Henry Varnum Poor (designer)

This article is about the designer. For the financier, see Henry Varnum Poor.

Henry Varnum Poor (1887–1970) was an American architect, painter, sculptor, muralist, and potter.

Born in Chapman, Kansas, Poor attended Stanford University, studied painting at the Slade School and under painter Walter Sickert in London, then attended the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1925 he married journalist and writer Bessie Breuer.

He is a grandnephew of the Henry Varnum Poor who was a founder of the predecessor firm to Standard & Poor's.

In 1950, Poor became the resident artist at the American Academy in Rome, and was Professor of Painting at Columbia University in 1952. He was also appointed to the United States Commission of Fine Arts in 1944-45.

Self-taught as an architect, Poor designed the "Crow House" on South Mountain Road in New City, New York for himself, and designed houses or home renovations for Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, John Houseman, Burgess Meredith and Maxwell Anderson. He was also a potter, with ceramics in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and ceramics designed for Radio City Music Hall.

As a muralist, Poor executed several large commissions:

• ceramic mosaic for the ceiling of the Union Dime Savings Bank, Sixth Avenue and 40th Street, NYC, 1927
• 12 mural panels for the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C., circa 1935
• Conservation of Wildlife in America mural, Department of Interior Building, Washington, D.C. 1937-38
• Grape Harvest, a ceramic tile mural for the U.S. Post Office, Fresno, California, 1941–1942
• extensive Land Grant Frescoes for the Old Main Building at Pennsylvania State University, over 1,300 square feet (120 m²) of work, between 1940 and 1948
• murals for the Louisville Courier-Journal Building, Louisville, Kentucky, 1948

External links

• on Poor's papers at the Smithsonian