Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery 9780520390102

Citation preview

64433int.indd a

22-05-18 10:17 AM

THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE SIMPSON IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES.

64433int.indd b

22-05-18 10:19 AM

SCULPTURE AT THE ENDS OF SLAVERY

64433int.indd i

22-05-18 10:18 AM

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION BOOK PRIZE SERIES

The Phillips Collection Book Prize supports publication of a first book by an emerging scholar. The manuscript selected for this biennial award represents new and innovative research in modern or contemporary art from ca. 1780 to the present. Between 2016 and 2021 the Book Prize was awarded by an editorial committee of The Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland. 1. Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art 2. Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott 3. André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life 4. Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle 5. Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art 6. Joyce Tsai, László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography 7. Lynda Klich, The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico 8. C.F.B. Miller, Radical Picasso: The Use Value of Genius 9. Caitlin Meehye Beach, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery

64433int.indd ii

22-05-18 10:18 AM

SCULPTURE AT THE ENDS OF SLAVERY

Caitlin Meehye Beach

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

64433int.indd iii

22-05-18 10:18 AM

SUPPORTED BY A PUBLICATIONS GRANT FROM THE PAUL MELLON CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN BRITISH ART

University of California Press Oakland, California

© 2022 by Caitlin Meehye Beach

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

isbn 978-0-520-34326-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-39010-2 (ebook)

Printed in China

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10

64433int.indd iv

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

22-05-18 10:18 AM

For Kwon Hye Young ῢ䟊㡗G㠊Ⲏ┞⯒G₆㡃G䞮Ⳋ㍲

64433int.indd v

22-05-18 10:18 AM

64433int.indd vi

22-05-18 10:18 AM

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction. “Within a Few Steps of the Spot”: Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism / 1 Grasping Images: Antislavery and the Sculptural / 21 “The Mute Language of the Marble”: Slavery and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave / 41 Sentiment, Manufactured: John Bell and the Abolitionist Image under Empire / 77 Relief Work: Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster / 113 Between Liberty and Emancipation: Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery / 143 Coda. “Sculptured Dream of Liberty” / 163 Notes / 167 List of Illustrations / 211 Index / 215

64433int.indd vii

22-05-18 10:18 AM

64433int.indd viii

22-05-18 10:18 AM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

not have been possible without many colleagues, mentors, and friends. Between three New York boroughs, Washington, DC, and London, they have enriched it—and my life—in countless ways. Its shortcomings and oversights are my own. Above all I must thank Elizabeth Hutchinson, who has guided my work over the past decade with generosity and incisiveness. Her commitment to teaching and writing socially engaged histories of art is an exemplary model and I feel lucky to have been her advisee. At Columbia I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Kellie Jones, Jonathan Crary, Meredith Gamer, and Mabel Wilson, whose insights on art, visibility, and power shaped this project in meaningful ways. At Bowdoin College, Patrick Rael, Jill Pearlman, Lauren Kroiz, and Connie Chiang taught me how to ask questions about the past and its afterlives. Linda Docherty and Thayer Tolles introduced me to American art and to sculpture respectively as an undergraduate. I would have not gone on to study art history without their guidance. I have found a wonderfully welcoming community in the Department of Art History and Music at Fordham University. It is a privilege to work at Fordham, and having stable employment

THIS BOOK WOULD

ix

64433int.indd ix

22-05-18 10:18 AM

and access to health care in a time of precarity helped immensely in my ability to complete this project. I thank Eric Bianchi, Anne Clark, Katherina Fostano, Matthew Gelbart, Kathryn Heleniak, Asato Ikeda, Joanna Isaak, Nathan Lincoln-Decusatis, Angela Michalski, Barbara Mundy, Nina Rowe, Maria Ruvoldt, Larry Stempel, Angelina Tallaj, Richard Teverson, and Sevin Yaraman for their generosity as colleagues. In the Office of the Dean and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, I thank Laura Auricchio, Eva Badowska, and Rafael Zapata for their advocacy and support. I’m also grateful for the scholarly community of the Affiliated Faculty Program in African and African American Studies, directed by Mark Chapman, and the Africanist Working Group, led by Nana Osei-Opare. The staff of Fordham University Libraries and the Office of Research also provided invaluable support. And of course, I thank my students, with whom it is a privilege to work. Thank you for your insights and curiosity. Over many years of research and writing my thinking has been enriched by conversations with and the intellectual generosity of many people: Mia Bagneris, Tim Barringer, Babette Bohn, Dannielle Bowman, Dana Byrd, Magdalene Breidenthal, Eddie Chambers, Adrienne Childs, Jennifer Chuong, Ruthie Dibble, Diane Favro, Michael Hatt, Caitlin Henningsen, Meghan Holmes, Tess Korobkin, Marci Kwon, Estelle Lingo, Ashley Lazevnick, María Lumbreras, Prita Meier, Wayne Modest, Sean Nesselrode Moncada, Kate Nichols, Fatima Quairishi, Xuxa Rodriguez, Julia Rosenbaum, Althea SullyCole, Isabel Taube, Roberto Visani, Wendy S. Walters, Tobias Wofford, and Elaine Yau. Michael Cole, Francesco de Angelis, Jennifer Raab, and Ioannis Mylonopoulos helped me think through questions of monuments and commemoration as a graduate student. Sarah Cash, Martina Droth, Karen Lemmey, and Thayer Tolles helped immensely in my research related to all things sculptural. David Bindman and Richard Barnes shared photographs of work by John Bell and insights on his career. Layla Bermeo, Emily Casey, and Clare Kobasa read chapters and offered constructive feedback. Susannah Blair, Eliza Butler, Ray Carlson, Connie Choi, Carrie Cushman, Catherine Damman, Yasmine Espert, Katherine Fein, Mikinaak Migwans, Abbe Schriber, and David Sledge have been generous interlocutors from Columbia on. The beginnings of this book are indebted to support from predoctoral dissertation fellowships. I first started this project in an attic office upstairs from the cast corridor at the Royal Academy of Arts, where Columbia University’s Cathedral Fund Fellowship supported an invaluable summer of research. The Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Wyeth Fellowship at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art also afforded me crucial time, space, and resources to develop my work and my own confidence in it. At these three institutions, I thank Eliza Bonham Carter, Elizabeth Cropper, Amelia Goerlitz, Peter Lukehart, Therese O’Malley, and Adam Waterton. I completed this book through the support of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There I thank the Office of Academic Programs and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, especially Sarah Lawx

64433int.indd x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

22-05-18 10:18 AM

rence, Iris Moon, and Elyse Nelson. A Research Support Grant from Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and a Faculty Research Grant from Fordham enabled travel to Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. Alpha Kanu and Amanda Maples helped in my travels to and within Freetown, and The Very Rev. Canon Fowell Prince Emerson-Thomas and the caretakers of St. George’s Cathedral and St. John’s Maroon Church shared their spaces, time, and insights. I also thank Josephine Kargbo at the Sierra Leone National Museum for facilitating my visit there. In Stoke-on-Trent, Lucy Lead at the Wedgwood Archive assisted with archival research and images. A special thanks to Simon Spier, who went out of his way to take me to see the first version of The Greek Slave at Raby Castle, and to Chloe Scott, who was a generous host in London. The labor and care of archivists, librarians, and museum workers has made this project possible. Thank you to the staff at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, the American Art/Portrait Gallery Library and the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library of Columbia University, the Biblioteca Statale Stelio Crise, the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, the British Institute in Florence, the British Library, the British Museum, Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum of the Royal Musuems Greenwich, the Cincinnati History Museum and Library, the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron, Cragside House and the National Trust, the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arti in Trieste, Kensington Central Library, the Minton Archive, the National Archives of Sierra Leone, the National Gallery of Art, the New Orleans Public Library, the Tyne and Wear Archive Services, the Wallace Collection Archives, Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Wilberforce House and Museum. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, Holly Trusted and Angus Patterson facilitated access to objects and archives related to Elkington and Company. Jim Ranahan of the Library of Birmingham went above and beyond to help me locate photographs of John Bell’s work. Caterina del Vivo of the Gabinetto Vieusseux generously shared her expertise on Hiram Powers’s career in Florence, and Maruizio Lorber of the Museo Revoltella did the same for Francesco Pezzicar in Trieste. Erin Albritton and Sally Reeves of the Notarial Archives of the Civil District Court of New Orleans shared important insights on the cityscape of nineteenth-century New Orleans. Lucy Saint-Smith of the Library of the Society of Friends shared resources on Quaker abolitionist committees amid pandemic closures. Anthea Purkis of the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery and Sheldon Cheek of the Image of the Black in Western Art Project at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research of Harvard University helped with image permissions in the eleventh hour. And thank you to Hye Sook Park, for her help with translations. I presented research for this book in talks at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newberry Library, the Ohio State University, Tulane University, the University of California Santa Barbara, and annual meetings of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

64433int.indd xi

xi

22-05-18 10:18 AM

the College Art Association and the Association of Historians of American Art. I am grateful for the organizers and attendees of these events, whose questions and feedback pushed my work in new directions. Earlier iterations of material in chapters 3 and 5 were previously published as essays in the summer 2016 issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in the volume Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 (Manchester University Press, 2021). To the editors of these volumes—Martina Droth, Michael Hatt, Melissa Dabakis, and Paul Kaplan— thank you for taking a chance on my work and for offering constructive advice. At the University of California Press, my sincere thanks and appreciation go to Archna Patel, with whom it has been a privilege to work. I am grateful to her, Teresa Iafolla, Nadine Little, and Jessica Moll for their guidance, expertise, and practical advice in all stages of the publication process. Lynda Crawford provided excellent copyedits, and Florence Grant did a superb job with indexing. My sincere thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, who provided invaluable suggestions and advice. To everyone at UC Press—in editorial, production, and marketing—who has helped make this book a material thing, thank you. A Dean F. Failey Grant from the Decorative Arts Trust and a Publication Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art generously supported fees associated with images and indexing. Last, and certainly not least, at the Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland, I thank Klaus Ottmann, Kathryn Rogge, and the selection committee for the Phillips Collection Book Prize. It is an honor to be selected for this award and to publish in the company of its previous recipients. Throughout these many years I have been sustained by the friendship of Mina Bionta, Julie Constantine, Coco Sprague Gille, James Lemoine, Emily Liao, Christina Long, Sarah Luppino, Lauren Johnson Rus, Liza Sweeney, Maddie Sweeney, Adrien Terranova, Scott Weiss, Emily White, Afiya Wilson, Natalie Voorheis, and Matt Yantakosol. Clare Kobasa and Maggie Crosland have been with me on this journey from the very beginning and without them thinking about and looking at art seems unimaginable. Enzo, the world’s best dog, has been a constant presence and companion while writing. My thanks, and love, to Ben VanWagoner, who has not only lent insights to many aspects of this book but more importantly made life while completing it immeasurably more wonderful. Finally, my family have made so much possible. I thank my parents and brother, Linda, Rex, and Kyle Beach, for encouraging and supporting me from near and far. My 㠊Ⲏ┞, Kwon Hye Young, has sacrificed a great deal in both of our journeys from Seoul to the United States, and this work is for her.

