Lawrence Grant White (September 26, 1887 – September 8, 1956) was an American architect, a partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, co-founded by his father Stanford White, and for five years the president of the National Academy of Design.[1]
Lawrence White, who was known as Larry, was born in New York City in 1887, the only surviving child of renowned architect Stanford White (1853–1906) and Elizabeth "Bessie" Springs (née Smith) White (1862–1950). His only sibling, an elder brother who died in infancy in 1885, was named after his paternal grandfather Richard Grant White, a Shakespearean scholar, husband of Alexina Black (née Mease) White.[2] Larry White's maternal grandparents were John Lawrence Smith (1816–1889) and Sarah Nicoll (née Clinch) Smith (1823–1890), members of the family after which Smithtown is named.[3] An uncle, James Clinch Smith, died aboard the RMS Titanic in 1912.[4][5][6]
White grew up at Box Hill, a farmhouse converted to an Italianate mansion by his architect father, situated on his parents' 60-acre Long Island estate.[7][8] In 1906, when he was almost 20 years old, his father was shot and killed by Harry K. Thaw over the father's affair with Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit.[1][9]
Chanler was a social acquaintance of Mildred Barnes Bliss and Robert Woods Bliss who were friends with Edith Wharton and Margaret Chanler, his wife's mother.[10] The Bliss' engaged White and the firm to design the buildings of the Service Group at Dumbarton Oaks as well as the Music Room and the East Bay of the living room.[10][14]
White served as the president of the National Academy of Design for five years and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly before his death.[1][15] According to The New York Times, White was "a renaissance man" who "wrote light verse, painted, played the piano and published a translation of Dante's Inferno."[7] In fact in 1948 he published a translation of Dante's entire Divine Comedy.[16]
Alida Mary White (ca. 1922–2020), who married (1st) in 1943 the composer John Lessard (1920–2003),[22][23] and after their divorce, married (2nd) in 1996 Montgomery Hare (1911–1998).[24]
John Chanler White (1924–1989), who married in 1968 Claire Raiguel McAllister, the daughter of Judge Thomas Francis McAllister.[25]
Cynthia Margaret White (b. ca. 1927), who married Robert Dean Jay (1921–1998).[26]
Sarah M. White (b. ca. 1929), a Roman Catholic nun.
Ann Octavia White (ca. 1932–2021), an architect who married in 1955 Harold Buttrick (1931–2015), co-founder of the architecture firm Buttrick White & Burtis.[13][27][28]
Larry White died on September 8, 1956, at his home in St. James, New York.[1] He was buried at Saint James Episcopal Church graveyard in St. James.
^James N. Carder, "The Architectural History of Dumbarton Oaks and the Contribution of Armand Albert Rateau," in A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, ed. James N. Carder (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), pps. 92–115.
^White, Lawrence Grant (1948). The Divine comedy: the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso; a new translation into English blank verse by Lawrence Grant White, with illustrations by Gustave Doré. New York: Pantheon Books.