Harvey Ellis
He is thought to have studied painting with Edwin White and architecture with Arthur Gilman; although plausible, these claims have resisted verification.
In 1879 while simultaneously functioning as an artist, art teacher and active club member, he and his brother Charles established the architectural firm of H. and C. S. Ellis.
Newspaper accounts of his testimony as a witness in a jury trial, in which Charles was the defendant, place Harvey still in Rochester in early 1885, but that autumn he submitted an entry for a competition for a monument for General Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York.
Several plein air watercolor sketches, identified in his hand as sites in France and dated with just the year 1885, imply a European trip.
Architectural firms seemingly sought his services, paid him significantly more than other employees; and with each move he traded up in terms of professional opportunity.
In 1887 Ellis began to work in Minneapolis as chief draftsman for Leroy Sunderland Buffington who then had the largest architectural office in the state.
Possibly Buffington recruited him to produce the entry that year for the Minneapolis City Hall and Hennepin County Court House competition.
The concept that Ellis deliberately shunned professional acclaim by producing anonymous or pseudonymous work allowed such attributions.
His most important project was the Chateauesque design for the 1890 St. Louis City Hall competition, which won the first prize and the job for the firm.
In early 1891 George Mann moved to St. Louis to oversee construction of the city hall, and he also established a solo practice there.
Later that year, after a brief time back in Minneapolis, where he produced a Beaux-Arts library design for Buffington, Ellis joined Mann in St. Louis.
[4] As the economic Panic of 1893 swiftly enveloped the country, architectural offices in Missouri and everywhere else were diminished or closed, and that year Ellis's midwestern sojourn ended.
Shortly after that Ellis moved to Syracuse, New York, to join the expanding architecture department of Stickley's United Crafts organization.
Ellis depicted furniture in the interior perspectives and elevations of his Craftsman residential designs, just as he had done in other situations, years earlier for Buffington for example.
This idea overlooked the fact that Ellis had no experience as a furniture designer and had been hired to work in the architecture department.
The lightly scaled furniture in most of his illustrations, which differed significantly from the massive items previously often seen in The Craftsman, reflected newer design trends that Stickley began to promote after his Arts and Crafts exhibition.
During Ellis' tenure, Craftsman designs showed a "lighter note"[7] than later "blunt, straightforward, and unadorned"[8] pieces after his death.
He also introduced curved lower edges to horizontal rails that visually lightened Stickley's earlier designs.
In 1997 the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York honored him with a simple, dignified granite marker for his grave bearing his name, a Latin cross and the word Architect.
