Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

This collection includes a menu card with signatures of many of the members of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects and three photographs depicting students in an atelier in Paris associated with the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. The menu card, dated in Josselyn's hand "Feb. 22, 1889", is from a dinner at the Cafe d'Orsay in Paris, during which preliminary discussions about forming the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects were held. On the verso of the card are the signatures of Thornton Floyd Turner, Austin W. Lord, Louis de Sibourg, T. R. Plummer, William A. Boring, Whitney Warren, Stephen Bonsal, Jr., S. B. P. Trowbridge, Ernest Flagg, John P. Benson, Evans Preston, Juan Guillermo de Lavalle, A. L. Brockway, Joseph H. McGuire, John W. Bemis, Edward L. Tilton, George Cary, and J. Donaldson, Jr. Mr. Josselyn's name also appears on the card, although not in his handwriting. According to correspondence from John Benson held in the Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts, the three photographs, taken by Benson, depict the students and instructor of a watercolor class in Paris in early 1889. In the first photograph, Josselyn has identified on the verso the sitters as follows: de Sibourg, McGuire, Josselyn, Lord, Flagg, Brockway, Cary, de Lavalle, Leteurtre, and Saglio. The second and third photographs depict the same men in the same atelier, although they appear to have been taken on a different day than the first image.