xii

64433int.indd xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

22-05-18 10:18 AM

INTRODUCTION “Within a Few Steps of the Spot”: Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism A world compartmentalized, Manichean and petrified, a world of statues . . . that is the colonial world.1

frantz fanon

Slavery and genocide do not have edges.2

tiffany lethabo king

C

Let us approach this question by considering a moment in the mid-nineteenth century, when the American sculptor Hiram Powers sent his sculpture The Greek Slave for exhibition in the United States (fig. 0.1). Modeled in Powers’s Florence atelier in 1843, the white marble statue depicted a young Greek woman taken captive with her wrists bound by chains. It made its way through the artist’s home country on a meandering tour, appearing before audiences in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and many other cities. By late 1850 The Greek Slave arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, where it drew glowing praise from newspapers as “faultless,” “a beautiful specimen of art,” and “perfect and life-like.”3 One review stood out. Addressing the statue directly, an anonymous commentator for the abolitionist newspaper the National Era noted, “Within a few steps of the spot which thy presence is consecrating, maidens as pure and as sensitive as thou art are weekly bought and sold.”4 This was in reference to the main slave market in downtown St. Louis, where enslavers trafficked human beings AN AN IMAGE INCITE CHANGE?

1

64433int.indd 1

22-05-18 10:05 AM

figure 1 Edward Wallowitch, Andy Warhol with Kitten, c. 1957. Photo by Edward Wallowitch. ©2021 Paul Wallowitch. All Rights Reserved.

figure 0.1 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, modeled 1841–1843, carved 1846, marble. National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran).

64433int.indd 2

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.2 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Antislavery medallion, 1787, jasperware. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Frederick Rathbone, 1908.

until the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865. The National Era suggests that Powers’s Greek Slave—on display in an entertainment hall across the street— stood not in a rarified space apart from that world but within it.5 The sculpture’s presence there, the commentator reasoned, might move viewers to appeal to the justice of “those equally oppressed in [their] very midst.”6 Whether a statue like The Greek Slave could indeed do such work forms the central focus of this book, which interrogates the place of sculpture in the transatlantic fight to abolish slavery in the United States. In 1788, the English potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) sent the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society a package of small jasperware medallions (fig. 0.2), each bearing a bas-relief of a kneeling Black man in chains encircled by the words, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”7 Widely circulated in campaigns to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire, Wedgwood’s medallion took on currency in the American context as well, quickly becoming a recognizable image to viewers on both sides of the North Atlantic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, it would be joined by a host of busts and statues by American and European artists Introduction

64433int.indd 3

3

22-05-18 10:06 AM

including Powers (1805–1873), John Bell (1811–1895), Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), and Francesco Pezzicar (1831–1903), each of which gave visual form to the politics of abolition. Each of these artists helped shape and were shaped by a mass visual culture whose efflorescence would come to define the long nineteenth century, a time in which viewers faced more diverse ways to consume images.8 Sculpture in particular was increasingly accessible and reproducible, whether in the form of small handheld medallions, tabletop figurines, or life-size statues seen by thousands on traveling tours, and this visibility primed it well for mobilization in projects of reform.9 Yet objects like the Wedgwood antislavery medallion or Powers’s The Greek Slave were not always straightforward emblems of radical change, a premise that is borne out with renewed attention to their making, circulation, and reception. As the National Era suggests of the latter, the consumption of sculpture also unfolded in close proximity to the institution of slavery and the regimes of racialized value that ordered it. In this book I argue that sculpture stood at slavery’s ends in conflicting and contradictory ways as it moved through a world contoured at once by the wide-reaching economies of enslavement as well as the international campaigns to refuse and abolish them. If the medium was a highly visible means of interrogating the politics of slavery, so too was it a deeply unstable one. The works of art under discussion in the following pages were categorically neither “good” nor “bad” images—a limiting and presentist rubric that has often governed past understandings of “abolitionist” imagery—but rather ones that came out of a world of aesthetic, political, and economic flux in which any vision of freedom proved challenging to articulate as visual and material fact. What became an ineluctably paradoxical relationship between art and abolition in the nineteenth century was something that stemmed from ways the sculptural enterprise and medium overlapped modes of commerce and commodification constituted under enslavement and other forms of unfreedom under racial capitalism. First, sculpture’s production and circulation—a capital-intensive, increasingly industrial enterprise—was embedded in flows of global trade connected to American plantation economies. Second, its reception was shaped by contemporary considerations of corporeality. Nineteenth-century concerns with the lifelike nature of sculpted bodies carved from marble, cast in bronze, molded from plaster, or fired in clay—long understood as measures of artistic virtuosity—were inextricable from hierarchies of race and subjectivity that shaped the institution of slavery and its regimes of bodily commodification. In making this central claim, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery aims to revise and critique conventional art historical understandings of sculpture as both phenomenologically produced body and industrially made object. In so doing, it also seeks to contribute to interdisciplinary dialogues about race and justice by modeling a set of strategies for considering the possibilities and limitations of art in the pursuit of redress under capitalism. In pursuing these lines of inquiry, this book takes an expansive approach to sculpture in the nineteenth century: where it was made, who paid for it, and the markets 4

64433int.indd 4

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

and regimes of value it occupied and to which it stood adjacent. I thus conceive of sculpture as an entity that inhabited an interconnected transatlantic world that spanned merchants’ exchanges and cotton factorage houses in the American South, quarries and studios in Italy, foundries and industrial manufactories in Britain, antislavery commemorations in Sierra Leone, African American Civil War soldiers’ fairs in Boston, world’s fairs, and touring shows. And while my focus rests primarily on the question of slavery’s abolition in the United States, its scope necessarily exceeds those geographic bounds.10 The making and reception of nineteenth-century sculpture was a transnational affair, as many scholars have shown, with artists from the world round converging on European cities such as Florence and Rome (and later, Paris) to access professional training, good materials, and collections of ancient and modern statuary.11 Moreover, the aesthetic, material, and financial demands of sculptural production in this period intersected a broader transatlantic hegemony of racial capitalism— what Cedric Robinson defines in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) as a system founded upon and complicit with racial oppression borne out through enslavement, expropriation, and empire.12 This book’s account of sculpture as a representational, transactional, and transnational object looks to shift understandings of the medium in a way that accounts for histories of enslavement that, as Robinson and other scholars of the Black radical tradition first argued, have been constitutive to a modern capitalist world order.13 Enslaved labor, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, was “the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale.”14 If sculpture has long been understood as a vital force in modern culture and society, so too was its production, circulation, and consumption complicit with and enabled by a global capitalist economy forged by stolen labor. Furthermore, that sculptures—in particular those depicting enslaved and captive bodies—were able to traverse such a world opens onto deeper concerns about the medium’s pernicious relationship to bodies commodified under slavery, or what Fred Moten has termed the figure of “the commodity who speaks.”15 Put differently, what is at stake when we locate the history of racial capitalism at the center of the fraught relationship between “art” and “objecthood”?16 “LIFE-LIKE”

Thinking about sculpture in the nineteenth century often involved a suspension of disbelief. The commentator for the National Era did not write about The Greek Slave so much as speak to it as if it were a sensing subject. And when the art critic Henry Tuckerman wrote his poetic ode to the same statue upon seeing it displayed in New York in 1847, he opened with two questions: “Do no human pulses quiver in those wrists?” and then, “Is no woman’s heart now beating in that bosom’s patient swell?”17 Tuckerman engages The Greek Slave not as an inert stone thing but as an animate, pulsing body.18 Several decades later, visitors to the sculpture galleries of the Philadelphia Centennial Introduction

64433int.indd 5

5

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.3 After Fernando Miranda, The Statue of the “Freed Slave” in Memorial Hall, 1876, wood engraving. Wallach Picture Division, New York Public Library.

Exhibition of 1876 variously described the bronze figure of a freedman as represented by Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery as “a faultless copy of the man,” “alive” and “speaking.”19 Likewise, when the sculpture was featured in an engraving, it appeared in print not as a static work of art but as a man in motion, vigorously striding off his pedestal into a crowd of shocked and delighted fairgoers (fig. 0.3). Such discursive play with sculptural ontology was not atypical for criticism and literature of the day. On the one hand, the traditional methods of art history might 6

64433int.indd 6

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

lead us to make sense of the preceding descriptions in relation to an Ovidian speaking or living statue.20 Since antiquity, the potential for a sculpture to be “life-like,” as one of the St. Louis newspaper correspondents wrote of The Greek Slave, was frequently a marker of valuation for artists and critics alike. On the other hand, nineteenth century preoccupations with the animacy of objects were as much political as they were aesthetic. Jennifer Roberts, following the work of Bill Brown, acknowledges how the rhetoric of the animate object was at once a key trope of material culture and “inseparable from debates about slavery.”21 Still, questions of race and enslavement often linger at the periphery rather than the center of art historians’ inquiries into the agency of objects in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material culture.22 Recent work by Wendy Bellion and Amelia Rauser has begun to address this lacuna by taking seriously the “sense of lifelikeness” attributed to statuary and shedding essential light on how the imagined vitalism of sculptural forms intersected calcifying racial hierarchies in transatlantic spaces of the late eighteenth century.23 What still remains unaccounted for are the ways that shifting conceptions of the sculptural from that moment into the nineteenth century have been perpetually yoked to a crisis of racialized subjectivity— what Frantz Fanon would describe as “this crushing objecthood” (cette objectivité écrasante)—that endures into present configurations of white supremacy.24 Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery looks across disciplines to legal and literary theory in order to articulate the stakes surrounding historical conflations of sculpted forms and human bodies. As Sianne Ngai reminds us, “to be animated in American culture is to be racialized in some way.”25 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American law conceived of enslaved African American people as objects of property, subjecting human life to what the legal scholar Cheryl Harris describes as “the ultimate devaluation” of personhood to a condition of market alienability.26 Stephen Best similarly writes of slavery as a central ordering force in modern constructions of property, race, and personhood, which he in turn places in a genealogy of post-Enlightenment AngloAmerican theories of the dual nature of the body as not only a corporeal entity but symbolic of larger networks of socioeconomic relationships.27 Best argues that these concerns about the fungibility of corporeality, specifically as they were articulated in William Blackstone’s influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), were reconfigured as cornerstones of American property law by the nation’s white male framers.28 As core concepts ordering the body politic, these ideas came to bear distinct consequences for practices of representation across performance, literature, and other media from the eighteenth century to the present moment.29 This book extends ideas explored by Best by demonstrating how the development of the art market, and the aesthetic theories and hierarchies that fueled it, also emerged in lockstep with the machinations of racial capitalism over the course of the long nineteenth century. Conceptions of sculpture’s vitalism—what I understand as sculptural animacy— stemmed from the same Enlightenment notions of fungible corporeality marshalled to justify slave law and the commodification of human life.30 Introduction

