William Henry Goodyear Papers

William Henry Goodyear (1846–1923) was the Brooklyn Museum’s first Curator of Fine Arts from 1899 to 1923. In addition to being a vital force in the early years of the Museum’s Fine Arts Department, Goodyear was dedicated to research in art history and architectural theory, which he began pursuing during his post-collegiate education in Europe and continued until his final days at the Brooklyn Museum. He spent much of his life developing and promoting his theory of architectural refinements, often lecturing and exhibiting on the subject and attracting both supportive and critical reactions. Goodyear’s professional work and research had an influence on the fields of museology, art, and architectural history and his accomplishments have left an enduring impression.

William Henry Goodyear was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Charles Goodyear (1800–1860), the inventor and developer of the vulcanization process of India rubber, and Clarissa Beecher. From 1852 to 1858 Goodyear lived in France and in England, attending schools in Ventnor and Norwood. He eventually returned to New Haven and entered Yale University in 1863. After graduation in 1867 he traveled to Germany and pursued studies in Roman law and archaeology at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin.

Goodyear first became interested in art history at Heidelberg in the early spring of 1868. He returned to Berlin the following autumn to study under Professor Karl Friederichs, an authority on casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In 1869 Friederichs invited Goodyear to accompany him to Cyprus to examine the Cesnola collection of Cypriot antiquities. There he made the acquaintance of General Louis Palma di Cesnola, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director from 1879 to 1904, who later helped bring Goodyear to that institution. From Cyprus, Goodyear journeyed to Syria, Palestine, and Italy. He spent three months in Italy in 1870, including a week in Pisa.

At Pisa Cathedral Goodyear made his first observation of architectural irregularities, which he named architectural refinements. In essence, architectural refinements are deviations and imperfections in a building’s design, which are employed by the architect purposefully and are not due to poor construction or structural failure. Goodyear concluded that these asymmetrical subtleties were intended to charm the eye and bring a dynamism and vitality to the construction. He observed that “the very apparent sloping cornices on the exterior of the Cathedral at Pisa were built in this manner in order to increase the apparent length of the building when viewed by the spectator from a certain point.” 2 He would return to the study of this phenomenon some years later with intense dedication.

After returning to the US in 1871, Goodyear married Sarah M. Sanford of Cleveland, Ohio—a union that would last for seven years. He began a career as a teacher, and in 1874 as a lecturer on the history of art and civilization. For many years he filled teaching and lecturing engagements in various educational, social, and art institutions throughout the United States, including the University of Chicago and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. It was in 1874, as well, that Scribner’s Magazine published his first essay on architectural refinements. This article, “The Lost Art,” examined the architectural asymmetries of cathedral buildings at Pisa. Charles Eliot Norton, professor of art history at Harvard University at the time, hailed Goodyear’s article as “the most important contribution to the topic since Mr. Ruskin wrote The Seven Lamps.”

In 1879 Goodyear married Nellie F. M. Johns, with whom he fathered five children: Mary Lord, Catherine, Charles, Jane Eleanor, and Rosalie Heaton. The marriage ended some years later and in 1897 Goodyear married Mary Katharine (Kate) Covert.

Goodyear’s Professional Career:

Goodyear’s museum career began in 1881, when he was appointed curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After three years he was given the title curator of paintings. He left that post in 1888 due to strained relations with the director, although later in his career he would attempt to return to employment at the Metropolitan Museum. From 1890 to his death in 1923, Goodyear was associated with the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (BIAS), the parent organization of the Brooklyn Museum. He became titular curator of the Institute in 1890 and salaried curator of fine arts in 1899, shortly after the Institute’s new museum building opened. His responsibilities as curator were far-reaching and included overseeing the development and maintenance of the Museum’s collection of European and American paintings, ancient art, casts of Classical and Renaissance monuments and sculpture, and other miscellaneous art collections, as well as designing exhibitions and installations. One of his first accomplishments at the BIAS was the founding, in December 1899, of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, modeled on the Paris Musée Scholaire. Goodyear also initiated an illustrated lecture series on the history and geography of fine arts, which led to the development of the Museum’s lantern slide collection. In 1900 the Brooklyn Institute sent him to Paris with photographer Joseph Hawkes to photograph the Paris exposition. Goodyear and Hawkes photographed various sites at the exposition and Hawkes colored the slides of the images. On his return, Goodyear used these slides to illustrate his lectures on the exposition.

