This sketch came to the society mounted in an album of sketches and engravings by Thomas S. Cummings and various other nineteenth-century American artists.

This sketch came to the society mounted in an album of sketches and engravings by Thomas S. Cummings and various other nineteenth-century American artists.

This sketch came to the society mounted in an album of sketches and engravings by Thomas S. Cummings and various other nineteenth-century American artists.

This sketch came to the society mounted in an album of sketches and engravings by Thomas S. Cummings and various other nineteenth-century American artists.

This sketch came to the society mounted in an album of sketches and engravings by Thomas S. Cummings and various other nineteenth-century American artists.

In the early 1900s, Ames, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, went abroad to study theaters and theatrical production in Europe; in 1908 he was invited to preside over the New Theatre in New York City, the first repertory theater in the United States. According to "American National Biography," his greatest contribution to American theater was the groundbreaking work he did in introducing the new movements in twentieth-century European theater to the United States.

In 1912 Butler ran unsuccessfully for vice-president on the Republican party ticket, and in 1920 received nearly seventy votes from the New York delegation in nomination as Republican candidate for president. He was a president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and in 1931 was a co-winner (with Jane Addams) of the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945.

The subject was an English-born actor and playwright known for sophisticated comedies such as "Private Lives" (1930) and "Design for Living" (1933).

An inscription suggests that the subject was a Professor of Psychology and Dean of Columbia University. Herbert Edwin Hawkes, a mathematician, served as Dean of Columbia from 1919 to 1943; Harry James Carman, an historian, succeeded him, serving until 1950; Lawrence Henry Chamberlain, a political scientist, was dean after 1950. The subject does not appear to be any of these men.