Jules Guerin

Biography

Returning to America after his European sojourn, he began his career as an artist illustrating books, often travel books about exotic places. It is likely that these designs are based on his own travels through North Africa and Palestine. The designs that he did then as well as his ability to romantically depict exotic peoples and places stood him well later when he began painting murals.
His mural work typically featured large areas of gold with vermilion, salmon and rose hues and blue and green accents.

As with many of the artists of his time Guerin took an active part in the international expositions of his day, showing at the Paris Expo 1900, where he received an honorable mention, the Pan American Expo in Buffalo, NY, 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Expo held in St Louis in 1904 at which he won a silver medal, and the Lewis & Clark Expo in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In 1915, Guerin was asked to serve as color co-ordinator of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. It is likely that connections that he made there led to his one man show at the University of California, Berkeley two years later, followed by several large murals in the Federal reserve Bank in San Francisco.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago’s best known architect of his day, was selected to create the Chicago Plan in 1907; part of the City Beautiful movement that Burnham was spearheading. In pursuit of this effort Burnham had Guerin paint a series of paintings of what Chicago could look like, many of them done from a bird’s eye perspective. These large watercolors are currently owned by the Chicago Historical Society.

In 1912, when architect Henry Bacon began working on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., he hired Guerin to create renderings of his proposed designs. After he received the commission, Bacon retained Guerin to paint the two large murals, Reunion and Emancipation, that decorate the interior of the memorial, allegorical figures that today serve primarily as the backdrop to Daniel Chester French’s Seated Lincoln statue.

Probably because of his early Chicago based background, Guerin was a frequent collaborator with the Chicago architectural firm (and the successor firm to Daniel Burnham’s practice) Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. Most notable of these commissions was the dramatic fire curtain he executed for the theatre in their Chicago Civic Opera Building in 1929.

Guerin was a frequent contributor to Scribners Magazine and Century Magazine during the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

Selected Murals

• Pennsylvania Station, McKim, Mead & White, architects, New York City 1911
• Lincoln Memorial, Henry Bacon, architect, Washington D.C. 1922
• Union Trust Building, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects, Cleveland, OH 1924
• Cleveland Terminal Group, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects, Cleveland, OH 1924
• Illinois Merchants Bank, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects, Chicago IL 1924
• Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, George Kelham, architect, San Francisco, CA 1924
• Chicago Civic Opera, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects, Chicago IL 1929
• Merchandise Mart, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects, Chicago IL 1930
• Louisiana State Capitol Building, Solis Seiferth, architect, Baton Rouge, LA 1932
  

  Books Illustrated

  
  Books by Robert Hichens, illustrated By Jules Guerin.
• The Fruitful Vine (1911)
• Egypt and Its Monuments (1908)
• The Holy Land (1910)
• The Near East - Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople (1913)