By the turn of the century, Goodyear had earned a solid reputation as an art historian. He considered himself an expert on art and architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative and industrial art of all periods. He published full scale works in art history, notably A History of Art (1888), Roman and Medieval Art (1893), and Renaissance and Modern Art (1894), in addition to writing numerous articles for journals. In 1891 he visited Egypt to secure material for his work The Grammar of the Lotus. This book explored the history of classic ornament as a development of sun-worship and the influence of the lotus form in art.

Survey Expeditions:

Throughout his career, Goodyear continued his study of architectural refinements, organizing survey expeditions throughout Europe, Egypt, and Turkey. He visited medieval churches, cathedrals, and mosques, noting various types of refinements such as widening piers, curves in place of horizontal lines, and leanings of towers and church facades. During these expeditions he collected measurements and took numerous detailed photographs illustrating the refinements. This research provided him with the evidence to expand and solidify his theories. With missionary zeal, he organized installations and exhibitions of cathedral images, delivered numerous slide lectures, and wrote detailed scientific articles about his research.

Goodyear’s discoveries of refinements in Pisa Cathedral in 1870 were followed in 1891 by his observations of horizontal curves of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes in southern France, the first observations ever made of curves in a Roman temple. Convinced that medieval architectural refinements are largely derivations from classical sources, Goodyear endeavored to prove the widespread existence of deliberate irregularities in the construction of medieval churches and cathedrals in Europe.

Goodyear’s 1895 Italian expedition was the first of a series of trips abroad during where he documented medieval cathedrals and churches, recording evidence of architectural refinements through the use of photographs that incorporated a surveyor’s rod, plumb lines, compasses, and other devices to show curves, widening, and leanings in architectural construction. Other major expeditions followed, financed by the Museum with the assistance of outside contributors. One avid supporter was Emma (Mrs. August) Lewis who contributed funds for survey expeditions and publications throughout Goodyear’s career. Goodyear credits Emma Lewis with suggesting the first expedition and for making the first contribution.

Goodyear summarized the purpose of his expeditions in a letter to Brooklyn Museum director William H. Fox dated March 27, 1919: the general purpose of the expeditions carried out on behalf of the Museum was to make surveys and measurements, and to obtain negatives available for enlargement, bearing on the question whether so-called architectural refinements, that is to say, subtleties of construction intended to give optical interest to the buildings, were practiced during the medieval period.

Ultimately, Goodyear hoped to publish his findings and observations on medieval architecture as a scholarly book, a goal that he never met. His results, however, were published from time to time in articles in the American Journal of Archaeology, the Architectural Record; the American Architect; the Architect and Contract Reporter (London); Building News and Engineering Journal (London); Architectural Review (London); Journal of the Archaeological Institute; Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects; Reports of the Smithsonian Institution; Revue de L’Art Chretien; Brooklyn Institute Bulletin; and in a Brooklyn Museum publication series, Memoirs of Art and Archaeology.

Exhibitions of Survey Photographs:

Goodyear’s survey photographs—which he believed scientifically documented the planned irregularities in the construction of churches, cathedrals, and mosques throughout Europe and the Middle East— were the real evidence that upheld his architectural theories. While his measurements and notes gave him material for numerous publications and lecture topics, Goodyear displayed his impressive visual library in exhibitions. Creating enlargements of his survey photographs, he used exhibitions, oftentimes in conjunction with lecture tours and detailed catalogs, as a way of impressing upon the public the validity of his arguments.

Generally, Goodyear received favorable press regarding his photographs. He noted that “on account of their large dimensions, unusual points of view and remarkable details, the photographs are of great value and interest as architectural illustrations of important monuments, even without reference to the special features which they also illustrate.”

Architectural Refinements Publications:

During the time he was traveling and organizing exhibitions, Goodyear published many articles, letters, and reviews in scientific, architectural, and literary journals and newspapers. While he had published full-length works on art history, Goodyear did not publish his first book devoted entirely to refinements until 1912. Goodyear described Greek Refinements as a “long-needed addition to the knowledge of Greek temple architecture, considered as a wholly independent study. Up to date there has been no book for general readers on the subject of the Greek refinements.”

Many reviewers were impressed with Greek Refinements and remarked on his exhaustive research and the numerous illustrations which “included 120 subjects, among them a number of photographs of the Greek horizontal curves in the South Italian and Sicilian Greek temples, which are the only extant photographs on this subject for these temples.” Goodyear also received many congratulatory and laudatory letters from friends and colleagues.