64433int.indd 7

7

22-05-18 10:06 AM

A central preoccupation throughout this book, then, is to look at the aesthetic, racial, and political ramifications posed by “life-like” statues in an age of abolition, particularly those that depicted captive figures. Even when mobilized in the context of opposition to slavery, the representation of the enslaved subject is always an act laden (and latent) with the dispossessive violence of slavery.31 Art historians before me have in turn paid careful attention to what it meant to represent the enslaved in three dimensions—a medium that was, by the nineteenth century, already tethered to hierarchical ideas of racial difference and bodily possession. Neoclassicism remained the lingua franca of academic art and the sculptor’s education well into this moment, with writings of critics like Johann Joachim Winckelmann extolling the virtues of marble bodies whose lithe forms harkened back to an imagined Greek past.32 Charmaine Nelson has discussed how such theories foreclosed possibilities for representing Black subjects by assuming a beau idéal of white subjects in white marble.33 Nelson’s study, in addition to scholarship by James Smalls, Kirsten Pai Buick, Kirk Savage, Michael Hatt, and Joy Kasson has shed vital light on the ways sculptural depictions of enslaved Black subjects are rife with visual and ideological instabilities—in terms of the materials from which they were modeled, carved, or cast, as well as the subjects they depict.34 We are thus primed to see how an image like Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion not only reinforced racial hierarchies in its representation of a supplicant African man beneath the text “Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” but, moreover, in the very fact of its materiality. In language hauntingly similar to Thomas Jefferson’s racist assessment of dark skin as an “immovable veil of black” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Wedgwood described in the very same year of his development of jet black jasperware as an impermeable ceramic “body” that might take colors “through its whole substance.”35 If sculpture was a singular medium “to say something” about the histories of slavery and emancipation, as Freeman Henry Morris Murray compellingly observed as early as 1916 in his landmark study of the topic, it was still one indelibly fraught with contradiction.36 This book adds to these existing understandings of the racialized materiality of sculpture by lending further attention to the economic regimes enfolded in dominant understandings of the aesthetic and the racial in nineteenth-century America and Europe. Kathryn Yusoff’s remarks on the geologic are helpful here. She writes, “The process of geologic materialization in the making of matter as value is transferred onto subjects and transmutes those subjects through a material and color economy that is organized as ontologically different from the human.”37 In recognizing these ontological stakes of materialization we should recall that it is, of course, the sculptor who “puts into hard and alpine stone / a figure that’s alive,” as Michelangelo writes, and my contention is that such conceptions of sculptural animacy in the nineteenth century cannot be understood as existing apart from global economies of theft and expropriation.38 Like nearly all other modalities of production in the Black Atlantic, the artistic practice of someone like Hiram Powers or John Bell was made possible by markets and wealth born out of enslavement and empire. Furthermore, the imaginaries surround8

64433int.indd 8

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

ing the circulation and reception of completed works reveal how the entangled economies of sculpture and of slavery extended to the very problem of the corporeal in modern culture as it was produced under the horizon of racial capitalism. Narratives of modernism often culminate in the declaration of sculpture as an autonomous “specific object” sealed off from the workaday world; the trajectory I trace here is in many ways the exact opposite.39 Figures of jasper, marble, bronze, Parian ware, and plaster were bodies produced—literally and figuratively—in relation to broader economic and legal negotiations of ontology and animacy of the period. A note on terminology: throughout I use the terms “animacy” and “animated” to describe the quality of liveliness attributed to three-dimensional sculpted objects representing the human body. Mel Y. Chen’s evocation of animacy as an affective construct shaped by race and sexuality is a crucial point of reference here, for it opens up ways to think about the racialized and libidinal economies affirmed, set into motion, or reconfigured in relation to sculpted bodies.40 Throughout I consider not only the affective presence of statues and the phenomenological engagements they engender, but I also foreground the role of language, criticism, and materials in anchoring and managing those encounters. Drawing from Fanon, Chen emphasizes the “alchemical” power of language in the construction of animacy and objectification alike, noting how people use hierarchies of animacy “to manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter in the world.”41 This insistence on the scalar determination of animacy is important as it complicates new materialist assertions about the unequivocal “vibrancy” of matter, instead asking us to pay attention to the human-driven efforts to differently motivate subjects and objects in the discursive and material world.42 Close attention to the man-made material and immaterial apparatuses that preceded, accompanied, and framed sculptures is thus an essential aspect of this book’s method. (Here it is worth remembering that Marx, writing Capital in 1867, famously drew upon metaphors of the sculptural in stating that New World slavery constituted the “pedestal” for the veiled growth of European industrial capitalism.)43 Significantly, it is the pedestal of The Greek Slave that plays a central role in the National Era’s account of the sculpture in St. Louis. Upon describing the place of the exhibition “within a few steps of the spot” of the city’s slave market, the narrative that then unfolds imagines the statue—improbably—coming to life and addressing the spectators in the gallery. Its animacy is activated by the rotating base upon which it stands; the sculpture is described as “turning just then upon its pedestal” and delivering in “the mute language of the marble” an antislavery address.44 In this regard, the case of The Greek Slave’s rotating pedestal opens onto three important points. First, the newspaper mobilizes the trope of sculptural animacy in order to make a point about the atrocity of slavery and the commodification of human life. Second, in so doing it evokes the statue as a bodily surrogate for the abolitionist lecturers who crisscrossed the country on traveling circuits, itineraries themselves not dissimilar from those of touring paintings or statues.45 Third, and most importantly, it raises the issue of just Introduction

64433int.indd 9

9

22-05-18 10:06 AM

precisely who is figured by the abolitionist body—a larger question about historical agency and power with which this book ultimately seeks to grapple. Let us revise the question with which we began. It is perhaps not so much the matter of whether an image can incite change, but really more one of why an image is needed or urgent, and for whom. OF ABSENCES AND ENDS

The year 1850 was marked by two cataclysmic events in regard to histories of abolition. First, in January—in the courthouse opposite the entertainment hall where Powers’s The Greek Slave would stand on display just months later—Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott won their freedom in a trial held before the State Supreme Court of Missouri after having filed individual suits several years prior. The case was ultimately reversed at the federal level in 1857, when in Scott v. Sandford Roger Taney’s Supreme Court ruled against the citizenship rights of African American people enslaved in the United States.46 But for the seven years prior, the Scotts, both of whom were born into slavery, were declared free in the eyes of the law. Second, in September, the 31st Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated that all persons escaped from slavery be returned to bondage upon capture. In one succession after another, both events bespeak the ways the status of people enslaved in the United States remained under intense juridical and political debate at midcentury. The stakes of abolitionist discourse mounted in turn, with an article like the National Era’s review of The Greek Slave grappling with the question of how art might figure therein. Infinite “inborn absences” inhere in any recounting of the wider impacts of the Scotts’ trial or the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Michel-Rolph Trouillot uses this turn of phrase in Silencing the Past (1995) to describe the uneven construction of history as “event” as he looks to account for the ways the radical uprisings of the Haitian Revolution went unacknowledged by many in the Western world.47 His meditations open onto a crucial point about narratives of the end of slavery. If, after the end of the US Civil War, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment formally reversed legislation upheld by decisions including the Fugitive Slave Act and Scott v. Sandford, it was neither the law nor the war that effected emancipation in its totality but rather the resistance of the enslaved across scales. Such resistance encompassed actions like the Scotts’ lawsuits and also extended more broadly to what Saidiya Hartman describes as “infinitesimal assaults to the slave order” effected by those in bondage, or the everyday forms of contestation, kinship formation, and self-assertion that comprised the routine, the transient, and the fugitive.48 Many have discussed the manifold ways the redressive acts of the enslaved formed the core of abolitionism in the Black Atlantic.49 This reality is essential for it corrects the mythos—one embodied as early as 1787 by the kneeling jasperware figure on the Wedgwood medallion—that abolitionist discourse was the domain of a select few white reformers in Britain and the United States and that emancipation was in turn proffered to enslaved Black people by benevolent 10

64433int.indd 10

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.4 John Bell, Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1848, marble. St. George’s Cathedral, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photograph by author.

