In 1875, Thomas G. Moses sought employment at the decorating firm of William Wright & Co. Arriving in Detroit he walked from the train depot to a theater construction site and inquired about a job. Mr. Wright put Moses to work on the spot as he had worked for this company before when work was slow at the P.M. Almini & Co in Chicago. The two decorating firms shared similar beginnings, although the founders began in different countries.
William Wright was born in the County of Norfolk, England, on November 12, 1833, and educated as a painter and decorator at Cambridge. Traveling to London in 1854 he completed his artistic studies and began his career as an interior decorator. In 1857 Wright immigrated to America in 1857, arriving in Detroit on the steamer, “City of Concord.” There, he opened up a shop and began advertising as a “painter, interior decorator and paperhanger.” He soon became associated with another decorating firm (Laible, Wright & Hopkins), accepting even larger commissions. This relationship lasted for five years until Wright purchased the second company, then adding William Reid as his partner. This was when he formed “William Wright & Company.”
William Wright & Co. was part of a vibrant art community in Detroit and also created a fine art gallery in 1868 that was free to all visitors. This was a similar to what Almini & Jevne offered in Chicago about the same time. The Detroit Free Press on Nov. 24, 1868 elaborated on the “Enterprising Business House” of William Wright & Co.
It advertised “a great many new paintings, chromos in oil and watercolors, and fine English engravings have been added, besides numerous articles in the way of ornamental and fancy goods, Swiss carved good, artists’ materials, etc. Similar to Jevne & Almini in Chicago, William Wright & Co. sold art materials to artists, displayed their fine art works, and employed many local artisans on decorative projects such as fresco painting.
William Wright also made stereoscopes upon an entirely new plan. The article described, “For large pictures but one lens is used, and one can look at pictures through it at the would gaze upon a natural landscape, without being obliged to squint or to place the glass in unpleasant proximity to the eye.”
Many of the fine mountain scenes viewed through this instrument included those secured by Wright in Europe. The newspaper article went on at length to discuss the “perfectness” of heights and proportions in these scenic elevations without any “feeling of weariness in looking for any length of time.”
The selling of stereoscopic views tied in beautifully with many of the painted murals and fresco completed by William Wright & Co. Many of their compositions were based on realistic and historical scenes for both residential and commercial spaces. In 1905 William Wright & Co. did both the decorative work and the entire interior design for the E. M. Harris & Co. cigar store located in the Elks’ Temple. The Detroit Free Press (Sept. 6, 1905, page 10) found the painted scenes from the Sigmund Rothschild tobacco plantations in Cuba “particularly noteworthy.”
The scenes were replicated from actual photographs. I thought back to the various reference sources and clippings saved by nineteenth and twentieth century artists for a variety of venues.
In 1874, the William Wright & Co. moved their offices to a new building on Lafayette, located on the same site where the old City Hotel once stood. Listed as “decorative artists” their company was situated on the second floor, near Lloyd & Pierce, architects. On the floor above were Conely & Hopkin, artists; Charles H. Ellis, civil engineer; and Madame S. Heirigel, teacher of music and languages. The Howard Dramatic Club occupied the fourth floor.
It was the following years that Moses sought employment at William Wright & Co. as they completed a large theatre project in Detroit. At this same time, C. J. Whitney opened an opulent theatre, spending $135,000 to build the Whitney Grand Opera House. I believe that this was the project Moses worked on for Wright – decorating the opera house. Whitney’s structure was known as the most elaborately equipped playhouse in Detroit at the time.
To be continued…
