Hiram Powers

Hiram Powers 1805-73, American sculptor, b. Woodstock, Vt. Having moved to Ohio, he made wax models for a Cincinnati museum. In 1835 he began his career as a sculptor, spending some time in Washington, D.C., where he modeled several portrait busts, including one of President Jackson (Metropolitan Mus.). In 1837 he went to Florence to study classical art. There he flourished to the end of his life. His Greek Slave (1843) became the most popular statue of the period in Europe and the United States. The second of several copies is in the Corcoran Gallery. His sculptures of Franklin and Jefferson are in the Capitol, Washington, D.C.

Bibliography: See S. E. Crane, White Silence (1972).

Powers, Hiram (b Woodstock, Vt., 29 July 1805; d Florence, 27 June 1873). American sculptor, active in Italy from 1837. He first achieved success with portrait busts, but his great international fame came with his marble statue The Greek Slave (1841–3), which caused a sensation at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and was for a time one of the most talked about and reproduced works of art of the age (there are several versions of it, for example in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington). The naked girl (a captive of the infidel Turks in the Greek War of Independence, 1821–32) is bound in chains and the astonishing popularity of the statue (which now seems rather insipid) no doubt depended on the way in which its sentimentality licensed its eroticism.