What’s That? The grotesques on the Evans Building

A series of grotesques of many different poses and demeanors.

The grotesques have contorted themselves into a crouch on the façade of the Evans Building at 4001 Spruce St., constructed in 1915 as part of the School of Dental Medicine, when it was still a relatively young school at Penn, founded in 1878. Like other Collegiate Gothic buildings, an architectural style popular at American universities between the 1880s and the mid-1930s, the Thomas Evans Building features a host of decorative grotesques—the fanciful stone sculptures that take a variety of forms, from animal and human to mythological character or somewhere in between.

According to a 1914 Philadelphia Inquirer report, some of the grotesques are reportedly replicas of the Cathedral of Notre Dame figures, said at the time to be “laughing at the anguish the students are one of these days to learn to cure within the building.” The grotesques—expressing “fiendish delight,” so says the 1914 report—are cut-stone and were a glistening white upon their debut.

The Evans Building was designed by architect John T. Windrim in consultation with Cope and Stewardson, who designed the Quadrangle, which also features an impressive array of grotesques. David Brownlee, a professor emeritus of the history of art, says the inclusion of grotesques can mostly be attributed to the larger Gothic Revival and the related “Arts and Crafts Movement,” which allied architecture and decorative carving as practices and is also illustrated in College Hall, Fisher Fine Arts Library, and other facilities of the time.

They’re grotesques!

But also, the grotesques have a special connection to the Evans Building’s namesake, Thomas W. Evans, a Philadelphia native and notable dentist who spent much of his life in France. Evans declared in his estate that the dental school created in his name following his 1897 death would be “second to none.” In partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, after many deliberations and a dramatically contested will, according to “A Century of Dentistry,” by Milton B. Asbell, the Thomas W. Evans Museum and Dental Institute School of Dentistry University of Pennsylvania was established, and plans were made to create the Evans Building at 40th and Spruce streets. The site was the location of the Evans family homestead and conveniently located near the then-new Penn campus in West Philadelphia.

Notably, Evans was the dentist to European royalty, serving as the personal dentist and confidant to Louis Napoleon, or Napoleon III, until the end of the Second French Empire in 1870. At 15 Rue de la Paix in Paris, France, he also maintained a laboratory where he conducted research on fillings and anesthetics.

It’s only fitting, then, that the grotesques greeting visitors to the Evans Building would tie the legacy of “the American dentist,” as Evans was known, to France.