Max & Trix
Max and Beatrix Farrand: Memory and Landscape at Yale
An Exhibit at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Lower Level 2
January 13 - May 25, 2025
Read more about the exhibit in the online exhibit essay
In 1913, two years after the publication of his The Records of the Federal Convention, Max and Beatrix Farrand married and moved to a house on Prospect Street in New Haven. Max Farrand was a Professor in the Yale History Department; Beatrix Cadwalader Jones Farrand was already established as one of the formative architects of the new American campus landscape.
Max & Trix celebrates the work of Max and Beatrix Farrand. It is also a story of Standard Oil, and the influence of industrial fortunes on the university as an American institution. The careers of Max and Beatrix were profoundly shaped by Edward S. Harkness (YC 1897), whose career as philanthropist in part responded to the tragic deaths by influenza in 1916 of his older brother, Charles William, and Mary, his brother’s wife. From 1918, Beatrix embarked with James Gamble Rogers (YC 1889) on a radical redesign of Yale’s campus landscape, beginning with the Harkness Memorial Quadrangle donated in honor of Charles William by his mother.
Through her work with Harkness, Beatrix became the first consultant gardener for Yale University. Max became the first Director of Harkness’s Commonwealth Fund, before leaving Yale to realize the vision of another American industrial magnate, and the founding of the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
