Joseph Morrill Wells

Joseph Morrill Wells was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts on March 1, 1853,[1] the son of Thomas Foster Wells (1822–1903) and his wife, Sarah Morrill Wells (1828–1897). Samuel Adams, the Boston brewer and patriot, was a great-great-grandfather. Joseph Wells's brother, Webster Wells, (1851–1916) was a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of numerous textbooks such as the Elementary Treatise on Logarithms (1878). His sister Anna Foster Wells (b. 1857) was a music teacher.

By 1849, the year Thomas Wells married Sarah Morrill, he was in partnership with John Emery Gowen, trading in West India goods and importing liquors and wine.[2] The business dated back to the days of Thomas Wells's great-grandfather, Captain Francis Wells, a wine merchant, shipper, and captain of the Hempstead Galley, the ship on which he brought his family in 1723 from England to Boston. In the 1850s, Wells and Gowen conducted marine salvage operations while selling deep-sea diving gear, doing business as "Wells & Gowen Submarine Armor."[3]

In 1860, Thomas and Sarah Wells lived at Roxbury with their four children,[4] but by 1870, the family was living in New York City at 9 Horatio Street ("between West and Hudson Streets"),[5] where they remained until about 1873,[6] and where Thomas Wells pursued his many business interests. By 1874, the family was living in a house at 137 Highland Street near Roxbury, from which Thomas Wells commuted to his office at 3 Merchants Row in Boston, where he worked in real estate.[7] In 1880, Thomas and Sarah Wells were living with their daughter Annie at Winchester, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, where the father worked as a "trader in stocks," and where for a time he was president of the Granular Metal Co.[8][9]

Joseph Wells attended the West Newton English and Classical School (aka the Allen School) in West Newton, Massachusetts, where he studied subjects such as art, music, dancing, and ethics, and where he was required to keep a daily journal (which he continued to keep for the rest of his life). He worked in Boston for the architects Peabody & Stearns from 1874 to 1875, and for the architect Clarence S. Luce from 1875 to 1878.[10] In January 1877, the New York architect Richard Morris Hunt published a drawing signed by Wells,[11] but this may have been a freelance commission.

In 1879, Wells joined McKim, Mead & White and remained there until his death in 1890. Notwithstanding his many contributions to the firm's work, he was obscure in life and for a time thereafter (in 1908, the artist Will Low wrote that Wells's "practice was absorbed in that of the firm of architects where he was employed," and in 1913, the critic Royal Cortissoz called him "a man of genius unknown to the outer world and, indeed, no more familiar to many of the younger generation in his profession..."). His current reputation as having been an important member of the firm derives in part from the recollections of the architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle, who for a time worked alongside Wells, and recalled him in an article written in 1934.[12] According to Magonigle, the architect Charles McKim once told him that he had "learned more from [Wells] than from any other source."[13] Magonigle claimed that it was Wells who "weaned" the architect Stanford White away from the "romantic and picturesque forms" he admired before he entered his classical phase in the mid-1880s. He credited Wells with the design (based on White's preliminary sketches) of the firm's Villard Houses (1884), and the detailing of the facade of the Century Association's New York clubhouse (1891).

Earlier, in 1924, Magonigle made even greater claims for Wells, writing that "there was a moment of great promise in the history of American design when it looked as though the influence of the genius of Joseph Morrill Wells would direct American thought toward a virile and fruitful eclecticism that would lead in its turn toward an architecture we could fairly call our own...but Wells died in the very early nineties...the [1893 Chicago] World's Fair came on and turned our minds toward Greece and Rome, and another Classic revival ensued...and so began the baneful use of precedent..."[14]

The historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, writing in 1972, saw Wells's design for the Villard Houses not only as a harbinger of the shift to the classical and symmetrical, but also as part of a broader transition from European to American leadership in architectural design, writing that "a change in American architecture came...in the early eighties with the designing and building of the Villard houses in New York." According to Hitchcock, "the rejection of the English High Victorian and even of Shavian-manorial irregularity and picturesqueness[15] is here at its extreme even at the very beginning. It was, moreover, almost immediately reflected in the planning of the firm's H.A.C. Taylor house in Newport, a year or two later, in which there was a return to the formal Anglo-Palladian mode of the eighteenth century." Noting that the classical trend came several years later to England, Hitchcock opined that "this was the point where the tide turns, when American leadership, although not yet much followed, was beginning to be recognized abroad."[16]

Others took a more measured view of Wells's influence. Charles Baldwin, Stanford White's biographer, acknowledged Wells's having introduced the Renaissance to the firm with his facades for the Villard Houses, but attributed White's shift to the classical more to his 1884 European honeymoon, writing, "...White's wedding trip through Europe opened his eyes. Returning, supported by Wells, he began to practice — and preach — Italian Renaissance as a style and a tradition better suited to American needs than any or all phases of Gothic, Romanesque, or...strictly classical architecture."[17] William Mitchell Kendall, who became a partner in the firm in 1906, recalled Wells's role as having been subsidiary to those of the partners: "So far as I know his work was confined to the details of building. In that he was supreme. Nobody before or since has equalled him in the appropriateness and scale of his ornamentation: and this of course gave great character to the buildings he decorated. But the ensemble, and by implication, the kind of decoration, was invariably decided by a member of the firm."[18]

Nonetheless, there were instances where Wells had greater responsibility for the composition. William R. Mead, a partner more inclined to manage than design, collaborated with Wells on major projects in Kansas City and Omaha for the New York Life Insurance Company, projects that failed to interest McKim or White, and therefore gave Wells a significant say in the overall design.[19] Years later, Mead wrote of Wells's status as first among equals among the firm's employees during its early days: "In 1879, shortly before the establishment of the firm, Joseph M. Wells came into our office...I suppose he had merely a good high school education, but he was one of the most learned young men in literature and art whom I have ever met, and a most original thinker...in his quiet, almost unsocial, way he immediately made an impression upon all of us, and became our intimate friend and associate, not only in our work but in our daily lives...I recall the times when we four were working together in the bonds of true fellowship."[20]

Wells's last assignment at McKim, Mead & White was to design the details for Madison Square Garden (completed in 1890), but illness kept him from the task. He died of pneumonia on February 2, 1890.[21]

Joseph Wells was buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford, Massachusetts, where Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens erected a tombstone in the form of a tall Greek stele. The tombstone was removed in 2019, restored and reinstalled in May 2020.

• "Joseph Morrill Wells" (Obituary), Architecture and Building, Vol XII, No. 7 (February 1890).
• Frank E. Kidder. The Architect's and Builder's Pocket-Book (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1902).
• Will Hicok Low. A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873–1900 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), pp. 275–277.
• Royal Cortissoz. Art and Common Sense (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), pp. 419–421.
• Charles Moore. The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim (New York: Houghton Miflin, 1929).
• Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), pp. 156, 161, 172.
• Charles C. Baldwin. Stanford White (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1931).
• Mosette Broderick and William C. Shopsin. The Villard Houses; Life Story of a Landmark (New York: Viking Press, 1980).
• Leland M. Roth. McKim, Mead & White, Architects (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).
• Samuel G. White. The Houses of McKim, Mead & White (New York: Rizzoli, 1998).
• Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks (New York: Rizzoli, 2003).
• Samuel G. White and Elizabeth White. Stanford White Architect (New York: Rizzoli, 2008).
• Mosette Broderick. Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010).
• Samuel G. White. Stanford White in Detail (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2020).