Chocolate comes from this tree, Theobroma cacao, here seen growing in the Fern Room at Phipps Conservatory. Each of those fruits bears a number of bitter seeds, known as “cocoa beans,” from which chocolate is made. The Phipps tree is unusually productive.
Until April 4, the Frick is hosting an exhibit called “Impressionist to Modernist: Masterworks of Early Photography.” The “early” part is debatable—the exhibit begins in the 1880s and concludes in the 1930s, by which time photography was already a century old. Father Pitt would call these works “middle” photography. There is no room for debate on the quality of the exhibit itself: all the artistic possibilities of photography as a medium are on display. It was enough to inspire old Pa Pitt to try some work in black and white, so here are some ducks:
Well, it’s not Steichen, but Father Pitt liked the ripply reflections of cattail stalks.
A good number of artists have been born in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, and some of them even have large museums here dedicated to their works. (Father Pitt is thinking, of course, of the John A Hermann, Jr., Memorial Art Museum in Bellevue. What were you thinking of?) But we could argue that the one who made the most lasting contribution to the city of his own free will was John White Alexander, whose mural composition Apotheosis of Pittsburgh covers thousands of square feet in the splendid Grand Staircase in the Carnegie. Alexander was born in Allegheny in 1856, and the Grand Staircase was his last significant work, so we can say that he began and ended his work here. A rather fawning (but perhaps justifiably so) 1908 article in The International Studio describes the high position he had reached in the world of art, and gives us good monochrome reproductions of a number of Alexander’s works, especially portraits. Here is an album of those pictures, in tribute to one of Pittsburgh’s great artists.
Portrait of Mrs. H.
Portrait of Fritz (Frits) Thaulow.
Portrait: Sisters.
Portrait of Walt Whitman.
Portrait of Miss R.
Pen Sketch of Mark Twain.
Portrait of Miss B.
Portrait of Mrs. R.
Fragment of Decoration, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
Two carved Romanesque faces on the Fourth Avenue side of the Times Building.
Yesterday Father Pitt got a preview of the show, which is up to the usual standard of whimsy and spectacle.
These orchids are identified only as “Phalaenopsis Group,” which probably means that somewhere along the line the identifying tags were lost.
John T. Comes (sometimes spelled Comès) designed a splendid Romanesque church for this congregation. It was built, however, on an improbably narrow street in the most crowded section of Lower Lawrenceville, so it is impossible to see the front as Comes designed it—unless we appeal to technology, merging fifteen separate photographs to produce one overall picture. In spite of the distortion caused by taking the pictures from a low position and altering the perspective, this imperfect picture comes very close to presenting the front of the church as the architect drew it.
In the distance, the Tower at PNC Plaza looms over the next block.
Franklin Toker suggests that, per square foot, this is the most expensive church ever built in America. It was built with Mellon money, so it is sometimes called the Mellon Fire Escape by locals who see it as an atonement for the sins inevitable on the way to becoming the richest family in America; but the congregation prefers the nickname “Cathedral of Hope.” The architect was Ralph Adams Cram, who could easily be called America’s greatest Gothic architect, and the Mellons gave him free rein and an unlimited budget. The result was Cram’s ultimate fantasy Gothic cathedral, whose massive central tower dominates the skyline of the neighborhood. To the left, in the distance, we see the Highland Building.
If you love architecture, Fourth Avenue gives you a more varied aesthetic experience per block than any other street in the city. Here we have the Richardsonian Romanesque style as it applies to a proto-skyscraper: the Fidelity Building, designed by James T. Steen. It opened in 1889, when Richardson’s courthouse on Grant Street was brand new. Its seven floors are close to the limit for pre-steel-cage architecture. Only a year after this building opened, construction began on the Conestoga Building on Smithfield Street, the first steel-cage building in Pittsburgh.
The photograph is huge, by the way: at full size it’s 8.88 megabytes, so don’t click on it on a metered connection. Once again, old Pa Pitt has put it together from multiple photographs, which was the only way to get the whole front of the building from across the street.
