Henry Hobson Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838 to 1886) was an American architect, born in Louisiana, best known for the style that bears his name, Richardsonian Romanesque, derived from the Romanesque Revival and especially the Romanesque of southern France. He studied at Harvard and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning to the United States in 1865. Trinity Church in Boston, built from 1872 to 1877, secured his national reputation, and the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, begun in 1869, was the largest commission of his career. He also designed a notable series of small New England public libraries, railroad stations, commercial buildings and houses, and he is counted with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the trinity of American architecture. He died at 47 and his assistants carried on as Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.