Memorial Hall

Designed as a permanent monument to the Centennial, Memorial Hall was to become the most enduring and influential architectural achievement of Hermann J. Schwarzmann. The massive granite structure, surmounted by a glass and steel dome, was built to a design called Modern Renaissance, and held the Centennial art exhibition. John Sartain, chief of the Centennial Bureau of Art, gathered over 3,256 paintings and drawings, 627 works of sculpture, 431 works of applied art, and nearly 3000 groups of photographs, from 20 nations. So great was the response from exhibitors that a separate Art Annex had to be built, and photographs were displayed in a nearby Photographic Hall.

The paintings exhibited represented for the most part the prosaic art that was so popular at the time, when every picture had to tell a story and, if possible, point a moral. The most popular painting at the Centennial was perhaps The Marriage of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales by W.P. Frith. An official report noted:

the crowd in front of this picture was impassable from the opening to the closing of the doors, and it was necessary to have a guardian continually stationed there to protect the picture, and keep the crowd moving.

The most popular exhibits were the Italian and French sculptures, such as Aurora by J. Bailly. Americans were unaccustomed to artistic license in general, and to nudity in particular, and were variously captivated and appalled by the Europeans. A 34-year-old William James wrote to his brother Henry in Europe:

France has nothing to show... Not that there were any great American works, but there was nothing vile, such as every foreign school gives you in its degenerate pupils... without a grain of inward decency.

No doubt that some of the exhibits were indeed "vile." William Dean Howells remarked on a popular likeness of Cleopatra in Memorial Hall, done in wax and animated:

Attended by a single Cupid, whose ruff, as he moved his head, shows the jointure of his neck; a weary parrot on her finger opens and shuts its wings, and she rolls her head alluringly from side to side and faintly lifts her right arm and lets it drop again -- for twelve hours every day. Unlike many sculptures this has no vagueness of sentiment, and it explicitly advertises a museum of anatomy in Philadelphia.

Works exhibited were not avant-garde. The first Impressionist exhibition was held at Paris in 1874, and none of these painters were represented at Philadelphia. Auguste Rodin did exhibit some pieces in the Belgian section. More typical were works such as Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, by the dean of American sculptors Randolph Rogers, William Wetmore Story's Medea, and Howard Robert's Premiere Pose, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. More popular among some visitors were works such as The Dreaming Iolanthe, sculpted by the famed Butter Lady of Arkansas, Caroline S. Brooks, and packed in ice throughout the Centennial.

Memorial Hall became the model for a series of public buildings in Europe: the Reichstag Buildling in Berlin, designed 1882, built 1884-94; Reichsgericht in Leipzig, Czech National Museum in Prague, University Library in Strasbourg, etc.

© 2001 Free Library of Philadelphia