When Horace Chapin Henry arrived in Seattle in 1891, the city was his Olympia oyster. A farmer’s son who’d fought for the Union at Gettysburg and then nearly died from tuberculosis after the war, the double survivor moved about as far away as possible from his hometown of Bennington, Vermont. Henry landed here with his family just two years after the Great Seattle Fire. With his pockets well lined by the success of his railroad construction company, he was in good shape to participate in Seattle’s new era of restoration and swift expansion. 

He’d chosen Seattle in order for his firm, Henry & Balch, to accept a contract with the Northern Pacific Railroad to build the Lake Washington Belt Line. The firm soon won more railroad contracts, and Henry later formed Pacific Creosoting Company on Bainbridge, boosting his fortune even more.

Henry became a quick champion of his adopted city, investing his cash in local businesses, launching the Provident Loan Company to offer low-interest loans for the poor, helping to organize the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, and founding the Firland Sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in what’s now Shoreline, after the 1911 death of his son Walter at 26 from the same disease that nearly killed Henry as a young man. His daughter, Florence, also died in her twenties, from a burst appendix while at college in Massachusetts, and Henry had the Florence Henry Memorial Chapel built in Shoreline’s Highlands in her honor. 

After building a massive Tudor-style mansion on Capitol Hill in 1894, at the southwest corner of Harvard and Spring, Henry and his wife, Susan, set about filling it with art. The Henrys’ collection eventually grew to include nearly 200 separate artworks, mostly late nineteenth-century French and American landscapes. In the early twentieth century, it was a popular notion of American civic leaders to consider art a civilizing force in modern society. To this end, in 1917, a gallery wing was added to the Henry Family residence to display this overflowing collection to the public. Called “the Little Gallery,” it was often loaned out to the Seattle Fine Arts Society (which became the Seattle Art Museum) to use for exhibitions. 

By the mid-1920s, after the death of his wife, Henry was in his 80s and realized he should probably provide the collection in the Little Gallery with a dedicated public space for when he passed. His hope was that the art collection would stay intact and not be split up, that it’d be cleaned and cared for, and that as many people as possible would be able to see it. In 1926, Henry wrote to University of Washington President Henry Suzzallo, offering the overwhelming bulk of his collection to the university—along with $100,000 to construct a pretty new house for the paintings to live in. And not a moment too soon. Suzzallo himself would step down from his role as UW president later that year, after supporting an 8-hour workday and subsequently enraging former lumberman and then–Washington state Governor Ronald Hartley, who effectively fired him. But he managed to greenlight Henry’s gifts first.   

In fact, Henry’s single condition on bestowing the cash and the paintings to the UW was that they act fast. Suzzallo’s namesake library was already under construction at the time, and the same Seattle-based architectural firm, Bebb and Gould, was employed to design the Henry Art Gallery concurrently. The firm also designed the (Fairmont) Olympic Hotel at Fourth and University and later the original Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park (now the Seattle Asian Art Museum). Both the Henry and the Suzzallo made heavy use of the Collegiate Gothic architectural style featured in many other buildings on campus, employing medieval-style arched entryways, curvilinear stone tracery, and elaborate relief sculpture to embellish the brick base. 

The project was led by architect Carl F. Gould, also the founder and director of the University’s School of Architecture, who began with a sketch he’d made for a possible campus theater back in 1910. Inside, a unique round room served as a starting hub, with many doorways leading to different wings of the gallery, each with detailed honeycomb-like patterns and distinct lines of poetry—e.g., “The perfection of art is to conceal artistry”—carved into the stone facades above the archways. Lacy wrought-iron window frames and lantern-like chandeliers decorate the hallways and staircases, suggesting either the French Quarter or actual France. Like most museums, the cool stuff is mostly on the inside—sited at NE 15th Avenue and 41st NE Street, across from what’s now Schmitz Hall, the original brick building looks, in fact, not unlike a simple ninth-century French chapel from the street.

Henry Art Gallery opened to the public on February 10, 1927, featuring 178 of Horace and Susan Henry’s mostly Impressionist paintings. It was the first public art museum in the state of Washington, and the commencement celebration was a big deal for the whole city, not just the university. The museum’s aesthetic soon shifted away from gentle Impressionist landscapes, though, as later that year, the Henry presented the Blue Four, a group of avant-garde artists comprising Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Wassily Kandinsky. It was the first time that the edgy Expressionists were exhibited on the West Coast.

In the summer of 1928, just a year and a half after his collection had been safely ensconced in the university, Horace Chapin Henry died at the age of 84. The Seattle Fine Arts Society moved into the rest of the Henry residence after his death, and six years later, his surviving sons, Langdon and Paul Henry, donated their parents’ mansion to the City of Seattle. The city eventually sold the property in order to fund the 1948 construction of the Susan J. Henry Branch of the Seattle Public Library, at Harvard Avenue E and E Republican Street. Today, it’s just known as the Capitol Hill Branch.

Fast-forward 70 years. In 1997, the UW okayed a plan for the Henry building to be quadrupled, ballooning to a 40,000-square-foot museum that would include a 154-seat auditorium, which Gould had sketched in his initial plans. Designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, the expansion incorporated minimalist style, sleek lines, and the integration of natural light via skylights, while using brickwork to maintain a visual balance between the contrasting new and old architectural styles. The tiny original entrance on the south face was shuttered, to be replaced by a new second-floor entrance clad in concrete, with the footbridge spanning across 15th Avenue NE connecting pedestrians to the Henry’s new entrance in the sky. The 1997 expansion also brought a glass-and-steel addition on the building’s south end, an external spiral staircase, and bigger galleries inside, allowing for larger works of art to be accommodated and providing flexibility for experimental installations. Plus it gave the Henry some extra space for a café, collections research, and art storage.

The most recent renovation to the building came in 2003, when the James Turrell Skyspace was installed on the western face of the Henry. Titled Light Reign, artist Turrell’s permanent display conflates architecture, sculpture, and atmosphere to create a naked-eye observatory. It’s essentially a round steel-and-glass room on a stick, which the viewer enters by an external bridge. The room is lined by a wooden wraparound bench, while the ceiling features a round skylight with a retractable dome on its roof. The point is to look up at the oval of sky, to contemplate it, to take a moment with it. When it’s raining or snowing, though, the dome is moved over the skylight and a glowing blue light replaces the sky, and then you sit and perceive the slice of fake sky instead. Meanwhile, the room itself lights up from the outside in pastel hues. Though it looks a little janky from the outside, the Skyspace has become an integral part of the Henry, not only as part of its artistic collection, but also as a part of its actual architecture. Once again, the cool stuff is on the inside.

In its current form, the Henry Art Gallery could, if you like, symbolize the changing nature of art, via its contrasts and shifts among different architectural eras. From its origins as a small university gallery to its current status as a major player in the contemporary art world, the Henry’s been a Seattle icon the whole time. It’s a reflection of a city that proudly fosters weirdness. It’s a place where artists can take risks and be nurtured at all points of their careers. The architectural mishmash of the Henry itself also does a good job mirroring Seattle’s personality, as it merges techy, airy, who-cares design with the serious moral undertones of its moneyed Collegiate Gothic beginnings. 

It seems fitting, too, that the Henry bears the name of a guy who majorly shifted among social classes and eras throughout his life—who was born on a farm, tangled with death, experienced great grief and loss, traveled across the continent to make his fortune, and then spent a whole lot of it on helping other people. They sure don’t make rich guys like they used to.