Princeton and the Gothic Revival: 1870–1930 investigates Americans’ changing attitudes to the art, architecture, and style of the Middle Ages through the lens of Princeton University around the turn of the twentieth century.
The exhibition considers how and why an architectural mode that was first used in the United States for picturesque mansions of the wealthy evolved into a style that was understood as particularly appropriate for universities. Drawing from the singular resources of Princeton’s Firestone Library and University Archives, along with the collections of the Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other institutions, Princeton and the Gothic Revival explores the central role Princeton played in the Gothic Revival movement and the uses of architecture to define a great modern university.
The exhibition introduces the American interpretation of the Gothic Revival, which began in England in the mid-eighteenth century but did not become popular in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. “Gothic” at that time often meant a picturesque form of architecture and decorative arts, epitomized by the designs of the preeminent Gothic Revival architect A. J. Davis. Davis’s design for Glen Ellen, generally acknowledged as the first Gothic Revival mansion in the United States, exhibits this picturesque approach, with its crenellated roofline, tower, and large bay window.
The exhibition shifts to the campus of what was then the College of New Jersey, beginning with an eclectic approach to the art and style of the Middle Ages during the 1870s and 1880s. This era saw the construction of a number of lavish High Victorian Gothic buildings financed by wealthy patrons—including industrialist and banker Henry G. Marquand, who donated funds to build a new chapel, named in his honor, which formerly stood on the site of what is now McCosh quadrangle. Marquand Chapel, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt, featured decorations by some of the most sought-after artists of the day, including Louis Comfort Tiffany, John La Farge, Augustus Saint- Gaudens, Frederic Crowninshield, and Francis Lathrop. The building incorporated Gothic forms with other architectural styles to replicate on the University’s campus the “Aesthetic” approach popular in domestic interiors of the period.
The second half of the exhibition investigates the use of medieval revival buildings to communicate the values of a new American model of higher education. This model was in part influenced by the trend toward scientific study, an approach championed by University President James McCosh. New fields devoted to object-based study, including biology and art history, were added to the curriculum. Both were housed in rather sober (and inexpensively constructed) Romanesque Revival buildings. The focus on education, not luxuries, was echoed in the collections of the new Museum of Historic Art, which included pottery, plaster casts, medieval ivories, and small-scale sculptures. Although most of these objects were not considered masterpieces, they provided the faculty and students with opportunities to engage in close looking at authentic works of art at a price the new museum could afford.
The school was rechristened Princeton University as part of the celebration surrounding its 150th anniversary in 1896. Flush with money from donors to the sesquicentennial campaign and eager to build a campus that would reflect the University’s status on the world stage, the administration decreed that all new buildings would be designed in the Collegiate Gothic Revival style. This style refers to fourteenth- to sixteenth-century English architecture, specifically that of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, without copying any particular model. A set of watercolors documents the design process for University Chapel, which borrowed elements from both French and English precedents. The chapel, at the time the second-largest university chapel in the world, was a place of grandeur but also refuge in the years following the First World War, and it continues to serve as one of the iconic images of the campus.
By making an architectural connection between Princeton and its academic predecessors, the University employed the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for American higher education. By 1930, the end date of the exhibition, the Gothic Revival was considered passé in larger architectural circles, yet the continued commissioning of Collegiate Gothic buildings—witness the twenty-first-century Gothic Whitman Hall—speaks eloquently to the power of these buildings to both create and sustain a collective vision of academe in modern America.