64433int.indd 11

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.5 Francesco Pezzicar, The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863, 1873, bronze. Museo Revoltella, Trieste. Photograph by author.

white people in the “events” of 1833 and 1865.50 My understanding of abolition and emancipation in this book follows the work of Hartman, Rinaldo Walcott, Tiffany Lethabo King, Christina Sharpe, Lisa Lowe, and others, who posit that horizons of Black freedom remain deferred under enduring configurations of coloniality, white supremacy, the afterlives of slavery, and the carceral state.51 If in what follows I consider the question of slavery’s “ends,” I do so with the understanding that abolition remains partial, incomplete, and contingent. A core concern of the following chapters, then, is how sculpture gave way to the complexities and fictions of the idea of abolition in an age of industrial and imperial accretion. Many of the works of art under discussion were conceived by their makers as commemorations of emancipation. John Bell’s marble bust of the white British antislavery campaigner Thomas Fowell Buxton was commissioned for a prominent colonial cathedral in Freetown, Sierra Leone, following the end of apprenticeship in 1838 12

64433int.indd 12

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in the British Empire five years before (fig. 0.4). Similarly, the anonymous Black freedman represented by Francesco Pezzicar’s monumental bronze statue The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863 stood on display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 to mark both the end of slavery in the United States and a more general idea of “freedom” at a world’s fair held to mark the centenary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (fig. 0.5). In so doing both sculptures—on display in spaces key to the formation of national and imperial narratives—worked to construct the fictive idea of abolition as a discrete historical event that neatly cleaved histories of slavery from futures of freedom; they were, in Trouillot’s formulation, “artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact.”52 Put another way, sculpture at the ends of slavery gave way to a distinction between emancipation and liberty: one a juridical process, the other an ideal far more elusive and ineffable. — This book begins with a question at once simple and deceptively complex: why sculpture? What could it do for the antislavery movement that a painting, print, or text could not? When Josiah Wedgwood sent an envelope of his famed antislavery cameos to Benjamin Franklin, then the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he expressed his hopes that “the subject of freedom will itself be more canvassed and better understood.”53 Franklin confirmed this to be true, writing of the medallions, “I am persuaded it may have an effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet.”54 Chapter 1 considers the stakes surrounding the persuasiveness of the Wedgwood medallion and the Description of a Slave Ship broadside, two images issued under the official auspices of the London-based Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Both elicited an engagement that had as much to do with touch as it did sight, and I argue that this hapticity found parallels in contemporary theorizations of sculptural engagement. Drawing from theories of sensory perception ranging from John Locke to Johann Gottfried Herder, I address the violent contradictions at stake as images circulated by the Society enabled beholders to “grasp”—or conceptually and physically surveil and possess—an impression of the horrors of slavery that many abolitionists acknowledged existed outside of the realm of visual or textual representation. Neither ceramic medallion nor printed broadside were sculptures, but the fact that both elicited a form of spectatorship akin to one’s engagement with a statue prefigured the kinds of paradoxes that would subtend the place of medium in abolitionist discourse in the decades to follow. Chapter 1 takes into account a wide range of actors, including Wedgwood, the modelers and craftsmen under his employ such as Henry Webber and William Hackwood, contemporary philosophers and art critics, formerly enslaved activists, reformers and lawmakers, and a heterogeneous world of “ordinary” consumers of material culture. I employ a similar approach in the chapters that follow, considering the “production” of Introduction

64433int.indd 13

13

22-05-18 10:06 AM

sculpture as a collective and multivocal affair. This method fittingly parallels the material realities of nineteenth-century sculptor’s studios—and indeed industrial manufactories—which were far from the purview of a lone artist but involved many kinds of labor, skills, and technologies executed by many kinds of people. At the same time, the positionalities, biographies, and careers of individual artists also matter, particularly in a moment when sculpture remained largely a pursuit of the white, the male, and the wealthy.55 The opportunities and obstacles that faced Hiram Powers, a white man who courted the patronage of Southern enslavers, differed vastly from those encountered by Edmonia Lewis, a Black and Anishinaabe woman who confronted the exigencies of racism but also navigated and participated in the support networks and institution-building of African American and Native artists, entrepreneurs, educators, reformers, consumers, and audiences over the course of her career. Throughout this book, I seek to tell an object-centered story of nineteenth-century sculptors’ practices that remains at the same time responsive to—but not reductive of—the raced, gendered, and classed limitations of biography. Each chapter case study, then, centers on a single artist but situates their work in a larger ecosystem of labor, production, consumption, and reception. Chapter 2 focuses on Powers’s The Greek Slave, a sculpture that Freeman Henry Morris Murray would later deem “American art’s first anti-slavery document in marble” in his landmark text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (1916).56 It rethinks the work’s relationship to the urgent matter of slavery’s abolition in the antebellum United States, a connection that has long been understood by scholars as implicit and bedrock.57 Considering The Greek Slave’s transatlantic trajectories from the sculptor’s studio in Florence to exhibition spaces in the United States, I show how its making and circulation intersected the machinations of racial capitalism in the Black Atlantic. We have already begun to see how these concerns emerged in sharp relief during the sculpture’s display in cities like St. Louis, and they would become more urgent yet in the city of New Orleans in particular. Attention to unstudied archival sources and period commentaries will further reveal how the sculpture’s display was inextricable from the acts of seeing and surveillance central to the institution of slavery and human trafficking. Across this chapter and the following, I also examine how this adjacency would in turn become a potent point of critique on the global stage, sparking responses that took visual and visible form on behalf of formerly enslaved Black activists and white abolitionist allies. It was precisely this possibility of sculpture to function as a form of antislavery critique that sparked the British sculptor John Bell to respond to the popular Greek Slave with a statue of his own, a bronze electrotype depicting an enslaved Black woman entitled A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic (1853) (fig. 0.6). With A Daughter of Eve as well as works like Thomas Fowell Buxton and The Octoroon (see fig. 3.14), Bell hoped his art “may aid in directing a sustained attention to the greatest injustice in the world”: slavery in the United States.58 Chapter 3 thinks through the 14

64433int.indd 14

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.6 John Bell, A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic, 1853, bronze electrotype with silver. The Armstrong Collection, Cragside House. Artwork in the public domain. Photograph by James Dobson for the National Trust Photolibrary/Alamy.

64433int.indd 15

22-05-18 10:06 AM

ways in which he realized this ambition. Yet the spaces that brought his sculpture into view, including government churches in British colonial Sierra Leone, foundries and potteries in the West Midlands, and exhibitions in Lancashire textile towns, gestured to the limits and contradictions of this project. These were places that had long been embedded in Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade as well as its projects of imperial and commercial expansion after abolition. They were likewise, as I discuss, central to a modern British sculptural enterprise increasingly tethered to currents of industry and empire in the Victorian era.59 Paradoxically, any effort to make visible the problem of American slavery in this global context hinged on a debt to the catastrophic conditions of enslavement and empire past and present. Together, chapters 2 and 3 stress how statuary—particularly that which depicted the enslaved body—interfaced a wider world of commodification and commerce that undercut the ideological work they might be asked, expected, or presumed to perform in appeals to abolition. On what terms, then, might art effect change in a capitalist society? Chapter 4 proposes one possible answer to this question by considering work by the American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who during the US Civil War created plaster sculptures depicting abolitionists and war heroes such as John Brown, William H. Carney, Robert Gould Shaw, and others (fig. 0.7). Lewis promoted the works across a variety of contexts, including antislavery meetings and soldiers’ relief fairs, and also sold them as cast replicas. Few are known to survive today, but I take this absence as a starting point to consider their success as works of art widely seen, shown, and consumed. I lend particular focus to Lewis’s display and sale of her plaster sculptures at relief fairs, considering the centrality of this work to a sphere of Black women’s activism that aided African American soldiers, their families, refugees of war, and the formerly enslaved. At these fairs, the poetics of plaster—as a medium both provisional and palliative—helped articulate new material possibilities for a politics of care circa 1865, the year of slavery’s abolition in the United States. As we will see, the plaster sculptures themselves as well as Lewis’s broader work of relief would in turn inform her monumental Forever Free (The Morning of Liberty) of 1867 in terms of both form and patronage (see fig. 4.17). If it remained uncertain after emancipation whether the sculptural could, or should, offer space of narratives about the end of slavery, the projects of relief work from which it emerged presented one possibility. The concluding chapter of this book revolves around a short case study of sculpture and the materiality of liberal freedom at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. It focuses primarily on the display of the Italian sculptor Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863, a monumentally scaled statue of a Black man bearing broken chains that had been cast expressly for the fair’s celebration of the hundredth anniversary of American independence. Pezzicar’s commemoration of emancipation participated in a broader, fair-wide mobilization of representations of the human form as expressions of “freedom” and “liberation.” It appeared alongside, for instance, the colossal copper torch-bearing hand that Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi 16

64433int.indd 16

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.7 Augustus Marshall, Edmonia Lewis’ Bust of Robert Gould Shaw, 1864, carte-de-visite. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

created for his yet-to-be completed Statue of Liberty, inside whose hollow form fair spectators could climb (fig. 0.8). Yet, as contemporary sources regarding its creation by Pezzicar and reception at the Centennial reveal, the sculpture was as much entangled with the afterlives of slavery as it was with any idea of subjective freedom. In the Reconstruction era, sculpture probed the possibilities of liberty at the same time as it exposed its limitations. The cast bronze that constituted the figure of Pezzicar’s statue Introduction

64433int.indd 17

17

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.8 “Colossal hand and torch” at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876, stereograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-02957.

proved a fitting material in this respect: its surface refracts more than it reflects, its body is monumental yet hollow. In many ways, it is a medium of deception and inversion, forged and cast through the loss of a ghostly body in wax or sand. The bronze monument, of course, would bookend sculptural paradigms of the long nineteenth century, supplanting the white neoclassical marble bodies of decades prior as the medium’s most vaunted and prestigious genre.60 If the outset of this book grapples with the racialized contradictions of the latter, the close contends with the deceptions and fictions of the former. At the ends of slavery, sculpture was highly visible, deeply unstable, and sometimes hollow. — It was hollowness, specifically, that the poet Vanessa Kisuule evoked when seeing the nineteenth-century bronze statue of the seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston felled in Bristol, England, in June 2020 (fig. 0.9).61 Demonstrators pulled down Colston’s statue in an international wave of uprisings in the Movement for Black Lives, held in the protest of the state murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. After toppling the bronze Colston off its pedestal with heavy ropes, the demonstrators dragged it through the streets and heaved it into Bristol Harbor on the River Avon, where beginning in the seventeenth century slave ships for the Royal African Company departed for the west coast of Africa to traffic in human 18

64433int.indd 18

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 0.9 Toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, Bristol, June 2020. Bristol Museums/Photograph by Keir Gravel.

life. Kisuule, the poet laureate of Bristol, recalled in the poem “Hollow” the experience of seeing a fragment of the fallen statue: Countless times I passed that plinth, Its heavy threat of metal and marble But as you landed, a piece of you fell off, broke away And inside, nothing but air. This whole time, you were hollow.62

What Kisuule’s poem helps us see are the ways sculpture can and cannot work in present visions of abolition. The presumptive cultural work expected of many of the sculptures under discussion in this book precipitates the commemorative fervor that would sweep the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Notions of sculpture as a singularly affective, sentimental, and indeed persuasive medium, shaped over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laid foundations for Gilded Age and late Victorian ideas that it was the monumental statue that could best “speak” to history and package its sins, whether committed in the name of Confederate rebellion, colonial invasion, or imperial war.63 It is essential that the many monuments erected in the shadow of enslavement fall; recall Fanon’s evocation of the colonial world as a petrified world of statues.64 As they do, we need also Introduction

64433int.indd 19

19

22-05-18 10:06 AM

remember that they are at once a “heavy threat of metal and marble” and “inside, nothing but air.” The sculptures I discuss in the following pages were never agents in the fight for the abolition of slavery, as much as some viewers might have imagined them to be. Rather, they were inert things carved of marble and cast in bronze, often rendered visible and spectacular through the very regimes of wealth and bodily value that enslavement afforded. Abolition will be realized only in part through the toppling of symbols—of which statues remain one part—but effected more urgently through the refusal and dismantling of structures and systems that constitute our present world.

