Mrs. Pruyn's scrapbook,
or the Grand Tour of 1872
In September of 1871 John VanSchaik Lansing Pruyn and his young wife Anna sail from Albany to Europe and the British Isles. For the next nine months the Pruyns immerse themselves in the British and Continental social scene culminating with Anna Pruyn's presentation to Queen Victoria in April of 1872. While a guest of the Duke of Argyll in Scotland, Pruyn receives word of the tremendous loss of life and property from the Great Fire of Chicago. One week later to the day he is in Junius Morgan's banking house in London laying the groundwork for a new railroad from New York to Chicago. During the trip Pruyn appears to have hired a photographer especially to make a meticulous record of the great cathedrals of England. These views, developed as albumen prints from glass plates, were then hand tipped into an especially created leather-bound scrapbook that still resides in the cathedral archives. These photographs, never formally published, depict the facades, towers, vaults and arcades of many English cathedrals and churches now changed signifigantly or lost altogether. Most importantly, this photographic record was later used by Bishop Doane, the architect Robert Gibson and Mrs. Pruyn as a source-book of architectural prototypes to be used in the design of the Cathedral of All Saints. It is clear, for example, that the designs for the pulpit and the rood screen in the cathedral were derived from those at Ely cathedral, and that the piers of the nave and the triforium designs were taken from the cathedrals of Durham and Lincoln respectively. This uniquely American approach to cathedral design was the first time that photographs were used to facilitate the architect in his quest for an "instantly ancient" American cathedral.