Goodhue, Harry Wright

Harry Wright Goodhue, Harry Eldredge’s son, one of the most promising members of the craft, never lived to see the full realization of his talent. Wright Goodhue (as he was usually referred to) showed a precocious ability to fuse revival and contemporary styles. The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University honored his memory with an exhibition of stained glass and sculpture from March through April of 1932.

Despite his short lifespan, Wright Goodhue accomplished much, often for buildings commissioned from the architectural firm of Cram and Ferguson.14 His windows showed a progressive adaptation of the abstract tendencies of 20th-century art, at first closely based on Arts and Crafts systems used by his father, Harry Eldridge Goodhue for the 1905 Corey windows in All Saints, Brookline, and the 12th- and 13th-century models published by Hucher, Viollet-le-Duc, and others.

Goodhue was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the eldest son of Boston stained glass artist Harry Eldredge Goodhue and Mary Louise Wright Goodhue. Wright received his early training in his father's Boston studio and in children's art classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. In 1921, Wright left school to work as an office boy and later as a draftsman in the architectural firm of Allen & Collens, where he designed his first stained glass windows including a chancel window for a church designed by his uncle Bertram G. Goodhue. Wright later studied for two years at Harvard University, where he wrote a thesis on aesthetics. In 1930 he married writer Cornelia Evans and they lived in Greenwich Village. He died in 1931 at the early age of 26.