The Walker Art Building as Seen through the Photography of Leon B. Strout
By Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Photographer Leon B. Strout (1869-1937) was something of a regular around Bowdoin’s campus for the better part of four decades. The College routinely hired him to snap senior portraits, capture athletic team photos, and document commencement and other major events. With his studio at 200 Maine Street just a short walk away, Strout likely found it easy enough to pop over to campus whenever a photographic opportunity recommended itself. Capitalizing on new developments in photography the first few years of the twentieth century, Strout was able to print and sell real photo postcards of campus scenes in his shop and at the college bookstore. Such keepsake images were popular with students and visitors alike. When the local newspaper, The Brunswick Record, began printing photographic images in its pages in the 1920s, Strout found another revenue source for selling images of the College and its happenings.
Of the nearly 6,000 images that make up the Leon B. Strout Collection at the Bowdoin College Library’s Department of Special Collections & Archives, nearly 400 document Bowdoin’s campus, buildings, and events, including many of and from the Walker Art Building. Constructed between 1892 and 1894, the Walker Art Building was designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead and White, one of the country’s most prominent architects.
Even before its completion, the Walker Art Building was impressive, as evidenced by Strout’s photograph of its construction. Taken while Strout was in his early 20s and relatively new to photography, his photograph (Figure 1: image 3709) documents the extensive scaffolding, elaborate wood formwork, and large-scale crane required to complete the building and its signature poured concrete coffered dome. Strout’s image, the only known one of the building under construction, also gives us a sense of the physical demands and real dangers faced by the building’s bricklayers and masons.
"Nineteenth-century construction photographs of Maine buildings are rare, especially of ones as significant as Bowdoin College's Walker Art Building. In 1892 Brunswick photographer Leon B. Strout captured this remarkable image of the art museum taking shape with intricate wooden scaffolding on the walls and a large crane atop the dome. Upon completion of the project, the campus would be graced with one of America's finest examples of Renaissance Revival architecture, the work of the noted New York architect Charles F. McKim."
–Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., H'08, Maine State Historian on Figure 1: Walker Art Building Under Construction, undated. M247i3709.
Strout returned to the Walker Art Building as a subject many times over his career. Among his favorite views were those seen from under and immediately outside the loggia, looking past the carved lions that flank the building’s main entry toward the chapel or Hubbard Hall. Born and trained in Boston, Strout practiced as a Pictorialist photographer in the spirit of F. Holland Day and Alfred Steiglitz. He was deeply interested in the effects of light and shadow and giving a painterly view to his images, as seen in his delicate rendering of the Walker Art Building’s columns (Figure 2: image 3652) and the artistic framing of the building viewed from a cope of trees nearby (Figure 3: image 4113). Others of Strout’s images are notable for the historical information they provide. For example, one undated image taken straight on of the building shows us that a large pair of urns was once part of the decorative program of the building’s exterior (Figure 4: image 3707).
Strout worked hard to make a living as a photographer in Brunswick, Maine. He succeeded in part because of his ability to capture as he described it a “wide variety of views.” In addition to working for the College and selling images as postcards and to the newspaper, Strout served as the resident photographer at the Poland Spring House resort for many years and ran an active studio practice. He also went to France following World War I as one of eight photographers to document the final resting place of fallen U.S. soldiers for the American Red Cross.
Thanks to generous funding from his descendants, particularly his great-granddaughter Kristin Strout, Special Collections & Archives has recently completed the digitization and online publication of Strout’s entire surviving photographic archives. Selections of these images are on view in the exhibition Wide Variety of Views: The Photography of Leon B. Strout throughout the summer on the second floor of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. A scholarly illustrated catalog of the same title with a lead essay by visual and cultural historian Libby Bischoff is forthcoming this Fall.
Kat Stefko
Interim Director of the College Library
With support from Laura Sprague, Senior Consulting Curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Anne Sauer, Interim Director of Special Collections & Archives and Archivist
