Edward Maene (21 April 1852, Bruges, Belgium – 4 December 1931, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a Belgian-American architectural sculptor, woodcarver and cabinetmaker.
Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was a master carver in wood and stone, and executed designs by architects such as Wilson Eyre, Willis G. Hale, Cope and Stewardson, William Lightfoot Price, Horace Wells Sellers, and Milton B. Medary.
Maene's choir stalls and reredos for the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, have been described as "the finest examples of hand carved wood in this country."
Career
Maene learned the stone- and wood-carving trade in his native Belgium, and studied in Paris. He immigrated to the United States in 1881, and settled in Philadelphia in 1883. There is evidence to suggest that he worked as a carver for Daniel Pabst, the premier custom-furniture maker in late-19th century Philadelphia. He opened his own workshop at what is now 239 South Lawrence Court, a half-block east of Pabst's workshop at 269 South 5th Street. Within less than a decade his shop employed "from twenty to twenty-five assistants."
His nephews John, Victor, Louis and Armand Maene all apprenticed in his shop. John J. Maene (1863–1928) was hired by architect/designer William Lightfoot Price as foreman for the Rose Valley furniture shop.
Wilson Eyre
Maene executed designs by architect Wilson Eyre, working on local projects such as the Dr. Henry Genet Taylor House and Office (1884), in Camden, New Jersey; a new Dutch Colonial façade and interiors for the Rowley-Pullman House (altered 1886, demolished 1963), at 238 S. 3rd Street, Philadelphia; the William H. Walmsley Building at 1022 Walnut Street, Philadelphia (1887, demolished); and the University Club at 1316 Walnut Street (altered 1887). A 24-year-old Charles Grafly worked with Maene on the Rowley-Pullman House. Maene's frieze for the Walmsley Building vestibule was exhibited alongside Grafly's spandrel for a Rowley-Pullman House doorway at the 58th annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1887.
For the Charles Lang Freer House (1892), in Detroit, Michigan, Maene modeled in clay Eyre's free-form chandeliers of dangling vines, the whimsical front doorbell surround, and other detail work, all later cast in bronze.
Maene's shop carved exterior stonework for Eyre's City Trust Building (1888, demolished c.1923), at 927-29 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia; and did work on Eyre's Newcomb Memorial Chapel (1894–95, demolished 1954), at Newcomb College in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Willis G. Hale
Maene's shop carved exterior stonework for one of the most notorious buildings in Philadelphia—architect Willis G. Hale's own Hale Building (1887), at the southwest corner of Chestnut & Juniper Streets. A 7-story speculative office building—later known as the Lucas Building, the Keystone National Bank Building, and by other names—it seemed to squeeze an entire Gothic castle's worth of ornament into a narrow city lot. Critic Montgomery Schuyler, writing in the magazine Architectural Record, pronounced it an "architectural aberration": "Absurd ... irrational, incongruent and ridiculous," one of "the monstrosities of Chestnut street." "Perhaps the most bizarre-looking skyscraper of the nineteenth century," it is now beloved by many for its funky awkwardness. Although the first story of its Chestnut Street façade has been altered repeatedly, much of the rest of its exterior remains intact.
Hale designed, and Maene's shop carved exterior stonework for the Peter A. B. Widener city house (1887–88), at the northwest corner of Broad Street and Girard Avenue, Philadelphia. The Wideners occupied this for barely a decade—architect Horace Trumbauer soon designed them a Neoclassical palace, Lynnewood Hall (1897-1900), just outside the city. In 1900, the city house became the Widener Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It was destroyed by fire in 1980.