Gothic Reading Room Houses Duke Portraits
New website explores the story behind the works
The Gothic Reading Room of Perkins Library serves as a gallery of prominent figures in Duke University's history. Now a new brochure and website from University Archives will help visitors know more about the people behind the portraits.
The brochure identifies the 32 portraits in the room, including the two most recent paintings of John Hope Franklin and Nannerl O. Keohane. Several presidents and Duke family members are included in the gallery, but others are less well known, such as several Duke Endowment trustees and Horace Trumbauer and Arthur Lee, the architect and engineer of the DukeUniversity campus, respectively.
Over the years, a few portraits have been removed from the Gothic Reading Room and only recently returned. Others, such as those of former presidents Braxton Craven and John Franklin Crowell, were brought to the room from other parts of the university.