After the publication of Greek Refinements, Goodyear planned to complete a work on medieval refinements using the extensive notes and photographs from his survey expeditions. In response to Salomon Reinach’s review of Greek Refinements, Goodyear wrote that “you have read between the lines of my book as no other critic has, realizing that I was laying a foundation for later work if my life is spared.” Outside observers noted as well that “though he has published magazine articles on his results, his magnum opus is still to appear. The present volume may indeed be considered as a first installment, since a thorough treatment of Greek practice is essential as a foundation, specially in view of the possibility of a direct historical transmission of the horizontal curvatures.”

Due to responsibilities at the Museum, lecturing and exhibition tours, and lack of funding, a book on medieval refinements was to remain a permanently pending project. Goodyear’s friends, including artist Wilford S. Conrow and art historian A. Kingsley Porter, endeavored to publish a compilation of his research work on this topic with support from the Brooklyn Museum after his death, but the definitive final book was never produced.

Response to Goodyear’s Work:

Goodyear’s work at the Brooklyn Museum and his architectural research gained him international recognition. He received many honors from educational, art, and architectural institutions. Among these were an honorary Master of Art degree from Yale University in 1904; honorary membership in the Architectural Associations of Rome and Edinburgh (1904–5), Royal Academies of Milan and Venice (1906–7), Society of Architects, London (1905); corresponding membership in the American Institute of Architects (1907); honorary and corresponding membership of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (1915), and membership in the Brooklyn Society of Artists (1919).

In addition to receiving support and praise for his architectural research from many of his colleagues—including Professor John Beverly Robinson of Washington University, St. Louis, who incorporated the study of refinements in his architectural courses—Goodyear did encounter some criticism. One of his most adamant critics was the English archaeologist, John Bilson. In a series of articles in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Goodyear and Bilson debated the finer points of architectural refinements. For example, John Bilson asserted that “the deviations from the normal in Amiens Cathedral which Mr. Goodyear believes to be intentionally constructed ‘refinements’ are nothing of the kind; they are merely the accidental results of movements which have taken place in the structure, of which movements conclusive proof is afforded both by the recorded history and by the present condition of the building.” Goodyear replied that Bilson’s argument “is a very sad indication of his prejudice and bias, and of his want of discretion, that he should be willing to base a wholesale condemnation of the given architectural investigation on the assertion that I have made a mistaken observation in one cathedral.”

The legacy of Goodyear’s life’s work can be appreciated in the building designs of some of his contemporaries. For instance, architects G. L. Heins and C. Grant LaFarge designed the interior plans for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York with refinements specifically utilizing Goodyear’s observations. This was the first modern large-scale architectural work that employed refinements. Architect William Welles Bosworth announced his intention to introduce asymmetries into his design for the façade of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, a house for J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., and buildings on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The architect R. M. Butler applied refinements in New Church in Newport, County Mayo, Ireland, in 1917. C. L. Borie applied them to the plan of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as did Donald Robb and Philip Hubert Frohman in Washington Cathedral, and archtiects Ralph Addams Cram and Robert Tappan in the Swedenborgian Church in Bryn Athyn.

The construction of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem at Bryn Athyn outside Philadelphia was an important event in Goodyear’s life. During its construction from approximately 1912 to 1917, architects Ralph Adams Cram and Robert Tappan, and attorney Raymond Pitcairn argued over the utilization of architectural refinements. Cram initially resisted their application in the church but eventually was convinced by Tappan and Pitcairn. In a letter to William Crocker, the editor of American Architect, Goodyear writes about the dedication ceremony of the church, which had occurred a few days earlier. He states that it was a memorable occasion for me, considering the ridicule and even malice to which I have been subjected, and the wide-spread influential denials still current in England and in France that the Middle Ages ever purposely constructed churches of the kind which is now seen at Bryn Athyn. On the whole, I am inclined to think that my presence at the dedication was the greatest event in my life.

William H. Goodyear died in 1923 of pneumonia and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Wilford S. Conrow, who had painted his portrait in 1916 [BMA, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 25.182], wrote a memorial to his life and work for the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly of July 1923. In this piece Conrow further emphasizes and praises the importance of the discovery of architectural refinements in Goodyear’s life and the value of his work to the fields of architecture and art. He concludes by stating that “our present duty, the responsibility that we must accept, is to preserve and spread this precious, long-lost knowledge in order that it may play its full, qualifying role in the creative arts of the future.”