The Wasmuth Portfolio was the first time in which Frank Lloyd Wright’s building designs were published and distributed. The two-volume publication comprises an introduction by Wright, a listing of each plate and 100 lithographs printed on tissue and paper.
First published by Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin, 650 copies of the folio were printed, 500 of which were sent to the United States for Wright to circulate. This number was diminished, however, in 1914, when a fire broke out in Wright’s Taliesin Studio, where he was storing many of the folios. As a result, partial copies remain in circulation, but complete versions of this first edition are rare. The folio was later reissued in 1963 by Horizon Press.
Inspired by the prairie grasslands of the American Midwest, architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright aimed to develop the first uniquely American style. The Wasmuth Portfolio showcases detailed renders of Wright’s pioneering approach to American architecture, which became known as the Prairie Style. These illustrations were not intended for use by architects and builders, but rather for exhibition and as a means for Wright to present his work to clients – to provide examples of finished buildings, which otherwise might have been difficult to gain from detailed plans. The drawings themselves hold significant merit in demonstrating how artists can transform buildings through the addition of foliage and manipulated perspectives.
Despite Wright’s acclaim as an architect, there is little concrete information surrounding the authorship of the Wasmuth Portfolio drawings. At Wright’s studio, renders were produced by a number of architects, and not necessarily those working on the design of a building. Moreover, many weren’t signed by the responsible architects, making it difficult to attribute many of the drawings. Some of the architects who may have contributed to the Wasmuth Portfolio renderings include Birch Burdette Long, William E. Drummond and Harry Robinson. However, only one of Wright’s employees is definitively known to have contributed to the drawings in the portfolio and that was Marion Mahony. Her monogram, MLM, can be seen on several of the renders, including plate fourteen of volume one, where it sits within the trees of A fireproof house for $5,000.
Mahony was only the second woman in the United States to earn an architectural degree, from which she graduated in 1894, and in 1898 she was the first to gain a professional licence to practise. After graduating, she worked at her cousin Dwight Perkins’s studio before joining Wright in 1895. A talented architect and designer in her own right, Mahony quickly garnered attention for her rendering skills.
She had a unique and progressive style of representing and contextualising buildings to prospective clients that is now synonymous with this early period of Wright’s own career. Her unique style of rendering foliage to capture individual leaves and blades of grass situates her buildings within a sprawling natural world. Some of her renders even partially obscure the buildings with bushes and trees, an approach that became internationally recognised following the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio. While compiling the folio, Wright worked with a number of artists and draftspeople to recast existing drawings for publication. In some cases, this meant adjusting the drawings, but Mahony’s were often traced directly from her originals.
In his discussion on the Wasmuth Portfolio, architectural historian H. Allen Brooks refers to evidence for some of Mahony’s monograms having been removed by Wright prior to publication of the portfolio. For example, in locating the original rendering of the K. C. de Rhodes House, which had been published in 1906, Brooks notes that the Mahony monogram present on this rendering was subsequently removed from the same rendering that Wright published in 1910 as part of the Wasmuth Portfolio. An additional inscription on the original drawing written in Wright’s hand reads ‘Drawn by Mahony after FLW and Hiroshige’. Although this does acknowledge Mahony as the artist, Wright still asserts himself as the architect.
Following the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio, Mahony’s approach to rendering was used extensively among the architects of the Prairie School, including those outside of Wright’s studio. Despite the acclaim Wright gained because of the publication of the folio, this recognition may be partially attributable to Mahony’s progressive approach to architectural rendering.
Imogen Mallia-Valjan is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, International Decorative Arts and Design.
See works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Marion Mahony on Level 2, NGV International. The NGV warmly thanks Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family for acquiring the portfolio Executed buildings and designs by Frank Lloyd Wright (Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright), 1910, for the NGV Collection.
This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, Jan–Feb 2024