish, and whom he had instructed in presentation drawings by a draftsman from his own office, then sent to Grosse Pointe, Michigan to plant one of his designs.

His more visible public commissions include the Italianate palazzo he designed for the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art (1918) in Washington, D.C. and the campuses of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1822 and 1927), Connecticut College, Deerfield

The Italian Renaissance styled Russell A. Alger House, at 32 Lakeshore Drive, designed by Charles A. Platt now serves as the Grosse Pointe War Memorial.[3] Platt also designed the Lyme Art Association building in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

He also designed The Leader-News Building in Cleveland, Ohio at the corner of Superior and Bond Street (now East 6th Street) which reportedly was fitted with elevator cabs designed by Tiffany Studios. The Building was completed in 1912 and per the Architectural Record, "Cleveland is to be congratulated upon the possession of one of the handsomest and most distinguished buildings in the country." - H.D.C.

In 1919 he became a trustee of the American Academy in Rome* and became President in 1928 and served until his death.

Throughout his life, Platt maintained his house and garden in Cornish, New Hampshire, and an office and residence in Manhattan. With his second wife, Eleanor Hardy Bunker, whom Platt married in 1893, Platt had five children. Among the children were William (1897-1984) and Geoffrey (1905-1985), who followed in their father's footsteps and practiced architecture in New York City.

Platt died in Cornish, New Hampshire at the age of 72.

Near the end of the 20th century some of Platt's surviving gardens in their full maturity were opened to the public including the spectacular gardens at the Gwinn Estate in Cleveland, Ohio (designed with Warren Manning and Ellen Biddle Shipman).

His drawings and archives, including the original glass plate negatives for "Italian Gardens" are held by the Department of Drawings & Archives in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. In 1993 Platt's book Italian Gardens was reissued with additional photographs by Platt, and an introductory overview by Keith N. Morgan, whose research into Platt's career helped to generate a general revival of interest in Platt and his works.

Source:

"Charles A Platt", Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Platt (Accessed 5/25/2013)