Wall Mural (Four Panels of Cars & Races)

James Scripps Booth was the oldest child of George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth. Born in Detroit and raised in their home on Trumbull Avenue, James was already twenty years old in 1908 when his parents moved into Cranbrook House. Throughout his life, James Booth divided his time between his twin passions for art and engineering. As a designer and engineer for the Scripps-Booth automobile company, James Booth spearheaded work on innovative vehicles from 1913 to 1923, when he left the company to pursue an independent career as a mechanical engineer and professional artist.

In the summer of 1914, James Scripps Booth took a break from his work as mechanic and designer for the Scripps-Booth auto company to revive his skills as an artist. That August, he painted four panels of automotive art on the interior wall of what was then a brand-new garage just down the hill from his parents’ home, Cranbrook House. The left-most panel, ”The Bi-Autogo Perfected,” is an original depiction of the Bi-Autogo, the two-wheeled automobile designed by James Booth. The other three panels, entitled ”The Mechanic's Viewpoint,” ”Le Grand Prix, France,” and ”Tourist Trophy, Isle of Man,” are copies of illustrations from the English magazine The Autogo, by the Frederick Gordon Crosby (1885-1943). Crosby was an English artist whose work as a technical illustrator helped him to produce accurate renderings of vehicles in motion for the magazine.

The paintings in the garage were executed largely as a diversion from his mechanical pursuits, rather than as a serious artistic endeavor. As James Booth admits in his unpublished memoirs, “I don’t consider there is any particular credit attaching to the copying of someone else’s work outside of a demonstration of your industrious ability to copy whats [sic] before you.” The project offered him an opportunity to experiment in large-scale wall painting. Though this was not a format that he would pursue later in his career, it was an enjoyable experiment, in his recollection: “I climbed the scaffold and had a lot of fun for the first time in really slinging paint on a large careless scale.” Unfortunately, the color and surface of the panels has deteriorated over the decades, as the artist’s lack of experience in wall-painting led to his neither priming the walls before beginning work or applying a protective coat of varnish at the end of the project.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
August 2024