Writer/Artist
Centurion, 1852–1892
Born 8 March 1813 in Washington, District of Columbia
Died 10 June 1892 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Buried Mount Auburn Cemetery
, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Proposed by John Frederick Kensett
Elected 4 December 1852 at age thirty-nine
Archivist’s Note: He resigned in 1876 and was reinstated in March 1888 with a new set of proposers, Worthington Whittredge and Daniel Huntington.
Century Memorial
Christopher Pearse Cranch was a man of varied accomplishments and scholarly tastes. He was a son of William Cranch, who, for fifty years, was Chief Justice of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. He graduated at Harvard, and studied for the ministry, but abandoned that profession for an artist’s career, for which he fitted himself by long residence and study in Italy and France. He was a member of the National Academy of Design. In the field of literature he was best known. His graceful writings in prose and verse, which appear in many volumes, including a translation of Virgil’s Æneid, made his name familiar to the American public, and showed him to be a man of broad culture, of delicate sentiment, of original thought, and of excellent literary judgment. He was of a modest and retiring nature, and was highly esteemed by all who were honored by his friendship.
Henry E. Howland
1893 Century Association Yearbook
