424–426 Beacon Street

If other dwellings built in the Back Bay at the turn of the twentieth century drew their inspiration from the Bulfinch school, this pair of limestone-fronted houses is unapologetically, even gloriously, French. Unlike an earlier generation's more tentative forays into Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition during the district's formative period, the work of Paris-trained Julius Schweinfurth bespeaks all the confidence, and none of the contempt, that arises from an intimate familiarity with prototype. As worldly as its predecessors were provincial, the rich plasticity of the Neo-Baroque ornament is saved from showiness by the impeccability of its grammar, intoning a last golden echo of the Second Empire.