William Mitchell Kendall, an accomplished drafter at McKim, Mead & White, created this detailed rendering of the ceiling of the North Room, which would become Greene’s office. The blank compartments would be filled with canvases by the muralist James Wall Finn, who drew heavily on the work of artists such as the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
In the drawing, someone has penciled the names of twelve Italian Renaissance patrons (ten men and two women) around the perimeter. Relief portraits of these figures would be installed in the ceiling’s border.
William Mitchell Kendall (1856–1941) for McKim, Mead & White
3/4” Detail of North Room Ceiling, Morgan Library, 11 April 1905
Ink on linen
New-York Historical Society, McKim, Mead & White Architectural Collection
The completed ceiling. Photo: Graham S. Haber, 2017.