I. Ferris Lockwood

Another figure that seemed to have stepped out of the old-time Century was I. Ferris Lockwood. He was never quite reconciled to the change from the Club of 1890, with 800 members and a modest establishment in East Fifteenth Street, mostly known as the gathering place of artists and writers. Lockwood was a little of both. He had written reviews and general articles for Scribner’s and had published books on poetry and philosophy; his love of art was even stronger. The Century’s monthly exhibitions have placed on the walls his own small landscapes in pastel, unpretentious but always exceedingly well done, and he was a sound art critic, with a judgment never perverted by the artistic frivolities of later days.

Lockwood had begun active life as a civil engineer, but it was a sure tendency of taste and capacity which brought him permanently into an occupation with literary and artistic surroundings, and his twenty-four years with the Lenox Library as Superintendent and with the New York Public Library as Bursar made him in his way an institution in that side of the city’s life. But he never lost his love for the Century, where the tall, shambling figure always found personal welcome from the moment he entered its door.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook