Jules Guérin's multifaceted career as theatrical scene designer, illustrator, easel and mural painter, and architectural delineator began in Chicago, where his family had moved in 1880. While still in his teens he was working as an assistant to a scene painter. He may have had some formal training in Chicago, but none is documented. He is said to have studied with Ernest Albert and Frank Bromley. It is more likely, however, that his association with Albert, at least, was as an assistant in Albert's theatrical set-design and painting business. He made an extended tour of England, Ireland, and France in 1887, but this apparently did not include any period of formal art study.
In the early 1890s, Guérin was employed as one of many artists working on the construction and decoration of buildings for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an experience that had a profound affect on him. In 1895 Guérin went to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and in the ateliers of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens, and Henri Martin. He also spent considerable time in Holland, painting landscapes and peasant farmworkers. Forty of his oils and watercolors on Dutch subjects were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 1896, at which time he was probably still living and working in Europe. Before the end of the decade, Guérin had executed decorations in Chicago's Steinway Hall and had secured his first regular work as an illustrator. Through the good offices of Maxfield Parrish, he joined Century Magazine and moved to New York.
His first important opportunity as an architectural delineator, the field in which he would attain special distinction, came in 1901, when the architect Charles Follin McKim engaged him as part of a group of artists executing the large-scale watercolor renderings for the Senate Parks Commission Plan for Washington, D.C. His work impressed McKim as well as Daniel Burnham, Chicago's premier architect. Guérin executed murals-six twenty-five-by-seventy-foot panels-for McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station in New York (1902-11). His major architectural renderings in this period, done in New York in 1907-8, were eleven panoramic views for Burnham and Edward H. Bennett's book Plan of Chicago (1909). Fernand Janin also contributed illustrations to this volume.
The success of a series of illustrations of the châteaus of Touraine, done for Century Magazine in 1904 and published as a book, with text by Maria Lonsdale, two years later, led to his being hired to illustrate travel books by Robert Hitchens, the visionary propagandist for the City Beautiful Movement, and extensive travel in Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and the Holy Land in about 1907-11.
In 1911-12, as delineator of Henry Bacon's proposals for the siting and design of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., Guérin made a major contribution to its being selected after a heated, if unofficial competition. In 1913 he was commissioned to do the memorial's interior mural decorations, which he produced by the time the building opened in 1922.
By this time Guérin's distinctive style, which relied on line, great simplification of form, strong lighting effects, dramatic viewing angles, and his special gifts as a colorist, had made him a premier architectural delineator. He worked with most of the major architects of the period, including the team of John Carrère and Thomas Hastings, Cass Gilbert, John Russell Pope, and Russell Sturgis.
Guérin also participated in most of the significant American architectural and urban design projects undertaken between 1900 and 1930. Perhaps his most outstanding achievement of this kind was as Director of Color, working with chief planner Edward H. Bennett, for San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. He established a scheme of colors for the stucco exteriors of the fair's buildings, derived from his knowledge of Near Eastern architectural decoration, which greatly reinforced the structural-design plan.
During the 1920s and 1930s Guérin was much occupied with mural work: the Union Trust Building, Cleveland; the Cleveland Terminal Building; Chicago's Civic Opera Building and Merchandise Mart; the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank; and the Louisiana state capitol in Baton Rouge were among his projects in those years. He then withdrew from active involvement in major projects, living essentially in retirement in his Gramercy Park, New York, home and summer residence in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey.
