Irving T. Bush - Contributions To Art and Architecture

Contributions To Art and Architecture

Within recent decades, scholarly architects have described and critiqued the buildings Irving T. Bush had commissioned. Perhaps mindful of the Dutch ancestry of his family (and of New York's), Bush's 1905 townhouse at 28 East 64th Street, Manhattan, by the firm of Kirby, Petit, and Green was "flamboyantly Jacobean, with a high, almost Flemish gable". (See the Bush Terminal article for a look at the Bush Terminal Building in Manhattan, also by Kirby, Petit, and Green in 1905.)

Bush commissioned southern California architect Wallace Neff to design his winter home at Mountain Lake Estates in Florida, near the residence (and later tower) of his father's former business partner, Edward W. Bok. Neff, who had recently been named "architect to the stars" by the Los Angeles Times, designed few houses outside California.

He also commissioned the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to design the grounds of the Florida estate. Olmsted was known not only as the son of Central Park's designer, but among numerous other accomplishments, was notable for re-designing the White House grounds in 1930.

After moving from his townhouse at East 64th Street, Bush lived in the 17-floor tower at 280 Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York, designed by Warren and Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, Michigan Central Station in Detroit and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.

Like other wealthy Americans, Irving T. Bush collected art. His portrait painting of the Russian princess Maria Worontzova (a name Anglicized as Vorontsov) by Franz Xaver Winterhalter was inherited by his niece and was only recently auctioned at Sotheby's in 2003. Bush's acquisition of a Portrait of Henry VII by Jehan de Perreal, a work from the early 16th century, made the news in 1929.

In 1922 Bush became one of the founding trustees of New York City's Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists' cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others. Also on the board were the Galleries' architect, William Adams Delano; Robert DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Clark.