Background
Horace Trumbauer was born on December 28, 1868 in Philadelphia. She the son of Josiah Blyler Trumbauer, a salesman, and Mary Malvina (Fabel) Trumbauer.
(Original hand-painted architectural plans and original ph...)
Original hand-painted architectural plans and original photos produced on the date shown. Not copies or reproductions. Very scarce.
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Horace Trumbauer was born on December 28, 1868 in Philadelphia. She the son of Josiah Blyler Trumbauer, a salesman, and Mary Malvina (Fabel) Trumbauer.
Leaving the Philadelphia public schools at the age of sixteen, he completed a 6-year apprenticeship with G. W. and W. D. Hewitt.
He secured a job as office boy for the Philadelphia architects George W. and W. D. Hewitt. Here his flair for architectural design soon showed itself, and his only formal architectural training was gained as draftsman for the firm.
In 1892 he opened his own office and at once proved he was a man to be reckoned with by building "Gray Towers" (1894), a gray stone castellated country mansion in Glenside, Pa. (later taken over by Beaver College), for the sugar refiner William Welsh Harrison.
Harrison introduced Trumbauer to Peter A. B. Widener, and from that day forward he was the favorite architect of the Wideners and of their financial allies the Elkinses.
At Elkins Park, Pa. , the firm planned the mansion of William L. Elkins and the superb "Lynnewood Hall" of P. A. B. Widener (both 1898).
Other Widener commissions included the Widener Memorial Training School for Crippled Children (Philadelphia, 1901), the Widener Library at Harvard University (1914), and the Newport residence of Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice (1916). Mrs. Rice, by birth an Elkins, was the mother by her previous marriage of Harry Elkins Widener, in whose memory the Harvard library was presented. The Trumbauer firm was also responsible for the exquisite New York town house of Dr. and Mrs. Rice (1923).
Trumbauer understood, as did few other architects of his generation, that only a magnificent setting could hope to satisfy an American with a magnificent income. Relying on the splendid vocabulary of the French Renaissance, he saw to it that the firm built the Washington town house of Perry Belmont (1907), as well as those in New York of George J. Gould (1907), James B. Duke (1909), and James Speyer (1914). But this is only a sampling of his New York work. In addition to redecorating the town house of Cornelius Vanderbilt III (1914), the firm created the skyscraper for the New York Evening Post (1925), the office and showrooms of the Duveen Brothers (1910), and the majestic but delicate Wildenstein Gallery (1931).
The Trumbauer firm did not object to collaborating with other masters of the Louis Quinze style. A French architect, E. Sanson, was their associate in the design of the Belmont house, and another, René Sergent, in that of the Duveen building. Trumbauer's ambition could not be confined to the limits of any city. In the countryside his firm planned the gorgeous villa of Mrs. Hugh Dillman at Grosse Pointe, Mich. (1931), and "Whitemarsh Hall, " the imposing mansion at Flourtown near Chestnut Hill, Pa. , of Edward T. Stotesbury (1916). These were excellent advertisements of his skill in reviving the glories of eighteenth-century France; the gardens of the latter estate were laid out by another French architect, Jacques Gréber.
Meantime Trumbauer was not idle in Philadelphia itself. The firm designed the Ritz-Carlton and Benjamin Franklin hotels, the Widener Building, and the Free Library and prepared the plans for the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1919 - 28), with which other architects, including Clarence Zantzinger, were also associated. Finally, the firm drew the plans for the entire campus of Duke University at Durham, N. C. The Women's College, in the Georgian style, was begun in 1925; the Men's College, in the Gothic tradition, in 1927.
Once he brought in the business, he felt, and perhaps rightly, that his labors were over. "He never did a drawing after he set up the office, " one of his associates reported.
Until 1908 the chief designer in the Trumbauer firm was Frank Seeburger. When he left to go into business for himself, his place was taken by two men who were even more talented. One was William O. Frank, an unusually skillful graduate of Drexel Institute who got his first training with Henry D. Dagit. The other was Julian Abele, a fastidious and cultivated Negro, a graduate of the Institute for Colored Youth and of the University of Pennsylvania (1902). As time passed, Abele grew more and more fond of the work of the eighteenth-century French master Jacques-Ange Gabriel; evidence of this reverence may be found, for example, in the Wildenstein Gallery and the Rice houses. Once, when a visitor to the office happened to praise a rendering of the Free Library, he smiled gently and remarked, "The shadows are all mine. " Frank and Abele continued the Trumbauer firm after Trumbauer's death; on Abele's death in 1950, Frank took complete charge. Trumbauer died in Philadelphia in his seventieth year of cirrhosis of the liver and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery.
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Though Trumbauer smoked only modest cigars--his favorite was the inexpensive Bering panatela--he had no rivals when it came to tempting clients to spend immodest sums.
On April 25, 1902, he had married Sarah Thompson Williams, who had been divorced from C. Comly Smith. No children were born to the Trumbauers, and his wife died before him.