Sculpture

Sculpture

Sources

Commemoration. Sculpture in the United States began as a craft rather than as an art. Most early-nineteenth-century American sculptors were stonecutters who specialized in tombstone production or wood-carvers who specialized in furniture decoration. Since local sculptors lacked classical training, Americans who wanted to commemorate Revolutionary heroes and founding fathers had to offer commissions for monuments and statues to European sculptors. In 1784 the Virginia State Assembly awarded the commission for a statue of George Washington to French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. For the U.S. capital, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe arranged in 1805 to have two Italian sculptors brought to America to complete the detailed work required. The desire to honor and memorialize great Americans through sculpture eventually helped to legitimize sculpture as a form of high art in the United States.

European Training. By 1825 Americans were beginning to travel to Europe to study sculpture under masters such as Albert Bertel Thorwaldsen and the great Antonio Canova. Horatio Greenough, a Harvard graduate who had been introduced to artistic theory by the painter Washington Allston, traveled to Rome in 1825 to study under the Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen. Greenough, who had studied anatomy and the classics at Harvard, was introduced to nude drawing at the Roman Academy, a common practice in Rome but shocking to an American. Greenough also went to Florence to work with Lorenzo Bartolini, whose belief that nature was the best teacher and model contrasted with Thorwaldsen’s neoclassical emphasis on symmetry and principle rather than naturalism. Several of Greenough’s best-known and most controversial statues, including Chaunting Cherubs (1830), Medora (1833), and George Washington (1832–1841), revealed this tension between neoclassicism and naturalism as well as showing Greenough’s willingness to use nude or seminude men and women as a means of conveying higher sentiments.

Naturalism. Perhaps as the result of the failure of his neoclassically-influenced George Washington, Gree-nough’s later work tended toward more-naturalistic imagery and echoed his emerging interest in using ideal sculpture to portray distinctively American themes. This change can be seen in The Rescue, a complex sculpture showing a white settler in a hunting shirt and cap rescuing a woman and child from a murderous Indian. The Rescue was installed in the U.S. capital in 1853, a day after Greenough’s death. Like Greenough, sculptor Henry Kirke Brown turned away from his European neoclassical training to produce sculptures featuring more-naturalistic human figures and treating American Indian subjects. Brown’s sculptures Aboriginal Hunter (1846), Dying Tecumseh (1848), and Indian Panther (1849–1850) portrayed Native Americans as subjects and suggested that white Americans’ encounters with Native Americans provided material for a distinctively American art.

Powers. Another nineteenth-century sculptor, Hiram Powers, worked his way up from stonecutting to sculpting. Powers’s bust of Andrew Jackson (1835) established his reputation as a sculptor; his naturalistic reproduction of Old Hickory’s weather-beaten features brought him commissions for the busts of John Marshall, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Martin Van Buren, and John Quincy Adams. In 1837 Powers traveled to Italy, where, like Greenough, he began to work on “ideal” sculptures (sculptures which used human forms to portray fictional characters or ideas, as opposed to the portrait busts that had given Powers his reputation). In Italy, Powers produced his best-known sculpture, The Greek Slave (1843), which portrayed a nude girl in shackles. In 1847 the first showing of The Greek Slave in the United States caused

considerable controversy. Meant to illustrate Greece’s plight during its war of independence from Turkey, the girl’s nudity was intended to reflect the extreme vulnerability of the Greeks, but audiences who were used to associating nudity with immorality were shocked by Powers’s willingness to exhibit the figure of an undressed female. As American audiences came to understand alternative ways to interpret nudity, they became more receptive to statues of nude figures. The exhibition of The Greek Slave eventually made a total of $23, 000 and marked an important moment in the history of American art and its appreciation.

Ideal Sculpture. Because it was best able to carry morally instructive ideas, ideal sculpture was considered to be a higher form of art than portrait sculpture. Yet in the United States sculpture first achieved artistic legitimacy as a means of commemorating great moments in American history, for when used to portray the great men (and women) of the new nation portrait sculpture could also be a means of carrying instruction. Debates over whether sculpture should follow neoclassical lines, drawing on Greek and Roman ideals of symmetry and beauty, or more-naturalistic lines also shaped beliefs about ideal and portrait sculpture. As Greenough would discover to his disappointment, American audiences would increasingly resist sculpture that drew too strongly on neoclassical imagery. Even as Americans accustomed themselves to ideal sculpture that portrayed nude men and women to express higher ideas, they increasingly wanted their human figures, real or imaginary, to resemble natural men and women rather than artificial neoclassical models.

Sources

Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America, new revised edition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984);

Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).