20

64433int.indd 20

Introduction

22-05-18 10:06 AM

1 GRASPING IMAGES Antislavery and the Sculptural This art . . . more forcibly represents the horrible catastrophes of history.1

étienne maurice falconet

Sculpture more frequently than painting serves higher purposes than that of mere ornament or of picturing something. Often it is designed to commemorate some individual or some event, or, particularly in the group form, its main purpose is to “say something.”2

freeman henry morris murray

W

For centuries this question has shaped debates about the medium and its merits, especially as it related to other forms of art. An especially famous episode unfolded in 1546, when the writer Benedetto Varchi surveyed eight Florentine artists for their opinion on the matter, asking each to make a case for the superiority of either painting or sculpture.3 Nearly all the respondents acknowledged the singularity of a sculpture’s materiality as an object carved in marble or cast in bronze. As an object that existed in space and through time, it had the potential to be at once eternal, straightforward, and truthful; Leonardo da Vinci wrote of the latter, “what appears is as much as there is.”4 Yet these qualities were also liabilities. If Leonardo believed sculpture was “helped by nature,” this was not so much the case for painting, which demanded more invention and imagination on behalf of the artist.5 When Varchi delivered the results of his inquiry into the paragone to the HAT CAN SCULPTURE DO?

21

64433int.indd 21

22-05-18 10:06 AM

Florentine Academy a year later, the verdict was clear: painting was the “nobler art” and sculpture, by the virtue of its materiality, had its limitations.6 The two passages with which this chapter begins present a distinctly different perspective on the long and storied paragone. Written for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet’s “Reflexions sur la Sculpture” was widely regarded as the authoritative definition of the medium for a modern age of Enlightenment. Falconet believed sculpture could answer to history by representing its catastrophes and perpetuating their memory. His idea would be echoed a century and a half later when the journalist and civil rights activist Freeman Henry Morris Murray published Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation, a sweeping history of the ways narratives of enslavement and freedom took form in three dimensions in the United States. Although they appeared in markedly different contexts and moments, Murray’s conclusions in 1916 had much in common with those Falconet drew in 1761: sculpture, perhaps more so than other forms of art, might be able to “say something” about the events of the past. One of sculpture’s answers to history would emerge in the abolitionist movement. Falconet’s and Murray’s writings on sculpture bookended the long nineteenth century, an era that saw the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Western hemisphere.7 Murray acknowledged the ways sculpture stood as a vital cultural force in this history, embodying the truths and fictions of what he called “the Sun of Emancipation” in three dimensions.8 Indeed, the wide range of his study, encompassing over fifty statues, medallions, busts, and monuments, opens onto the broader question of how, why, and on what terms sculpture came to be a singular medium for addressing the subject of slavery and its abolition. To return to the paragone: why sculpture? What could it do that a painting could not? If the larger scope of this book is concerned with the place of sculpture in antislavery discourse, what I seek to do here is establish a set of historical foundations for understanding what it was about the medium in the first place that might make it so compelling and persuasive in this effort. In approaching this question, this chapter refocuses a set of well-known images circulated in antislavery campaigns of the late eighteenth century in relationship to theories of sculpture and spectatorship. It is well known that visual material played an important role in the activities of antislavery committees like the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (known also as the London Committee; the names will be used interchangeably here).9 Established by British reformers in 1787, the society distributed a wide range of materials in an effort to fulfill their aim of raising public awareness about the wrongs of slavery, and objects like Josiah Wedgwood’s “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” medallion (see fig. 0.2) and the engraved Description of a Slave Ship broadside (fig. 1.1) became important tools in building grassroots support for a movement that eventually culminated in the passage of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. The success of both, as scholars have noted, hinged on their ability to elicit the viewer’s sympathy with a sparse economy of text and image: the silhouetted 22

64433int.indd 22

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:06 AM

figure 1.1 James Phillips (printer and publisher), Description of a Slave Ship, 1789, copperplate engraving. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

64433int.indd 23

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure of a kneeling slave; the schematic rendering of a slave ship and its human cargo.10 These modes of spectatorship, as we will see, also had much in common with contemporary understandings of the haptic dimensions of sculptural encounter. Late eighteenth-century artists and critics, building on Enlightenment theories of empiricism, understood the sculptural object as singular for the ways it might open onto ways of feeling and knowing outside the realm of the visual. It was not insignificant that in this same moment the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade were concerned with the limitations of describing and representing enslavement, nor was it coincidental that the images they circulated in an effort to resolve these limitations prompted a spectatorial engagement carried out not only through sight but also through touch. The implications of this were fraught with contradiction. Objects ranging from the Wedgwood medallion, the Description of a Slave Ship, and miniature models of slaving vessels derived from the Description were both effective and affective to the publics in which they circulated. Yet these qualities arguably paralleled a mode of sculptural engagement that turned upon one’s ability to grasp, in both an intellectual and tactile sense, the subject at hand; put differently, perception functioned in equal parts as a form of surveillance and possession. Although the images circulated by the London Committee made visible the urgency of abolition in modern culture, the terms on which they did were contingent upon a mode of spectatorship that informed the logic not only of sculpture but also of slavery. “A SEAL FOR THE USE OF THIS SOCIETY”

The body of this chapter unfolds in three sections, beginning with the Wedgwood medallion and then turning outwards to consider the broader stakes of images mobilized by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in relation to questions of sculpture and touch. Though a great deal has been written on the medallion, an image well known in its time and today, here an overview of its production under the auspices of the society is integral to understanding its reception and the kinds of engagement it elicited as a material object. The history of the medallion’s making in many ways parallels the committee’s founding, which convened for the first time in London on May 22, 1787. The original membership comprised a dozen white Englishmen, who met at the printing shop of the prominent publisher James Phillips in George Yard just south of the Royal Exchange. Their founding aim was simple: as noted in their meeting minutes, they hoped to procure and publish “information and Evidence” regarding a practice “both impolitick and unjust.”11 Within the committee’s first year, Phillips printed and distributed some eighty-five thousand copies of publications on topics ranging from religious and moral philosophy to economic history, a feat made possible through contemporary developments in print culture, technology, and marketing.12 Over the course of the following two decades— the committee remained active through Parliament’s passage of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807—its members acted as a curatorial body of 24

64433int.indd 24

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

sorts, identifying texts, treatises, publications, and images for circulation to new publics and venues.13 Not long after the establishment of the London Committee, its members passed a resolution that “a seal be engraved for the use of this society.”14 A subcommittee was subsequently formed for this task, and that fall they laid before the group “a specimen of a Design for the same, expressive of an African in Chains in a supplicating Posture with this Motto ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother.’ ”15 It was subsequently produced as a cameo medallion by the English potter Josiah Wedgwood, who since 1769 operated a successful ceramics manufactory in Staffordshire, a clay soil-rich region situated between Liverpool and Birmingham. Wedgwood, who had joined the society as a standing member that August, manufactured the medallions gratis from the subcommittee’s proposed designs as his contribution to the group’s efforts, with the first versions coming from the ovens at his Etruria factory by the year’s end.16 The finished product was a small oval cameo of unglazed white jasperware with a bas-relief in black jasperware, both ceramic compounds of Wedgwood’s own invention. It measured about an inch in diameter and weighed just under two and a half grams—approximately half the weight of an eighteenth-century farthing (the smallest and lowest value of English coins), or the full weight of one modern American penny. The relief figure on its surface closely matched the initial specifications of the committee’s plan, depicting a man in chains kneeling beneath the question, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Although conceived as an emblematic seal, the medallion quickly took on a persuasive role. In one oft-cited instance, Wedgwood sent a package of cameos to the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1788, writing to Benjamin Franklin, the Pennsylvania Society’s then-president, that he hoped “the subject of freedom will itself be more canvassed and better understood.”17 Franklin then distributed the medallions to his friends and associates, writing back to Wedgwood, “I am persuaded it may have an effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet.”18 His estimation was correct. The medallion’s uses indeed exceeded those of the published texts, circulars, and broadsides that had been the primary means of communication for reformers to date. It was a small, lightweight object that could be held in one’s palm, worn on the body, inlaid into a decorative knickknack, passed from friend to friend, or slipped in an envelope and mailed across the ocean. As such, it significantly impacted the ways that those active in the antislavery movement communicated with one another and greater publics at large. As the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson—who ordered no fewer than five hundred copies for circulation—noted of the medallion’s popularity in 1807, “At last, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honorable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom.”19 Many have interrogated the stakes of the medallion’s popularity and efficacy in relationship to the racist terms on which its rhetoric unfolded. The kneeling figure looked back to a long history of European representations of people of African descent, a topic Grasping Images

64433int.indd 25

25

22-05-18 10:07 AM

that previous scholars have carefully analyzed and is important to limn here.20 The pose of the kneeling figure had iconographic roots in the imagery of Christian supplication, especially as depicted in scenes of the Adoration of the Magi. Joseph Leo Koerner has discussed how the Magi had long been understood to embody different temporalities and geographies of Christendom, but in the sixteenth century the third Magus— who often appeared at the edges of compositions farthest from Christ—was increasingly depicted as a specifically Black African man following the acceleration of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonial invasions of the so-called New World.21 In this widening global context, one in which Africans were trafficked and enslaved in European courtly spaces as well as in the Americas, white Europeans came to understand Blackness in a differential and hierarchical sense to themselves. This stereotype proliferated in the visual arts, especially as European portrait painters began to depict aristocratic white sitters accompanied by subservient Black pages, who often appeared wearing collars to signify their status as enslaved (fig. 1.2). As Anne Lafont has shown, the realm of the visual—and portraiture in particular—codified and calcified European understandings of skin color as a form of racial difference that in turn justified the practice of enslavement over the course of the early modern era.22 By the time white reformers began in earnest to mount campaigns against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century, the image of Black African subjectivity was correlated with enslavement and abjection in the minds of many Europeans. This history of representation haunts the Wedgwood medallion in both image and text. Saidiya Hartman reminds us that the imaginaries of abolitionism and antiracism are not perforce synonymous with one another and more often than not remain diametrically opposed.23 This becomes patently clear when comparing the medallion to portrait cameos of contemporary individuals Wedgwood produced around the same time, such as the one depicting the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society president Benjamin Franklin (fig. 1.3). These cameos featured views of white subjects in luminous jasperware, a material with which the potter had experimented at length to produce a “body as white & fine as it should be.”24 Featuring a black figure on a white jasper surface as opposed to the usual white figure set against a cobalt blue (occasionally light blue or celadon green) ground, the antislavery medallion was essentially a reversal of the portrait cameos of Franklin and others. It presented no one specific individual but rather a generic type whose silhouetted profile recalled racist images of Black people made by white European and American artists and scientists in the eighteenth century.25 Indeed, in size and heft the medallion looks and feels less like a Wedgwood cameo portrait and more like the lightweight tokens or “emergency money” that eighteenth-century ceramic manufacturers routinely gave workers in substitute of or advance for wages when they could not pay them up front (fig. 1.4).26 This is an object more closely aligned with a material culture of labor and obligation than one of identity and selfhood. The sculptural dimensions of the figure as emphasized by the medallion’s designers William Hackwood and Henry Webber further complicated this idea, 26

64433int.indd 26

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.2 Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of a Woman and an Enslaved Servant, 1696, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1908.

