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WORK TITLE: Henry Howard: Louisiana’s Architect
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1948
WEBSITE:
CITY: New Orleans
STATE: LA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.knowla.org/entry/1140/&view=summary * http://www.hnoc.org/publications/henryhoward.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Jan White (deceased).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, architectural photographer, and researcher.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Henry Howard
Originally from Georgia, Robert S. Brantley is an architectural photographer, researcher, and writer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Brantley is a contributor to periodicals and books, often contributing photographs with his late wife, Jan White Brantley. He is also coauthor with Victor McGee of Henry Howard: Louisiana’s Architect. A nineteenth-century architect who was born in Ireland, Howard is known for his distinctive designs that combined American and European trends and departed rom the established styles of the time.
Howard first arrived in New Orleans around 1837, a year after he started out as a carpenter and stair builder in New York. He quickly established a reputation for his creative designs and eventually designed a wide range of distinctive houses and civic buildings in New Orleans and the surrounding area until his career ended in 1884. Although he had widespread recognition throughout most of his career, Howard was largely forgotten by the time of his death by a public that favored more decorative Victorian styles. Furthermore, another architct named James Gallier was given credit for some of Howard’s work. In their book, Brantley and McGee seek to reestablish Howard’s reputation as they detail his life and work.
Featuring hundreds of contemporary and archival images, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of Howard’s work over a 40-year career, presented chronologically. Brantley and McGee make a special point to establish an unquestionable authentication of Howard’s many aesthetic contributions to South’s urban and rural areas. Born in Cork, Ireland in 1818, Howard was the son of a house builder and followed in his father’s trade. He immigrated to New York in 1836 in hopes of studying architecture. When his study plans went awry, he decided to move to New Orleans. Many of Howard’s buildings represented various interpretations of the Greek Revival style, a popular architectural movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that featured classical round columns. Brantley and McGee point out that Howard was accomplished in a white race of architectural typologies, revealed by his designs of Saints Peter and Paul Church and the Carrollton courthouse.
Howard was best known for his resplendent town and plantation houses. According to the authors, another influence on his architectural designs was the Regency style of the early nineteenth century, which he first became acquainted with in Ireland. The book is based on a variety of primary sources, including Howard’s papers, court and senses records, and family archives. Clifton Ellis, writing for the Journal of Southern History, was impressed by the illustrated catalog at the end of the book but felt that the illustrations and pictures should have been interspersed throughout the text in parts that the specific buildings were discussed. Nevertheless, Ellis went on to call Henry Howard “a feast for the eyes,” adding later that the book “is a fascinating and well-researched biography of Louisiana’s most prolific antebellum architect.”
Southern Comfort and The Pitot House
Howard also serves as a photographer and/or illustrator of a number of architectural books focusing on architecture in the American South, including books for the “Louisiana Landmark” series. For example, he and his late wife supplied the photographs for Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans by Frederick S. Starr. A Reference & Research Book News contributor called Southern Comfort “a blend of architecture and history.”
The Brantleys also supplied the photography for The Pitot House: A Landmark on Bayou St. John by James Wade. The full-color coffee-table book features the Pitot House, a historic landmark in New Orleans that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. An eighteenth-century Creole colonial country home first build in 1708, the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It serves as the headquarters of the Louisiana Landmark Society, which had the building moved several blocks from its original location, where it was scheduled for demolition. An Internet Bookwatch contributor commended the modern and vintage photography included in the book for showcasing “the beauty of the architecture and design.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Internet Bookwatch, January, 2015, review of The Pitot House: A Landmark on Bayou St. John.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Clifton Ellis, review of Henry Howard: Louisiana’s Architect, p. 676.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2006, review of Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans.
ONLINE
Historic New Orleans Collection Web site, http://www.hnoc.org/ (March 16, 2017), review of Henry Howard.*
LC control no.: n 89116925
Personal name heading:
Brantley, Robert S.
Found in: Starr, S.F. Southern comfort, c1989: t.p. (Robert S.
Brantley)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Henry Howard: Louisiana's Architect
Henry Howard: Louisiana's Architect
by Robert S. Brantley with Victor McGee
photographs by Robert S. Brantley and Jan White Brantley
Published by The Historic New Orleans Collection and Princeton Architectural Press, 2015
$60 • hardcover • 8.9 x 12 inches • 352 pages • 330 color images
ISBN 978-1-61689-278-4
One of the nineteenth century’s most prolific architects but also, until recently, one of the most historically elusive, Henry Howard (1818–1884) left an indelible mark on the landscape of his adopted home, Louisiana.
Born in Ireland, Howard immigrated to New York in the mid-1830s. Within two years he followed his brother south to New Orleans, the nation’s third-largest city and the center of a flourishing plantation economy. Through the following decades, Howard and the city would thrive together.
Working twenty-hour days juggling private, ecclesiastical, and civic commissions, Howard gave Louisiana some of its most iconic structures: the Pontalba buildings on New Orleans’s Jackson Square, the Robert Short house in the Garden District, and a string of legendary plantation houses along the Mississippi River. At a time when most architects also acted as builders, Howard worked almost exclusively as a designer, a practice that helps explain the staggering variety and volume of his known works. And yet his name seldom appears in the same breath as those of his more famous contemporaries, architects James Gallier and James Dakin. Indeed, some of his greatest designs, most notably Belle Grove Plantation, were for decades attributed to others. The photographer and architectural historian Robert S. Brantley provides a comprehensive survey of Howard’s career in this meticulously researched collection. Lavishly illustrated with photographs both new and historical, and interspersed with archival drawings and plans, Henry Howard: Louisiana’s Architect restores its subject to his rightful place in the pantheon of southern architects.
