George Gough and Ellen Scripps Booth [Plaster]

George Gough and Ellen Scripps Booth [Plaster]

Figure sculpture, American--20th century

MF, Sculptor copy:
Founders of Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Booth was publisher of the Detroit News and very interested in the Arts and Crafts movement in the early 1920s. It was at that time he set out to create an art and educational village situated in the rolling morainic landscape north of Detroit. He built first a village church in the Gothic style, designed by Bertram G. Goodhue Associates, whose interior was enriched by work of the leading artisans in the Arts and Crafts movement at that time. A change of direction came in 1927 when Booth brought the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen to Cranbrook as architect-in-residence. Saarinen built an ensemble of buildings, a school for boys, another for girls, a museum of art, a museum of science, an art school, studios, and residences. He gathered about him a group of highly talented Swedish craftsmen and Carl Milles, a sculptor of major reputation in Europe as a creator of outdoor bronze figures and fountains, as sculptor-in-residence.

Fredericks, Marshall M., 1908-1998

1950

Use of this image requires permission from the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum

Sculpture

University Center (Mich.)

21" dia

Plaster

1991.103

Storage Room A - G4

03/22/1989 gifted to MFSM
06/03/2010 moved from archives to Storage A

MF, Sculptor copy:
Founders of Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Booth was publisher of the Detroit News and very interested in the Arts and Crafts movement in the early 1920s. It was at that time he set out to create an art and educational village situated in the rolling morainic landscape north of Detroit. He built first a village church in the Gothic style, designed by Bertram G. Goodhue Associates, whose interior was enriched by work of the leading artisans in the Arts and Crafts movement at that time. A change of direction came in 1927 when Booth brought the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen to Cranbrook as architect-in-residence. Saarinen built an ensemble of buildings, a school for boys, another for girls, a museum of art, a museum of science, an art school, studios, and residences. He gathered about him a group of highly talented Swedish craftsmen and Carl Milles, a sculptor of major reputation in Europe as a creator of outdoor bronze figures and fountains, as sculptor-in-residence.

Michigan.gov website:
"Cranbrook had its beginnings in 1904, when George Gough Booth, publisher of the Detroit News, and his wife, Ellen Warren Scripps Booth, bought a large farm in the rolling countryside of Bloomfield Hills and named it after the English village of Cranbrook, the Booth family ancestral home. Taking up residence in 1907, the Booths gradually transformed their farm estate into a remarkable cultural and educational complex consisting of their home, Cranbrook House; the Meeting House, which was expanded into the elementary Brookside School; Christ Church, Cranbrook; Cranbrook School for boys; Cranbrook Academy of Art; Kingswood School for girls; and Cranbrook Institute of Science."

Cranbrook.edu website:
"The institutions of Cranbrook never would have been established had it not been for the dream of its founders, George and Ellen Booth, to achieve something of lasting value and service with the resources they possessed. As George Booth stated at the dedication of Cranbrook School in 1927:
We were unwilling to go through life with our aims centered mainly in the pursuit of wealth and with a devotion wholly to the ordinary opportunity for social satisfaction. We were not willing to leave all of the more enduring joys for our children or the joy of work in so good a cause entirely to our friends after we had passed on; rather did we wish, in our day, to do what we could and give tangible expression now to our other accomplishments by adventures into a still more enduring phase of life. We wished to see our dreams come true while we were, to the best of our ability, helping to carry on the work of creation.
The dream of the Booths was a lifetime in the making. Despite their widely divergent backgrounds, each was raised in a family setting that encouraged personal growth, spiritual development, and a commitment to community service -- values that remained with them throughout their lives.
Born into a modest household in Toronto, Ontario on September 24, 1864, George Gough Booth left school at 14 to apprentice as a metalworker. A business venture of his father brought the family to Detroit in 1881, and it was there, through church activities, that the young Booth first made the acquaintance of his future bride. When still in his teens, Booth acquired a half interest in a Windsor iron works firm which manufactured grilles, fences, and gates of his own design. At 23 he sold the business and, at the invitation of his father-in-law, James Scripps, became the business manager of the Detroit Evening News. Booth rose through the company ranks to build the News into a great metropolitan daily and to head its parent firm, the Evening News Association. Booth began purchasing small newspapers in several Michigan cities in the 1890s. These he combined in 1914 with others belonging to his brothers Ralph and Edmund to form Booth Newspapers, Inc., one of the industry's largest chains. Secured of a substantial fortune, he devoted the remaining decades of his life to the development of the Cranbrook institutions.
In contrast, Ellen Scripps Booth enjoyed a very comfortable home life as a young woman. She was born in Detroit on July 10, 1863, the eldest child of Harriet and James Scripps, who founded the Evening News Association in 1873. Upon her graduation from high school, she accompanied her parents on several trips to Europe, where the Scripps' made extensive purchases of paintings, prints, rare books, and other works of art for their home on Trumbull Avenue. Many of these were later donated to the Detroit Museum of Art and today form the nucleus of the Detroit Institute of Art's collection of old master paintings and prints and the Detroit Public Library's rare book collection.
The couple were wed in 1887 and resided for the next 21 years in Detroit. In 1904, the Booths purchased a badly run-down and overgrown farm in the gently rolling countryside of Bloomfield Hills, then a sparsely populated farming community some distance from the city. They immediately named the property Cranbrook after the village birthplace of George Booth`s father in Kent County, England, and set about improving the land as a vacation spot and potential home site for the family, now grown to include five children. Working largely from plans drawn up by Booth, teams of landscape architects, farmers, gardeners, and laborers were engaged to transform the untended fields of Cranbrook into a beautiful country estate and working farm. Dams and bridges were constructed, miles of roads and winding paths were laid out, cottages and farm buildings erected, and thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to shade the barren hills and supplement the natural growth of the property.
In June 1908, the family moved into their new home, Cranbrook House, which was designed by the noted Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Under provisions made in the will of James Scripps, who had died two years previously, the vacated city estate was purchased, the home doubled in size by Kahn's firm, and donated to the city as the Scripps Library and Park. George Booth personally designed the wrought iron fences and gates of the park and laid out the gardens surrounding the library." (Written by Mark Coir, Director of Archives, Cranbrook Educational Community)

Molly Barth copy:
Below are portrait reliefs of various people. On the right is George and Ellen Booth, the founders of Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A bronze cast of this portrait relief is at the Science Institute at Cranbrook on the planetarium wall. That bronze cast is gilded and it is set into a limestone wall relief.