64433int.indd 27

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.3 Josiah Wedgwood, Cameo with portrait of Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1775–1799, jasperware. The Frank W. Gunsaulus Collection of Old Wedgwoood, The Art Institute of Chicago. figure 1.4 Token money manufactured by Worcester Porcelain Factory, ca. 1780, soft-paste porcelain. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Constance D. Stieglitz, in memory of her husband, Marcel H. Stieglitz, 1964.

with their recourse to the antique resulting in an image that by turns obscured and exacerbated questions of race and labor. HACKWOOD AND WEBBER’S SCULPTURAL BODIES

Nearly all of Wedgwood’s wares—whether a humble cameo or a fancy teapot—were meant to be handled, and the medallion was no exception. The efficacy of the Wedgwood medallions certainly stemmed from their relationship to the haptic, and arguably, questions of three-dimensionality and the sculptural in particular. The small medallions weren’t sculptures per se but ceramic objects, whose bas-relief figure was formed through the impression of clay into the concave hollows of a plaster block mold and fired at a high temperature (fig. 1.5). It was significant that the kneeling enslaved man appeared on the surface of the medallions in relief, however low and small. Close focus to this figure will help us understand how the origins of this composition and subsequent circulation of the cameos had much to do with the haptic qualities of sculpture as theorized by artists and critics of the day. The antislavery medallion was designed by the modeler William Hackwood and the sculptor Henry Webber, both of whom worked for Wedgwood at his Etruria factory. Though scholars have questioned the precise origins of Hackwood and Webber’s design, a likely source lies in a set of minutes taken five years before in the hand of the 28

64433int.indd 28

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.5 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Block mold for antislavery medallion, ca. 1787, museum number WE.7384–2014. Photo © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Quaker wool merchant Joseph Woods, who then sat on the antislavery committee of Meeting for Sufferings, the representative body of the Society of Friends.27 Woods and many others from this earlier group then went on to be founding members of London Committee; shortly after the latter’s formation he was appointed head of the subcommittee tasked with preparing the seal for the society’s use.28 On the cover of the earlier Meeting for Sufferings’ minute book appears a cursory sketch of a man in profile view, naked and poised on bended knee (fig. 1.6). He clasps his hands upward, with his reach bounded by a long chain extending from right ankle to left wrist. Whether Hackwood and Webber consulted this specific image or not—they certainly developed their design in close collaboration with Woods—it bears striking similarity to the Wedgwood medallion in iconography and in emblematic function. More important, and regardless of direct influence, a juxtaposition of the two allows us to see afresh the ways the Wedgwood medallion incorporated a figure conceived with specific attention to its three-dimensional, and arguably sculptural, qualities. While the respective figures on the Wedgwood medallion and in the earlier Quaker sketch are similar in form and pose, they differ in terms of their relationship to space. The Quaker figure kneels but is ultimately unanchored in any specific spatial context. The figure on the medallion, by contrast, appears atop a rocky outcropping, a compositional device often used by Wedgwood’s designers as a way to distinguish a portrait Grasping Images

64433int.indd 29

29

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.6 Minute book, Quaker Committee on the Slave Trade, 1783. Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House.

64433int.indd 30

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.7 Josiah Wedgwood, Hercules Pushing a Rock, late eighteenth century, jasperware. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Starr and Wolfe Families, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019.

from a scene.29 This ground frames a pose both dynamic and precarious as he flexes his right foot to rise upward, steeling his toes on the ground for balance. With tensed legs braced against the earth, this pose recalls other images of carceral labor by Wedgwood made around the same time, including a blue jasperware intaglio depicting the mythological hero Hercules engaged in his fifth labor of cleaning the Augean stables (fig. 1.7). Indeed, it is well known that Hackwood and Webber, the latter of whom studied sculpture at the Royal Academy, looked to the idealized but dynamic bodies of classical antiquity in conceiving the medallion, modeling a figure whose muscled and draped body recalled the form of the famed Belvedere torso as well as representations of the kneeling and laboring Hercules.30 Although the figure appears largely in profile view, his back and shoulders rotate slightly toward the matrix of the cameo in a way that further emphasizes a sense of three dimensionality. The chains cross the body from right ankle to left wrist and vice versa, falling in a semicircular arc that inverts the curve of the figure’s bent back but does not cross his torso. Grasping Images

64433int.indd 31

31

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.8 Plaster cast of the Belvedere Torso (after Apollonius), early nineteenth century. © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Hingham.

It is significant that Hackwood and Webber positioned their enchained figure in a manner that makes a clear, unimpeded visual reference to a sculptural prototype like the Belvedere torso, a cast of which was in the collections of the Royal Academy (fig.1.8). The ancient fragment was “the perfection of this science in abstract form,” as Joshua Reynolds told Royal Academy pupils in his discourse on sculpture given in 1780.31 Scholars have often interpreted the classical overtones of the Wedgwood medallion as an attempt to render the enslaved in a heroic and idealized manner.32 This may be true, but the pitfall of this interpretation is that it overstates the intentionality behind the medallion as one that works to create a “positive” or “elevating” image of an enslaved Black person by the virtue of its aesthetic borrowings and abolitionist intentions. In so doing we run the risk of overlooking the visual vocabularies of racism in which both this specific figure and eighteenth-century neoclassical bodies at large were steeped in and implicitly condoning the dynamics of white saviorism behind the medallion’s making. What concerns me more, however, is what it meant to corre32

64433int.indd 32

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

late the body of the enslaved with that of a fragment of a classical sculpture in late eighteenth-century Britain, and, more specifically, what was at stake as abolitionists engaged the former on the same terms as the latter. “PHYSICALLY PRESENT, TANGIBLE TRUTH”

Sculpture was coming to the fore as an autonomous form of art in eighteenth-century Europe at the time Hackwood and Webber created their design for the Wedgwood medallion. The Baroque architectural settings in which statues were frequently embedded during the seventeenth century—think, for example, of the multimedia ensemble surrounding Gianlorenzo Bernini’s swooning Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel of the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome—gave way to more austere configurations of sculptural display in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.33 This was a moment that saw the emergence of dedicated statue galleries in places such as the Museo Pio Clementino in Rome or Petworth House in Wiltshire, and with them, new ways of encountering and apprehending sculptural forms. Viewers might closely examine the surface of a statue by candlelight, as the British artist Joseph Wright of Derby painted a group of art students in rapt admiration of a reproduction of the Hellenistic sculpture “Nymph with a Shell” (fig.1.9), or they might partake in the kinetic spectacle of its three-dimensionality by way of a pedestal that turned on its axis by means of a rotating device embedded into its plinth, as works by the neoclassical sculptors Antonio Canova and John Gibson were sometimes displayed.34 These new modes of sculptural engagement that emerged in the late eighteenth century corresponded to contemporary theorizations of the medium itself by artists and philosophers including Étienne Maurice Falconet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder, and many others. One concept uniting this wide range of writings was the premise that sculpture allowed viewers to perceive in a way that they could not with other media. The roots of this belief can traced in part to the longstanding paragone of the respective merits of painting and sculpture with which this chapter began. But its contours were also deeply indebted to Enlightenment theories of perception, especially the empiricist idea that one’s experience of the world comes from sensory encounter. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke argued that touch and the haptic were primary modes of human perception, discussing a blind man’s encounter with a statue to elucidate his claim. He notes, “The word statue may be explained to a blind man by other words, when picture cannot; his senses having given him the idea of a figure.”35 (It is also worth noting here that Locke’s descriptions parallel a contemporary interest in painting allegories of the senses by way of a blind man’s encounter with sculpture, as the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera frequently did.)36 In Locke’s estimation, someone who is visually impaired would still perceive the forms of a sculpture, an act “in which he traced with his hands all the lineaments of the face and body, and with great Grasping Images

64433int.indd 33

33

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.9 Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by Lamplight, 1769, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

admiration applauded the skills of the workman.” Confronted with a flat picture, on the other hand, “he could neither feel nor perceive any thing.”37 In the late eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder echoed and expanded upon Locke’s foundational observation of sculptural encounter. Crucially, this was still a moment when touch was not yet forbidden in museum spaces 34

64433int.indd 34

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

as it is in many today; esteemed visitors to a given collection might be granted the privilege of handling objects at the discretion of a patron or curator.38 Indeed, Herder wrote Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream in 1788 following a trip taken to visit galleries in Paris the decade prior. Arguing that material form is known only through tactile encounter, he notes in a Lockean turn of phrase, “Sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies.”39 Because of this, sculpture elicits a uniquely haptic response on behalf of the viewer—the desire to touch.40 The tactile nature of the medium has the capacity to induce empathy on behalf of the beholder and, crucially, this empathy is not an end unto itself but rather a means to accessing a higher truth. The more we recognize a body through touch “rather than staring at it or dreaming of it, the more vital is our feeling for the object, and as expressed in the word itself, our concept of the thing.”41 Put another way, sculpture helps the beholder access certain kinds of “physically present, tangible truth” that cannot be acquired through vision.42 A sense of bodily connection—one might even go so far as to say obligation or indebtedness—can thus emerge from one’s encounter with sculpture. “The more vital our feeling for an object from afar,” Herder concludes, “the more we sense the weight of the space that intervenes and the more everything in us surges forward to meet it.”43 Of particular interest here are the ways Locke and Herder stress the sensory singularity of sculptural engagement. Both are preoccupied with blindness and what one can understand when they cannot see or when their vision is compromised or otherwise limited. In their formulation the sculptural object is something that can exist outside of vision, perhaps even thought, and is as such vital and necessary. Sculpture allows its beholder a way to access the world when other images fail to do so. GRASPING

