Great Academician

Less than 24 hours after the death of Andrew Mellon (see p. 12), whose $9,000,000 art gallery for the city of Washington he had designed, Architect John Russell Pope died last week in Manhattan. The New York Times and Herald Tribune carried eulogistic editorials, at once praising and commemorating the era of U. S. architecture in which Pope ranked as a master.

Born in Manhattan in 1874, "Jack" Pope was the first student to win a scholarship to the American Academy in Rome founded by the late Charles Follem McKim. Three years in Europe supplied him with wide architectural learning and a love for the grand style. During the rest of his life Pope's imagination soared no further than the symmetries of Greek and Roman architecture. Such was the character of his period.

In practice in Manhattan after 1903, Architect Pope worked hard and resourcefully, designed show houses for wealthy people like Ogden Mills. Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt. In 1916 he won the year's award of the Architectural League with his design for the $2,000,000 Scottish Rite Temple in Washington, a massive affair of marble and bronze. In the one architectural movement of his time that was distinctly American--skyscraper building-- John Russell Pope took little interest. Neither was he affected by the style variously called Functionalism, Modernism. Internationalism, whose father was Frank Lloyd Wright, whose grandfather was Louis Sullivan. While that style was coming of age in the last decade, Architect Pope made Yale Neo-Gothic, Dartmouth Neo-Georgian, designed the grandiose mass of the Archives Building in Washington, adapted Rome's Pantheon for the Mellon gallery and again for the proposed Jefferson Memorial (TIME, April 19).

A great academician, Pope had been president of the American Academy in Rome since 1933. An amiable and elegant gentleman, he lived in Newport in a low, rambling mansion which he designed and called "The Weaves." The afternoon of his daughter Jane's party in 1933 he amazed swank Newport by opening his house to the public.

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