John Russell Pope

Pope was born in New York in 1874, the son of a successful portrait painter and his wife. He studied architecture at Columbia University and graduated in 1894. He was the first recipient of the Rome Prize to attend the newly founded American Academy in Rome, a training ground for the designers of the "American Renaissance." He would remain involved with the Academy until his death.

Pope traveled for two years through Italy and Greece, where he studied, sketched and made measured drawings of more Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance structures than he did of the remains of ancient buildings. Pope was one of the first architectural students to master the use of the large-format camera, with glass negatives. Pope attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1896, honing his Beaux-Arts style. After returning to New York in 1900, he worked for a few years in the office of Bruce Price before opening his own practice.

In 1912 he submitted several proposals for the Lincoln Memorial, but lost out to Henry Bacon.

In 1919, he developed a master plan for the future growth of Yale University. Pope's plan for Yale was significantly revised by James Gamble Rogers in 1921, who had more sympathy for the requirements of the city of New Haven, Connecticut. Rogers did keep the Collegiate Gothic unifying theme offered by Pope. Pope's original plan is a prime document in the City Beautiful movement in city planning. Pope won a Silver Medal in the 1932 Summer Olympics for his design of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

Pope designed additions to the Tate Gallery and British Museum in London, an unusual honor for an American architect, and the War Memorial at Montfaucon-d'Argonne, France. Popealso designed extensive alterations to Belcourt, the Newport residence of Oliver and Alva Belmont. The Georgian Revival residence he built in 1919 for Thomas H. Frothingham in Far Hills, New Jersey has been adapted as the United States Golf Association Museum.

Lesser known projects by Pope's firm include Union Station, Richmond, Virginia (1917), with a central rotunda capped with a low saucer dome; it now houses the Science Museum of Virginia; Branch House (1917–1919), a Tudor-style mansion in Richmond, now housing the Virginia Center for Architecture; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and in Washington, D.C., the National City Christian Church, Constitution Hall, American Pharmacists Association Building, Ward Homestead, and the National Archives Building (illustration, left). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he designed a severe neo-Georgian clubhouse for the University Club (1926). In Oneonta, New York, he designed the first building for Hartwick College: Bresee Hall was constructed in 1928. In 1932, he constructed the chapter house for Alpha Delta Phi at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Earlier, he designed the City Hall in Plattsburgh, New York, which was completed in 1917, and the city's Macdonough Monument, erected in 1926 to commemorate the naval victory of Commodore Macdonough in the Battle of Plattsburgh on September 11, 1814.

A 1991 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, John Russell Pope and the Building of the National Gallery of Art, spurred reappraisal of his work. For some time, it had been scorned and derided as overly historicist by many critics influenced by International Modernism.