Arthur Rotch was an American architect. He was a partner of Rotch & Tilden (Boston) with George Thomas Tilden.
Background
Arthur Rotch was born in Boston, the son of Benjamin Smith and Annie Bigelow (Lawrence) Rotch and brother of Abbott Lawrence Rotch. He was a grandson of Abbott Lawrence and a great-great-grandson of William Rotch of Nantucket. His immigrant ancestor on his father's side was an earlier William Rotch, who was in Salem before 1692 and went to Provincetown, Massachussets, in 1719, and whose son Joseph, moving to Dartmouth, on Buzzard's Bay, in 1765 to become a whaler, was one of the founders of the town of New Bedford.
Education
Arthur was educated at Mr. Dixwell's school in Boston and then at Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1871. He had long been interested in architecture, and in the fall entered the school of architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained two years, leaving to go to Paris and enter the École des Beaux-Arts. In Europe he spent a leisurely period of almost seven years, traveling and studying not only architecture but painting--water color and decorative--as well.
Career
While in France Rotch was in charge of the restoration of the Château de Chenonceau. Shortly after his return to Boston, he formed, in 1880, a partnership with George T. Tilden. Rotch and Tilden's work, which was principally domestic and ecclesiastical, comprised large houses in Boston, Washington, Bar Harbor, and Lenox, and the Churches of the Messiah and the Ascension in Boston, and of the Holy Spirit in Mattapan, Massachussets. It also included the art museum at Wellesley College, the Rindge Manual Training School at Cambridge, the gymnasium of Phillips Exeter Academy at Exeter, N. H. , and public libraries at Bridgewater and Groton, Massachussets, and Eastport, Me.
He had been for some time troubled with severe rheumatism, and the European trip did not help him; a trip south in the winter of 1893-94 was equally fruitless. He died the following summer at his summer home in Beverly, Massachussets.
A man of large means, he stinted neither time nor money in aiding his beloved profession. He was a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (incidentally, an accomplished water colorist and a frequent exhibitor both in Boston and New York), and he was influential in the founding of the Rotch Traveling Scholarship endowed by his father in 1884 to enable draftsmen or architects under thirty who have worked two years in a Massachusetts office to have two years of study abroad. Moreover, he furnished the architectural library of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and when the Harvard School of Architecture was founded in 1893 he financed its entire first year at his own expense.
Achievements
Rotch is important for reasons far more significant than his own architectural work, which is often tentative and inconclusive. It is true that it is frequently more polished, more advanced than other work of the time, which was still trying vainly to follow the creative genius of H. H. Richardson and achieving for the most part only a pallidly picturesque incoherence; Ventfort Hall, at Lenox, is notably good Jacobean for the early nineties, and the Mattapan church, in the mid-eighties, remarkable in its attempt to achieve both academic polish and simple, direct picturesqueness. But Rotch's most important contribution was to the taste of his time and to architectural education. On his death he left $25, 000 to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and $40, 000 to the school of architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Connections
Rotch married, November 16, 1892, Lisette de Wolf Colt.
