Residences in Chicago | The MacVeagh & Eddy Homes
Residence: Left
Now demolished, this fine home was designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson in the Richardsonian Romanesque style and located at 1400 N Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and completed in 1887. It was designed for Franklin MacVeagh, (1837-1934) American politician, lawyer, grocer and banker who served as Treasury Secretary under President William Howard Taft.
“Construction of the granite-clad mansion took place between 1885 and 1887, just before Richardson’s death.
The MacVeagh house stood three stories high with creamy rough-cut Ohio sandstone known as Buff Amherst. The walls were carried seamlessly around corners. It had a steeply pitched red tile roof.
Interior spaces were lavishly outfitted, with antique French tapestries, a conservatory entered through marble arches, an Italian dining room, and a French styled music room.
Covered exterior loggias that looked out over the lake on all three floors. The Tribune wrote that the house was an example of “luxurious imprisonment.”
When the house was demolished in 1922 for a high rise apartment building, efforts were made to preserve the elaborately carved entryway to be used at another site. And the entryway may well have been salvaged, whatever became of the fragments is unknown, and they were presumably lost over time, maybe still sitting in storage somewhere.”—Original Chicago public Facebook group (2026)
Residence: Right
Also demolished, this was the Eddy House, the home of Arthur Jerome Eddy, (1859-1920) an American lawyer, author, art collector, and prominent member of the first generation of American Modern art collectors. Completed in 1887 by the architects Jenney & Otis, (William Le Baron Jenney & William A. Otis) a brief description appeared in The American Architect and Building News, April 23, 1887:
The house is situated on the Lake Shore Drive, near Lincoln Park, overlooking Lake Michigan, one of the finest building sites in the city.
The material is Hallowell white granite. Interior finished in hard woods. Hall and stairway in quarter sawed white-oak; parlor in Spanish satinwood; library and dining-room in mahogany.
The style indicated by the published designs is preserved throughout the house. There is also a stable on the lot, built of Hallowell white granite, the interior trimmed in Georgia pine finished with spar varnish. (p. 199)
Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical
“Within the covers of Sun and Shade…We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases,”—Ernest Edwards, president & publisher, 1889
In July, 1888, the first issue of Sun & Shade: A Photographic Record of Events, was published in New York City by The Photo-Gravure Company. Essentially a high-class art periodical, each issue featured eight or more beautiful hand-pulled photogravures as well as plates printed in photogelatine, (collotype) and halftone. These were collected within a stapled, folio-sized magazine issued monthly. The subject matter included the work of leading amateur and professional photographers, as well as works of art—many from the galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The December issue—Christmas themed—featured a specially designed cover printed in green ink. Success was swift. The first issue sold 1000 copies “in a fortnight”. (1.) Within the first year, Sun & Shade quickly increased circulation to 4000 copies a month. With a public demand for reprinting earlier issues, this success lead to a rebranding, after which, beginning with the September, 1889 issue, the magazine was renamed Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical. The final issue was March, 1896, when financial issues to the parent company, spurred by the eventual May, 1896 bankruptcy of the N.Y. Photo-Gravure Company, forced its closure.
Sun & Shade would become the ultimate statement of the many skills and inquisitive mind of Englishman Ernest Edwards. (1836-1903) Essentially his own printed passion project, the magazine was fueled by his ongoing love of photography in the field (issues featured many plates by him over the years) and a deeply scientific mind which pushed the advancement of the state of photo-mechanical reproduction and fine printing.
The son of a clergyman from Bloomsbury in London, he initially made a name for himself taking photographic portraits of eminent people in his Baker Street gallery. (Charles Darwin sat for him several times) His love of the outdoors also bore fruit and he became an accomplished alpine photographer. But his real interest centered around photo-mechanical reproduction. In 1869, he took out a patent in England for his own rudimentary collotype process called heliotype. In the Fall of 1872, he moved across the pond along with his wife Charlotte, and became superintendent of Boston’s Heliotype Printing Company after selling the American rights to American publisher James Ripley Osgood. (1836–1892) Edwards ran the Heliotype Printing Co. there until the end of 1884. The following year the James R. Osgood & Co. went bankrupt, although not a result of the heliotype division.
Growing restless in Boston, he then moved to New York City, where he established a new firm in March, 1885: The Photo-Gravure Company, (subsequently renamed The New York Photo-Gravure Company) with offices in Manhattan and a leased printing factory in Brooklyn. In 1887, his company received perhaps the one commission it’s best known for today: the printing of 781 collotypes, which Edwards called photogelatine plates, making up the monumental publication:
Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, with the landmark sequenced motion study photographs taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Restructured in 1891 as the New York Photogravure Co., Ernest Edwards continued to advance the state of photo-mechanical printing during his final decade, with Sun & Shade publishing some of the earliest examples of his own invention by 1894: plates printed in a three-color process called chrome-gelatine, a variation of his heliotype process.
Quality Rather than Quantity
Even though it survived less than eight years in print, describing Sun & Shade in Ernest Edward’s own words is perhaps the best posterity for this important photographic periodical with an artistic heart. One year after its’ debut, he wrote the following, published in The Photographic Times for August 2, 1889:
“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade, a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.
“In our rapid growth the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class–always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.
*Our efforts shall be directed in the future to make Sun and Shade an artistic periodical which shall be not only pleasing but educational in its broadest sense, Some of our plans may be briefly referred to.
“We shall reproduce the leading pictures in the great collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Within the covers of Sun and Shade will be found from time to time, reproductions of the works of American artists. We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases, And we shall supplement these special features with examples of sculpture, architecture, and industrial art. If in the future we receive as hearty a response to our efforts as we have received in the past, our task will be indeed pleasant and our road to success a royal one.” (p. 394)
- Notice: Sun & Shade: October, 1888. The August and September issues did not appear.
