Architecture & Landscape database

By Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.

With the emergence of the architectural profession in Maine in the mid-nineteenth century, architects provided renderings to help clients envision proposed houses and buildings. These artistic perspective drawings differ from the sets of working drawings prepared for construction purposes that included elevations, floor plans, framing plans, and building details.

One of the first Maine architects to make renderings, also known as presentation drawings, was Charles A. Alexander, a talented young Boston native, who practiced in Portland from 1851 to 1863. The Maine Historical Society owns Alexander’s 1856 rendering of Bramhall, the Western Promenade Italianate mansion of John Bundy Brown, Portland’s leading businessman. Showing the west elevation, this engaging presentation drawing is painted in watercolors with skillful shading and shadowing. Alexander’s 1868 rendering of Brown’s Falmouth Hotel served as the basis for a lithograph advertising the opening of Portland’s grandest nineteenth century hotel.

During his sixty years as an architect, John Calvin Stevens frequently used pen and ink and watercolor renderings to show clients his vision for their building projects. A gifted artist, Stevens made most of these renderings himself. The Stevens Collection at the Maine Historical Society includes several notable examples, including St. Barnabas’s Episcopal Church in Rumford of 1904 and the Hannaford Brothers Warehouse of 1919-20 in Portland.

On rare occasions Stevens turned to professional architectural delineators such as David A. Gregg of Boston, who created the beautiful 1909 perspective drawing of the Sweat Memorial Gallery, now part of the Portland Museum of Art. The impressive 1909 watercolor for the Portland City Hall was produced by the principal architects, Carrere and Hastings of New York for a project in which the Stevens firm served as associate architects.

A contemporary of John Calvin Stevens, George M. Coombs of Lewiston, practiced architecture from 1872 until his death in 1909. In 1891 he hired twenty- year-old Harry C. Wilkinson, who quickly demonstrated an extraordinary talent for architectural rendering. Five years later, Coombs invited Wilkinson to help form the firm of Coombs, Gibbs and Wilkinson. Between 1896 and 1899 the partnership designed changes to the Mansion House, the first inn at the Ricker family’s famous Poland Spring resort. The Maine Historical Society owns Wilkinson’s pencil and wash drawing of Mansion House alterations made during this period.

In 1899 Harry C. Wilkinson left Lewiston to become a draftsman and renderer for the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. He maintained his connection to the Rickers, who acquired the Bay Point Hotel in Rockland in 1902, renaming it the Samoset Hotel. That year Wilkinson provided the Rickers with a dramatic pencil rendering showing the proposed remodeling and expansion of their new hotel.

By the early twentieth century, several Maine architects relied on professional delineators for their renderings. The most popular of these artists was Water M. Campbell of Boston, who was active as an architectural illustrator from 1910 until his death in 1945. Several of Campbell’s renderings from the 1920s are owned by the Maine Historical Society, including Elder’s Café in Portland designed by Webster and Libby and the Eastland Hotel in Portland and the Houlton Hotel by Herbert W. Rhodes.

In recent decades, architectural rendering in pencil, ink, and watercolors has been replaced by digitally generated illustrations and simulations. Fortunately, the Maine Historical Society has preserved outstanding examples of the render’s art from 1850 to 1950, the period in which architectural rendering flourished in the state.