The limitations of vision and description were a major concern of abolitionist discourse. In 1789, recounting his experience of Middle Passage across the Atlantic after being kidnapped by slave traders in the Kingdom of Benin, Olaudah Equiano wrote, “the first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship . . . these filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted to terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe.”44 Equiano’s colleague, the white reformer Thomas Clarkson, repeated this nearly verbatim when writing about the Middle Passage two decades later in his two-volume history of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, noting, “Here I must observe at once, that, as far as this part of the evil is concerned I am at a loss to describe it.”45 Clarkson’s inability to describe the slave trade is not the same as Equiano’s and cannot be equated as such. What is important to note, though, is that configurations of the trope of blindness—what Ian Baucom has termed “the problem of abolition . . . the problem of the unseen, the problem of nonappearance, the problem of blocked vision”—became central to British antislavery discourse in the late eighteenth century.46 The task of antislavery campaigners, some Grasping Images

64433int.indd 35

35

22-05-18 10:07 AM

of whom had endured and escaped slavery like Equiano but many of whom were white, working for societies like the London Committee was thus not only one of description but of manufacturing that description—of creating texts and images that might do the work of showing what others were “at a loss to describe.” The central image mobilized in this project came in the form of an engraved broadside: the Description of a Slave Ship published by the London Committee in 1789. Printed and distributed the same spring that Equiano published The Interesting Narrative, in which he wrote of the Middle Passage as “a scene of horror almost inconceivable,” the Description depicted a series of overhead, interior, and cross-sectional views of the Liverpool slaving vessel Brooks as it was crowded with human cargo. These illustrations, rendered with a minute precision borrowed from the contemporary language of naval draftsmanship, were accompanied by columns of explanatory text that detailed statistics of the ship’s composition and the conditions the captives faced on board. Description of a Slave Ship was based on a plan of the Brooks that had been published in a pamphlet one year earlier by the Plymouth Committee, a sister society of its London counterpart. In her extensive study of the slave ship icon, Cheryl Finley has pointed out that the revised London Committee version incorporated seven cross sections as opposed to the one overhead view that appeared in the Plymouth plan, an addition that impacted the viewer’s ability to imagine a space that the accompanying text ultimately still characterized as “miserable beyond description.”47 This detail is important for the ways it bespeaks the limitations and insufficiencies of the visual; even a profusion of details rendered in the most precise and exacting manner would never fully communicate the unspeakable horror of slavery. But what was at stake in looking at Description of a Slave Ship, in all its fragmented views and detailed descriptions? The sociologist Simone Browne poses this question in her study of the links between the historical formation of surveillance and that of slavery, taking into account the ways the broadside anticipates the primacy of a white gaze and vantage point.48 In conception and presentation, both text and image were artifacts of an Enlightenment episteme that construed knowledge in an acquisitive sense, as a thing to be consumed, accumulated, possessed. The multiplicity of views in the Description related not only to the contemporary field of naval engineering but also a broader practice of technical draftsmanship that dated to the Renaissance, in which architects would present a plan and an elevation of a single structure on a single sheet of paper so as to help a viewer imagine the building in the round.49 It is also not inconsequential that the work of mentally constructing a three-dimensional form from a series of two-dimensional fragments has much in common with the language of sculptural encounter. “Sculpture is at the same time vague and elusive,” as Charles Baudelaire notoriously lamented, “because it displays too many facets at one and the same time . . . the viewer who walks around the figures can choose a hundred different positions without finding the right one.”50 Thus Herder’s spectator is one who “circles restlessly around a sculpture” so that they might fully “grasp the image.”51 Herder’s 36

64433int.indd 36

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.10 Model of the slave ship Brooks, ca. 1790–1791. © Wilberforce House Museum/Bridgeman Images.

evocation of grasping is important for it emphasizes how perception happens not through vision alone but also through movement and hapticity. It is through circumambulation that the viewer resolves a unified sense of the physical object and from this, as we will recall, “everything in [them] surges forward to meet it.”52 To spectate is not merely to see but to surveil and possess in equal parts. The broadside viewer who pores over a series of fragmented views of the Brooks in order to cohere an image of the ship in its totality is not so dissimilar from Herder’s restless beholder who seeks to visually and conceptually possess the statue they circulate. The Comte de Mirabeau did precisely this after Thomas Clarkson laid the Description before members of the French National Assembly in a meeting at which the broadside was famously said to have “made its impression upon all who saw it.”53 The French statesman then commissioned a mechanic to build a miniature wooden ship based on that depicted in the broadside, and the British antislavery campaigner William Wilberforce did the same not long after (figure 1.10).54 Somewhere between sculpted object and object lesson, the models differed distinctly from the broadside upon which they were based and in the forms of tactile engagement they elicited. Wilberforce’s model of the Brooks transforms the ship depicted in the broadside into a model that could be held, turned, and studied in one’s hands; its maker has cut out fragments of the broadside and pasted them onto the surface of the wood.55 And while the model’s small, twenty-inch scale makes legible and materially present a horror that the beholder might otherwise not understand, it also instantiates a clear hierarchy of power and possession that paralleled those ordering the carceral space of the slave ship itself. The sense of touch is never neutral: as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes, “to Grasping Images

64433int.indd 37

37

22-05-18 10:07 AM

touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold.”56 It is not insignificant here that the Wilberforce model comes with its own cover, emblazoned with the label “W. Wilberforce Esqr. to the House of Commons.” It bears on its surface two tiny handles, so that a viewer might cover and reveal the engravings of the Brooks’s captives at will. Abolitionists like Mirabeau and Wilberforce may have grasped the ship in an effort to understand what was endured by the enslaved, but that act of grasping more closely approached the kinds of bodily surveillance and control perpetrated by the enslaver than anything else.57 In this respect, the models of the Brooks approximated another object already in circulation among transatlantic antislavery networks. This was, of course, Wedgwood’s medallion, the other “official” image circulated on behalf of the London Committee that preceded the publication Description of a Slave Ship by two years. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the medallion was a lightweight object that could be cradled in the palm of one’s hand. Like the model, it was a miniature that compressed and condensed descriptive text and representational image into an object that was at once pithy, material, and graspable. Both objects also remind us of how miniaturization is always bound up in questions of possession and control; to draw from Susan Stewart, to render an object miniature is to equally render it “of a person.”58 They were, in sum, efficacious by the virtue of their haptic and sculptural dimensions, and in particular the ways their material properties prompted a kind of sensory engagement that allowed beholders to arrive at truths they could not necessarily access through language or description. What lies at stake in the efficacy of the imagery of the London Committee is a question of the status quo, and its preservation. The images were effective in making sympathetic beholders—consider Thomas Clarkson’s oft-quoted recollection that the Description of A Slave Ship “brought forth the tear of sympathy on behalf of their sufferers, and it fixed the sufferings in his heart”—but they reified rather than challenged the broader hierarchies of race and power that ordered the world through which they moved.59 This paradox manifests in a striking manner in one particular detail of some, but not all, of the Wedgwood antislavery medallions. The medallions are strikingly delicate slips of ceramic; they are so lightweight that picking one up from a flat surface often requires wedging one’s fingernails underneath the bottom in order to gain any leverage (given this quality, it is unsurprising that so many consumers chose to set their examples into mounts, frames, and jewelry).60 Their surfaces are also subject to decay, particularly in places where the black jasper body has been molded and pressed into the thinnest of details. In some medallions, parts of the linked chains that bind the figure’s wrists and ankles have deteriorated as the jasper has flaked off with wear, handling, and time (figure 1.11). A beholder could effectively efface the one detail on the medallion’s surface that materially signifies enslavement to leave behind a kneeling figure, unchained and corporeally whole. Touch might reveal bodies and truths, but the act of so doing is almost always marked with the violence of the possessive and the proprietary. 38

64433int.indd 38

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:07 AM

figure 1.11 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Antislavery medallion, 1787, jasperware. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1942. Photograph by author.

TOWARD THE GREEK SLAVE

What, then, of statues? This chapter has put forth the claim that the material culture of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade turned on a mode of sculptural spectatorship that was as much about grasping as it was seeing. In making a case for a shared language of engagement at work between the imagery of abolition and the viewing of sculpture, my intent here has not simply been to add yet another layer to our understanding of a set of already well-known histories. Rather, it is to provocatively suggest that the production and reception of images like the Wedgwood antislavery medallion and the Description of a Slave Ship prefigured the idea that sculpture might play a singular role in discourses of abolition in ways wholly distinct from, paradoxically, a piece of ceramic or a printed broadside. When in 1913—amid commemorations of the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation half a century before—Freeman Morris Murray embarked on the research project that would three years later become Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, he made a case for the singularity of the sculptural medium in responding to the history of slavery and abolition. The course of his book spanned the nineteenth century to the early twentieth, considering how artists including Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis, Thomas Ball, Augustus Grasping Images

64433int.indd 39

39

22-05-18 10:07 AM

Saint-Gaudens, Meta Warrick Fuller, and many others navigated the embodiment of race, enslavement, and freedom in their work in light of representational paradigms set into motion by the abolitionist imagery of the late eighteenth century.61 The statue with which Murray opened his book was Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave of 1844, a work he deemed “American art’s first anti-slavery document in marble.”62 Audiences were well-primed to receive the sculpture as such, he reasoned, on account of the fact that “anti-slavery agitation had already noticeably impressed the general public with the evils, cruelties, and brutalities connected with slavery as an institution.”63 Murray estimated that the sculpture’s popularity among the American and British public was also bound up with its whiteness—Powers did not depict an enslaved Black woman but a white Greek captive.64 Yet, as we will come to see in the following chapter, The Greek Slave intersected the reality of enslavement when it was exhibited in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, not the very least because its reception hinged upon the terms of sculptural engagement prefigured by the images of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

40

64433int.indd 40

Grasping Images

22-05-18 10:08 AM

2 “THE MUTE LANGUAGE OF THE MARBLE” Slavery and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave At the time they were sold, they were set up like the Greek Slave in the Great Exhibition.1

reverend thomas binney to the british and foreign anti-slavery society in 1851

W

Henry Tuckerman saw Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave displayed at New York’s National Academy of Design in 1847, he asked the statue, “What to thee a herd of gazers? What to thee a noisy mart?”2 These questions appeared in his poetic ode to the marble sculpture, which depicted a young woman standing nude and enchained (see fig. 0.1). The critic was struck by what he saw as the figure’s calm despite her enslavement, made most evident by a linked marble chain that bound the statue’s wrists together. But Tuckerman’s questions suggest that perhaps not everyone saw The Greek Slave in the same way as he did. Asking about gazers in a noisy mart, he probes the possibility of the sculpture’s shifting meaning and does so with a nod to its subject matter—a young woman captured for sale as a slave in an Ottoman market during the Greek Wars of Independence. What, Tuckerman asks, might such a lifelike representation of a body awaiting sale mean in a space of commerce? How did the sculpture’s imagined context of a slave market spill over into the real spaces through which it moved in the nineteenth century? HEN THE ART CRITIC

41

64433int.indd 41

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.1 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, 1866, marble. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles F. Bound.

