Michigan Stained Glass Census

Artist / Studio

Artist

Goodhue, Harry Wright

Birth Year: 1905

Death Year: 1931

Biography: Harry Wright Goodhue was born in 1905 at Cambridge, MA, the eldest son of Boston stained glass artist Harry Eldredge Goodhue (1873-1918) and Mary Louise Wright Goodhue. He was called by his middle name of Wright to distinguish him from his father. Having shown exceptional artistic ability, young Wright received his early training in his father's Boston studio and in children's art classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. After closing his own studio in 1916, Wright's father joined the Boston studio of Vaughan & O'Neill & Co., but he died in 1918, when Wright was 13. As a means of supporting her three young sons, Mary Louise Goodhue oversaw the completion of her husband's unfinished commissions and the creation of new windows, based on his designs and fabricated by Vaughan & O'Neill. In 1921, just before his sixteenth birthday, Wright left school to work as an office boy in a Boston brokerage firm. This was followed by his employment as a draftsman in the architectural firm of Allen & Collens, where he designed his first stained glass windows, including a chancel window for a church designed by his uncle Bertram G. Goodhue. After he received another major commission in 1924, Wright and his mother opened their own Boston studio where he designed and fabricated all the windows for the new Second Universalist Church in Boston. His later commissions included windows for churches by well-known architects such as Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram G. Goodhue (before his death in 1924), Allen & Collens, and Pittsburgh's William P. Hutchins. In 1927 some of Wright's window designs were shown at the Tricentennial Exhibition of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. (His Arts and Crafts windows for St. Dunstan's Chapel were created during this time.) Well aware of his interrupted education, Wright studied for two years at Harvard University, where he wrote a thesis on aesthetics. In 1930 he married writer Cornelia Evans and they lived at Greenwich Village, NY. Unfortunately, Goodhue's brilliant career as a stained glass artist was cut short by his untimely death in 1931 at the age of 26.