This drawing, marked “First sketch of accepted design,” was made not by the lead architect, Charles Follen McKim, but by his twenty-seven-year-old employee Thomas Wight. This was not unusual: McKim was known for relying on the firm’s studio drafters while providing strong design leadership.
As a teenager newly arrived from Nova Scotia in the 1890s, Wight had answered an advertisement for a “boy” to work with McKim, Mead & White in Boston. “I want the job, but I don’t want to be a boy,” he said, insisting there be room for advancement. There was. Wight left the firm before the Library was completed to establish his own successful architectural practice in Kansas City, where he would design the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Thomas Wight (1874–1949) for McKim, Mead & White
Library for J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq., ca. August 1902
Graphite with wash
New-York Historical Society, McKim, Mead & White Architectural Collection