Arthur HEUN
(Saginaw 1866 - Chicago 1946)
‘Frogner’: The House of Fredrik Herman Gade, 333 N. Green Bay Road, Lake Forest, Illinois
Watercolour and gouache.
Stamped with the architect’s stamp AH (not in Lugt) at the lower right.
383 x 673 mm. (15 1/8 x 26 1/2 in.)
Stamped with the architect’s stamp AH (not in Lugt) at the lower right.
383 x 673 mm. (15 1/8 x 26 1/2 in.)
This fine watercolour by Arthur Heun depicts his design for the Lake Forest home of the attorney and future diplomat Fredrik Herman Gade (1871-1943). Of Norwegian birth and upbringing, Gade settled in America in 1888, enrolling at Harvard University Law School the following year. In May 1897 he married Alice Garfield King, and the couple settled in Lake Forest, where Gade served several terms as mayor between 1903 and 1906 and again between 1909 and 1910. Set on five acres of land at 335 North Green Bay Road in Lake Forest, Heun’s home for the Gades was built in the late 1890s, soon after their marriage. The house was named ‘Frogner’ by Gade, in memory of the area of his childhood home in Oslo in Norway. After the Second World War the house became the home of Volney W. and Adair Orr Foster and their three children. The Arts and Crafts style house designed by Heun at 335 North Green Bay Road remains largely unchanged today, and is listed in the U.S. federal government’s National Register of Historic Places.
As noted by an exhibition label pasted onto the wooden backboard of its frame, the present sheet was included in the 13th annual exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club in 1900, although it is not listed in the catalogue. Heun’s office address at this time – Suite 1300 in the Ellsworth Building at 355 Dearborn Street in Chicago – is also written on the same exhibition label. Two further drawings by Arthur Heun were included in the 1900 Chicago Architectural Club exhibition; both were for the ‘Villa Crest’, built as a summer home in Manchester, Massachusetts, for the Walter D. Denegre family.
As noted by an exhibition label pasted onto the wooden backboard of its frame, the present sheet was included in the 13th annual exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club in 1900, although it is not listed in the catalogue. Heun’s office address at this time – Suite 1300 in the Ellsworth Building at 355 Dearborn Street in Chicago – is also written on the same exhibition label. Two further drawings by Arthur Heun were included in the 1900 Chicago Architectural Club exhibition; both were for the ‘Villa Crest’, built as a summer home in Manchester, Massachusetts, for the Walter D. Denegre family.
Born in Michigan, Arthur Heun studied architecture at the University of Michigan and was apprenticed to his uncle, the German-born architect Ludwig Volusin Bude, in Grand Rapids. Heun began his career working as a draughtsman for the architectural firm of Francis M. Whitehouse in Chicago, one of the leading residential architects in the city at the end of the 19th century. When Whitehouse retired, at the height of his career and soon after completing the Choral Hall for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Heun took over his clientele and established his own practice, likewise specializing in residential commissions. Among his most significant early projects were several homes in the affluent Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, notably ‘Ardleigh’, an Elizabethan-style house built for the merchant and philanthropist John V. Farwell in 1896, and the neighbouring ‘Edgewood’, commissioned by Farwell’s brother Francis, as well as Mellody Farm, a very large estate built between 1904 and 1908 for J. Ogden Armour, the second wealthiest man in America at the time.
Heun continued to work in Chicago and Lake Forest for much of his career and counted among his clients such prominent citizens as William McCormick Blair, Albert Loeb, Astor Street and Frank Stout. An active member of the Chicago Architectural Club, Heun was also associated with The Eighteen, a group of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who met regularly to discuss common topics. In 1905 he joined Wright and several other local architects who took offices in the Steinway Hall building in Chicago, thereby coming into contact with the innovative ideas of Wright and the architects of the so-called Prairie School. Heun also designed the original buildings of the city’s Arts Club between 1916 and 1936. A member of the American Institute of Architects from 1911, Heun continued to enjoy a successful career as a domestic architect, receiving important commissions until the 1930s. In addition, he often designed the interiors and some of the furniture, lighting and windows in the houses that he built, and decorative elements from a number of homes designed by him are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Heun died at the age of 79 and, according to an obituary, ‘After retiring from active architecture he devoted himself to painting.’ At this death Heun bequeathed his collection of modern paintings and drawings to the Arts Club of Chicago.
Heun continued to work in Chicago and Lake Forest for much of his career and counted among his clients such prominent citizens as William McCormick Blair, Albert Loeb, Astor Street and Frank Stout. An active member of the Chicago Architectural Club, Heun was also associated with The Eighteen, a group of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who met regularly to discuss common topics. In 1905 he joined Wright and several other local architects who took offices in the Steinway Hall building in Chicago, thereby coming into contact with the innovative ideas of Wright and the architects of the so-called Prairie School. Heun also designed the original buildings of the city’s Arts Club between 1916 and 1936. A member of the American Institute of Architects from 1911, Heun continued to enjoy a successful career as a domestic architect, receiving important commissions until the 1930s. In addition, he often designed the interiors and some of the furniture, lighting and windows in the houses that he built, and decorative elements from a number of homes designed by him are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Heun died at the age of 79 and, according to an obituary, ‘After retiring from active architecture he devoted himself to painting.’ At this death Heun bequeathed his collection of modern paintings and drawings to the Arts Club of Chicago.
Provenance
Mathieu Néouze, Paris, in 2022
Private collection, France.
Private collection, France.
Exhibition
Chicago, The Chicago Architectural Club at the Art Institute of Chicago, Thirteenth Annual Exhibition, 1900 [ex-catalogue]; Paris, Mathieu Néouze and Jacques Sargos at Galerie Mathieu Néouze, Un peu avant, un peu après 1900, 2022, no.11.