Robert S. Brantley is a New Orleans–based architectural photographer, researcher, and writer. His work has appeared independently and with that of his late wife, Jan White Brantley, in numerous magazine articles and books on New Orleans and Louisiana. Originally from Georgia, he has made New Orleans his home since 1977.
Robert S. Brantley is a New Orleans–based architectural photographer whose work has appeared in numerous design magazines and books about New Orleans
Henry Howard: Louisiana's Architect
Clifton Ellis
82.3 (Aug. 2016): p676.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Henry Howard: Louisiana's Architect. By Robert S. Brantley, with Victor McGee. (New Orleans and New York: The Historic New Orleans Collection and Princeton Architectural Press, 2015. Pp. 352. $60.00, ISBN 978-1-61689-278-4.)
This copiously illustrated volume is a fascinating and well-researched biography of Louisiana's most prolific antebellum architect, Henry Howard, who practiced in New Orleans and its vicinity between 1837 and 1884, designing and building many of Louisiana's most iconic buildings. Unfortunately, by the time of his death much of Howard's work was unfashionable and easily forgotten by a public that had become infatuated with exuberant Victorian styles. Worse still, many of Howard's buildings were attributed to his contemporary James Gallier, whose place in history was assured by the book American Builders General Price Book and Estimator (1833), which was widely available. Robert S. Brantley seeks to set the record straight about Henry Howard and his remarkable contribution to Louisiana's architectural and urban heritage.
Howard was born in 1818 into an Anglo-Irish family in Cork, Ireland. Howard's father was a house builder, and Howard took up the same profession, eventually immigrating to New York in 1836 hoping to study architecture with an American architect. Thwarted in New York, Howard moved to New Orleans in 1837, where he applied his talents with great success until his death. Howard helped shape the built environment of the city and its hinterland with his various interpretations of the Greek Revival style, leaving a significant body of work that today so enriches the spatial and visual experience of New Orleans. He was adept at all building typologies, as evidenced in his Carrollton Courthouse, Saints Peter and Paul Church, and St. Anna's Asylum, although he is best known for his sumptuous town houses and plantation houses. One of his best-known works is the Pontalba Apartments in Jackson Square, an urban intervention that finally brought definition and scale to the famous park at the heart of the original city.
The book is a compelling read. The author has expertly intertwined the man and his work so that to talk about one is to necessarily talk about the other. The narrative is chronological, beginning with Howard's training as a builder in Ireland, where he absorbed the Regency style of the early nineteenth century, particularly its innovative room arrangements and geometries. This style, the author claims, is the source of some of Howard's unusual plans for houses, like the famous Woodlawn Plantation and its nearly identical neighbor, Madewood Plantation, in Assumption Parish and the very unusual Belle Grove Plantation in Iberville Parish. Whatever his inspirations, Howard was an innovative and meticulous architect.
The author draws from a large number of primary sources, most especially from the papers of Howard, but also from court records, census records, and various family archives. The book is exceptionally well illustrated with historic photographs from various archives, especially commissioned color photographs, plans from the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the carefully drawn and watercolored cadastral plans of the New Orleans Notarial Archives. The illustrated catalog at the end of the book shows just how prolific Howard was. The book is a feast for the eyes. Unfortunately, none of these images are numbered either in the text or in the captions. Anyone browsing through the book who is particularly taken by an image will be obliged to read carefully through the text of the pages before or after the image in an attempt to find more information.
The research is sound, but social and cultural historians might be disappointed by the lack of analysis and interpretation of Howard's unusual plans for these slaveholding households. Brantley's goal, however, was not to write a cultural history. He sought to recover the work and reputation of a remarkable architect whose legacy is part of New Orleans's unique heritage. Brantley has accomplished this goal admirably.
CLIFTON ELLIS
Texas Tech University
Ellis, Clifton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ellis, Clifton. "Henry Howard: Louisiana's Architect." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 676+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447774&it=r&asid=0159db6ad013ca85e87b69f455e41bec. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447774
Southern comfort; the Garden District of New Orleans
21.1 (Feb. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
1568985460
Southern comfort; the Garden District of New Orleans.
Starr, S. Frederick.
Princeton Architectural Pr.
2005
265 pages
$24.95
Paperback
The Flora Levy humanities series
F379
Much like New Orleans itself, this book is a blend of architecture and history in the first large study of the historic Garden District suburb, and spans from the early to late nineteenth century. Starr discusses the architecture and culture of the area and people relating to the Americanization of New Orleans, patrons, antebellum style, specific architects and builders, slaves and servants, the area's "culture of comfort," the Civil War, and after the war. A chapter is devoted to magnate and patron James Robb. Interspersed are many color photographs of houses and landmarks by Robert S. Brantley and Jan White Brantley. Starr, a historian, is the author of other books on New Orleans.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Southern comfort; the Garden District of New Orleans." Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA141643621&it=r&asid=7cfde0fb54ff540ef8bd41c95ff93aff. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A141643621
The Pitot House
(Jan. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Pitot House
James Wade, author
Robert S. Brantley and Jan White Brantley, photographers
Pelican Publishing Company
1000 Burmaster Street
Gretna, LA 70053-2246
9781455619320 $24.95 www.pelicanpub.com
Part of the Louisiana Landmark Series, and also available as an ebook, The Pitot House: A Landmark on Bayou St. John is a full-color coffee-table book showcasing a historic work of architecture, first constructed on the bayou in 1708. Both modern color and vintage black-and-white photography reveal the beauty of the architecture and design of this stately home, exemplary of Creole architecture, and the text relates its storied history, including technological improvements added to it as the decades progressed. The Pitot House is a choice pick for architecture shelves or casual browsers, highly recommended.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Pitot House." Internet Bookwatch, Jan. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA397580756&it=r&asid=2c1e597dcd77aab3704ea0b4198a2a15. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A397580756