The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 35th Street, is handsome but unprepossessing, unlikely to stop passersby in their tracks. Its Gothic Revival style was hardly unusual in 1865, when the church held its first service. Murray Hill was still a young neighborhood, peopled by some of the old-money families of New York, like the characters from Edith Wharton novels. Their brownstone houses, like the large extant example from the 1850s at the southeast corner of Madison and 37th, were the opposite of ostentatious. So, too, was their neighborhood church.

The church was designed by Emlen Little, not one of New York’s famous architects. But he was well-known in his time, apparently, for he served as president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He also once shared an office in New York with Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson later refined a highly personal style based on the early Medieval Romanesque. “Richardsonian Romanesque” enjoyed an immense popularity in the 1880s and 1890s. Brooklyn abounds with examples. Indeed, in writing my book on Brooklyn architecture, I identified seemingly countless examples where architects had lifted building parts wholesale from built and unbuilt designs by Richardson. Alas, Richardson’s only building in Manhattan is an early work, the former Century Association clubhouse, on East 15th Street, from 1869.While nice, it doesn’t represent Richardson in the full flower of his extraordinary creativity. He soon would leave New York for Boston, and his masterpieces are to be found in Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other places – but not New York City.

That is, unless we count the Henry Eglinton Montgomery Monument, on the north aisle wall of the Church of the Incarnation. When Richardson did the monument, in 1876-7, he was at the height of his fame, having just completed Boston’s magnificent Trinity Church. Another connection between Richardson and Incarnation is that the rector who commissioned the monument, Arthur Brooks, was the brother of Trinity Church’s famed Phillips Brooks. Here is Richardson exercising all of his considerable power, though in small scale. The arched and gabled Romanesque design, with a sensuous contrast between its dominant Cleveland sandstone and the Lisbon marble of its columns, is New York’s lone example of mature Richardson. The arch frames a bronze portrait medallion of Montgomery, a onetime rector of Incarnation. Augustus Saint-Gaudens did the medallion, completed as he worked on his Farragut Monument for Madison Square.

Opposite the Montgomery Monument, on the south aisle wall, is the Arthur Brooks Monument. Here the classical frame, by Henry Bacon, contains a portrait by Daniel Chester French. I don’t know its exact date, but presume it was done shortly after Brooks’s 1895 death and thus a few years before Bacon and French collaborated on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Incarnation’s windows deserve their own column, and will get one.