The late Mr. Richardson, even to
a comparatively late period in his professional career, was afflicted
with the usual bashfulness about having his work published. We well
remember the solicitations, the refusals, the renewed appeals, and,
finally, the reluctant and conditional assent to have a single gelatine
print from one of his perspectives published. This was the drawing, we
think, of the Woburn Library, and was accompanied by a plan. Finding
that he had suffered no severe injury from this exposure of his design
to the gaze of the cold world, Mr. Richardson soon became one of our
kindest friends, and if reputation and employment are things to be
desired by an architect, we may say with all due modesty that what he
did for us was repaid to him a hundred-fold, for, great as was his
talent, it must, without the publicity given to his work through means
like ours, have had for years only a local influence. As it was,
however, every issue of ours with one of his designs was studied in a
thousand offices and imitated in hundreds; his name was in the mouths of
all architects throughout the Union; our plates were reproduced abroad;
the illustrated magazines, finding his reputation already made in the
profession, hastened to spread it among the public; and at his lamented
death, a few years later, he was the central figure of American
architecture.
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