John Russell Pope

Those Centurions who sat next to John Russell Pope, or across the lunch or dinner table from that good-humored and easy conversationalist, were not always aware how brilliantly constructive an architect they had been talking with. Pope was a disciple of McKim, but his development of large-scale conceptions in the planning of public and private buildings was altogether original. From first to last, he held unswervingly to the ideals of the great artistic past, but he managed to infuse into his work imagination, artistic conceptions, of his own.

Like all architects of genius, Pope will be allotted his place in artistic history through the enduring edifices which bear his name as designer. The dignified Archives Building and Scottish Rite Temple at Washington; the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in this city; the Montfaucon War Memorial in France; the extension in which the British Museum is to house the Elgin marbles and, not least, his last constructive work, the designing for Ex-Secretary Mellon of the gallery of art which, at Washington, is to shelter for the American people Mellon’s artistic gifts to them—all this sums up an enduring life-story. But it is perfectly safe to prophesy that the Century will remember John Pope far less for what he did than for what, in genial Club-house companionship, he individually was.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1938 Century Association Yearbook