Full Name: Ferree, Barr
Gender: male
Date Born: 1862
Date Died: 1924
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), connoisseurship, and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Architectural historian and connoisseur. Establish Foundation for book publishing. Ferree graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and lectured there on architectural subjects in the recently founded School of Architecture. Although subsequently entering the world of business, he continued to lecture, achieving the presidency of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. He was also the first American to be elected to honorary membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Ferree published an influential catalog of French cathedrals which he compiled through a vast personal library (now the Barr Ferree Library of Princeton). His efforts to save French architecture from destruction during World War I won him the Legion of Honor in 1922. When he died unexpectedly in 1924, his estate became the core of the Barr Ferree Foundation, dedicated to publication of books on architecture and the related fine arts. E. Baldwin Smith dedicated his work, The Dome (1950) to Ferree’s memory.
Selected Bibliography
The Bombardment of Reims. New York: Leonard Scott Publication Company, 1917; The Chronology of the Cathedral Churches of France. New York, [s.n.], 1894; Primitive Architecture. New York: [s.n.], 1890; Architectural Education for America. New York: [s.n.], 1894. ___ 0.DOA
Sources
E. Baldwin Smith. “To the Memory of Barr Ferree” Introduction to The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950, p. v.