Lewis, Edmonia

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Lewis, Edmonia

c. 1844
c. 1909

Information on the sculptor Edmonia Lewis's life is sparse and difficult to verify. She was often inconsistent in her own accounts of her early days. Born in upstate New York around 1844, the daughter of a Chippewa mother and a black father, Lewis, who was given the Indian name Wildfire, and her older brother, Sunrise, were orphaned when she was five. Raised by maternal aunts, she described her youth as something of an idyll, in which she lived in the wild, fished for food, and made moccasins to sell. She was able, as well, to study at a school near Albany.

With financial help from her brother, Lewis attended Oberlin College, where her studies included drawing and painting. In a dramatic incident, she was accused of the attempted murder, by poisoning, of two classmates who were stricken shortly after enjoying a hot drink she had prepared. While the young women lay ill, Lewis was abducted by a mob and severely beaten. After her recovery and subsequent vindication in the courts, she ended her studies and moved to Boston in order to pursue a career in the arts.

There she found encouragement and support from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the writer Lydia Maria Child, the sculptor Edward Brackett, with whom she studied, and a community of friends and patrons of the arts, many of whom were active in the abolitionist movement. Her bust of Robert Gould Shaw (1864), the Boston Brahmin and Civil War hero who died leading black troops into battle, was a great success. Sales of copies of that work enabled her to finance a trip to Europe, where, after traveling in England, France, and Italy, she settled in a studio once occupied by the sculptor Antonio Canova on the Via Della Frezza in Rome.

A friend of the sculptors Anne Whitney and Harriet Hosmer and the actress Charlotte Cushman, Lewis was a member of the group of British and American expatriate women artists whom Henry James called the "white, marmorean flock." About Lewis, he wrote: "One of the sisterhood … was a Negress, whose color, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame."

James's opinion notwithstanding, Lewis's work was much in demand during the heyday of what were called the literary sculptors. Her studio, listed in the best guidebooks, was a fashionable stop for Americans and others on the grand tour, many of whom ordered busts of family members or of literary and historical figures to adorn their mantels and front parlors.

The first African American to gain an international reputation as a sculptor, Lewis was a prolific artist. The catalog of her work runs to over sixty items, not all of which have been located. Her early work in Boston included portrait medallions and busts of major abolitionists such as John Brown, Maria Weston Chapman, and Garrison. There was also a small statue, now lost, showing the black hero Sgt. William H. Carney holding aloft the flag at the battle of Fort Wagner.

In Rome, she executed such major works as "Forever Free" (1867), a depiction of a slave couple hearing the news of emancipation, and "Hagar" (1868–1875), about which she said, "I have a strong feeling for all women who have struggled and suffered." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Song of Hiawatha" had made him a literary folk hero and inspired numerous artists, and Lewis drew on that familiar resource with groups such as "The Marriage of Hiawatha" (1867) and "The Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter" (1867). These works seemed to patrons all the more authentic coming from the hand of a young woman who was part Indian and was reputed to have grown up in the wild.

Lewis's considerable celebrity reached its height with the unveiling of her "Death of Cleopatra" (1876) at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. That monumental work, a life-sized depiction of Cleopatra on her throne, was praised for the horrifying verisimilitude of the moment when the snake's poison takes hold, and for Lewis's attempt to depict the authentic Egyptian queen from a study of historic coins, medals, and other records.

In the 1880s, as the vogue for late neoclassical sculpture declined, references to Lewis dwindled as well. Although it is known that she was living in Rome as late as 1909, it is not certain where and when she died.

See also Painting and Sculpture