An Architect's Art

Stanford White sketched before he could spell his name, painted with lyric proficiency before he was out of his early teens. But Artist John La Farge (who claimed that he diverted Henry James from painting to writing) advised White that his bent was not for art but architecture; more money in it, too, and recognition. Architect White won both, designing such famed monuments as Manhattan's Washington Arch, Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Century and Metropolitan Clubs, and many of the buildings of New York University. But whenever he had an available moment, in summer trips through the Hudson River Valley and even during his honeymoon in Europe. Stanford White found time to draw.

Sometimes his sketches were nothing more than a two-line remembrance of the way a bit of hill met the sky or the strange slant to a tenement roof; often they were more explicit, recording texture and light as well as line, color as well as shape. By the time of his death in 1906. White had done well over a thousand drawings and watercolors; 40 of them were on view last week at Manhattan's Davis Galleries, exquisite if minor testaments to a major architect's first great love.

A few are landscapes--simple stretches of rivers and mountains, with nothing more architectural to them than an occasional bridge or a range of steps--and to them White lent the best of his sense of color. White's skies, like Turner's, open on a sudden drenching spectrum, but. unlike Turner, the colors are never more than mute. White's palette, even at its rawest, never offered an indelicate hue: violet was his moodiest color.

Most of his subjects were not plains but buildings; whatever the structure. White approached it with a painter's eye for the play of shadow and the effect of shape upon varying shape, seemingly as concerned with pictorial content as he was with underlying architecture. White's buildings were of course constructed from the most detailed blueprints, but they often appear as though he had rubbed a lamp, pointed to a drawing, and told the djinni to build just that.

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