Powers’s The Greek Slave was among the most widely traveled and seen sculptures of the nineteenth century, attracting crowds at exhibitions in Europe and North America. The work was first modeled in plaster at the sculptor’s Florentine studio in 1843 and was carved by a team of Italian workmen into six full-size versions in the following decades.3 Two of these versions crossed the Atlantic in the late 1840s and were shown in the United States, where slavery remained legal until its abolition in 1865. The two sculptures traversed wide swaths of the country in the years leading up to the American Civil War, where they were displayed in art academies, galleries, entertainment halls, and government buildings. Much has been said about The Greek Slave and how its image of white captivity related to the enslavement of African Americans in the United States. If the sixth and final version of the statue (fig. 2.1), completed in 1866, evoked the most direct associa42

64433int.indd 42

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

tion to slavery because of Powers’s decision to replace the intricately linked chain binding the figure’s wrists with a straight bar manacle, such a referent was less secure for versions of the work completed and exhibited before the Civil War.4 Scholars have understood Powers’s representation of an enchained body as an abolitionist emblem, as an inversion of the raced power dynamics of slavery in the United States, or as a clear disavowal of such issues.5 Complementing these iconographic and metaphorical interpretations, what follows aims to grapple with the actualities of the sculpture’s economic entanglement with slavery. Taking seriously Henry Tuckerman’s query about what The Greek Slave meant to the space of “the mart,” this chapter thinks through and with new archival material as well as theorizations of materiality and embodiment to examine the implications of circulating, displaying, and viewing a lifesize, three-dimensional representation of an enslaved figure in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Attention to The Greek Slave’s circulation across different but interconnected scales, from local spaces of exhibition to a transatlantic art market, complicates straightforward associations of the sculpture with abolitionist politics and illuminates wider concerns about art’s relationship to the interrelated structures of racial formation, power, and capitalism. As noted in this book’s introduction, economies connected to enslaved labor fueled manifold aspects of artistic production in the Atlantic world. Powers’s career, too, remained enveloped in these financial circuits despite and because of his expatriation to Florence in 1837. The circumstances that produced The Greek Slave were shaped by wealth and patronage from enslavers, and the completed sculpture would in turn move through similar circuits of commerce when exhibited. The Greek Slave’s exhibition in the antebellum United States, the terms of its reception, and the kinds of transactions that governed its production and movement as a sculpted body unfolded in proximity to the metrics of an economy that treated persons, objects, and capital as fungible entities. It would be in New Orleans, where the sculpture was twice exhibited, where these concerns emerged in sharpest relief. Attention to correspondence and commentaries regarding The Greek Slave’s promotion and exhibition in the Louisiana city reveals the extent to which the statue was embedded—and embodied—in the city’s culture, spectacle, and economy of human trafficking. Powers was deeply invested in displaying his work in a manner that foregrounded the lifelike sculptural body as an entity to be seen, scrutinized, and managed. In the context of antebellum America, such acts of spectacular seeing and bodily surveillance could not be divorced from the broader society of enslavement in which they took place. Yet during these same years, The Greek Slave’s very relationship to enslavement and bodily commodification in the American South would in turn become a point of antislavery critique on the global stage, attesting to the ways in which the sculpture stood at once in proximity to the commerce of slavery and the politics of its abolition across transatlantic trajectories. “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 43

43

22-05-18 10:08 AM

HIRAM POWERS’S ROUTES OF ATLANTIC CAPITAL

Consider two images of Powers’s sculpture in circulation around the middle of the nineteenth century. The first is a woodcut illustration of the sculptor’s studio in Florence, published in an 1853 article on American sculpture in the French periodical L’Illustration (fig. 2.2).6 Powers shows his allegorical statue of America to two admiring visitors—perhaps prospective patrons—while surrounded by a bevy of works in varying states of completion. The Greek Slave stands nearby on a rotating worktable, with additional busts, statuettes, and fragments scattered throughout the cavernous space. The second image appears on a one-dollar note issued by the bank of South Carolina during the same decade (fig. 2.3). Powers’s statue of the proslavery senator John Calhoun guised as an ancient Roman orator, commissioned by the state’s legislature to stand in the Charleston City Hall, appears at left.7 It shares a surface with three additional vignettes: a palmetto tree, a bust of a former state governor, and a port where enslaved African Americans unload barrels and goods from ships docked nearby. If the woodcut situates Powers’s art in the space of the Florentine atelier, the banknote takes it out of that context and asks us to locate it across the ocean in the American South, adjacent not to the work of the artist but rather the work of the enslaved. It is unsurprising that the costly and labor-intensive enterprise of sculpture intersected the economy of slavery in the antebellum United States. The Black foundryman Philip Reid, enslaved by the white sculptor Clark Mills, cast Thomas Crawford’s bronze statue of Freedom for the US Capitol dome in the 1860s.8 Enslaved people also quarried, transported, and carved local stone in the construction of the Capitol and other federal buildings in Washington.9 The majority of Powers’s sculpture, by contrast, was produced in the studio pictured in L’Illustration, a space seemingly distant from the quarries and foundries of northern Virginia and Maryland, where enslaved men cut stone and cast bronze. Yet his sculptural practice intersected and depended upon the economy of slavery in other ways. Particularly in its early years, Powers’s career was part of an Atlantic world of artistic production, patronage, and commerce where the spaces of woodcut and banknote—of the European artists’ studio and the slaveholding American South—existed in codependence. The Vermont-born Powers, whose career spanned the 1830s to the 1870s, made initial forays into sculpture modeling waxworks in Cincinnati and portrait busts in Washington and Boston.10 He moved to Florence in 1837 to pursue a career making ideal neoclassical sculptures in the manner of artists like Antonio Canova, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and John Gibson, whose marble figures drawn from the antique were much sought after by wealthy European elites.11 The kinds of sculptures Powers executed upon arriving to Florence—such as the mythological Proserpine (fig. 2.4), the biblical Eve (fig. 2.5), or the youthful Fisher Boy (fig. 2.6)—engaged this long-standing artistic tradition and its recourse to representing idealized nude bodies in white marble.12 Each of the figures bears a countenance of placid calm in spite of trying circumstances as Powers seems to have appropriately followed Johann Joachim 44

64433int.indd 44

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.2 “Atelier du sculpteur américain Powers, à Florence,” in B. H Révoil, “La sculpture en Amérique,” L’Illustration 21 (June 1853), 405. General Research Division, New York Public Library. figure 2.3 Banknote, Bank of the State of South Carolina, issued 1862. Records of the South Carolina State Treasurer, Cancelled Notes of the Bank of the State of South Carolina, 1850–1865 (S218196), South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

64433int.indd 45

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.4 Hiram Powers, Proserpine, 1839–1873, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. George Cabot Lodge. figure 2.5 Hiram Powers, Eve Tempted, modeled 1842, carved 1873–1877, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson.

Winckelmann’s famous prescription for noble simplicity and quiet grandeur “both in posture and expression.”13 Eve regards her fateful apple with cool disdain while the Fisher Boy thoughtfully listens for storms in a conch shell. And Proserpine gracefully rises from the vegetal depths of the underworld; her pain, to paraphrase Winckelmann again, apparent neither in her face nor “entire bearing.”14 Making marble statues was no neutral aesthetic pursuit. It is well known that the materiality of neoclassical sculpture was inextricable from dominant racial hierarchies in Western Europe, contoured both by specific theories of scientific racism and more general associations between whiteness and the ideal body as conceived by Winckelmann and others.15 The color of ancient statues, as the German art historian speculated in his 1764 History of Ancient Art, “more nearly resembles the whiteness of the skin.”16 Powers’s work was no exception to this rule, as was readily apparent with his preoccupation with white stone that was, in his words, “faultless” or “free from all spots or blemishes.”17 Yet the whiteness of Powers’s neoclassicism extended beyond the realm of what is visual and visible and suffused his practice writ large in terms of the sculptures he made, who paid for them, and the markets and regimes of value to which they stood adjacent. 46

64433int.indd 46

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.6 Hiram Powers, Fisher Boy, modeled 1841–1844, carved 1857, marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Hamilton Fish, 1894.

Powers’s pivotal move to Florence in 1837 was immediately preceded by three years in Washington, a formative time in terms of the people he met and the inroads those connections there subsequently paved in his pursuit of a career making ideal sculpture. During his tenure in the American capital, he produced busts of members of the city’s political and social elite, including President Andrew Jackson, the former president John Quincy Adams, and former Supreme Court justice John Marshall. Each bust synthesized close attention to the sitter’s individual features into a broader neoclassical aesthetic of bare chests and lavish drapery, calling to mind the verism of Roman imperial portraiture as opposed to the placid idealism that he would later pursue in Florence. Among the first portraits Powers produced among this coterie of statesmen was a bust of John Calhoun. The sculptor obtained sittings from the senator shortly after taking up a studio in the US Capitol building and completed a plaster model in 1836 (fig. 2.7).18 Like his classicizing busts of Jackson and Marshall, Powers depicted Calhoun in the draped robes of a Roman statesman. With a deeply furrowed brow and severe downward gaze, the sculpted Calhoun also aligned with Powers’s contemporary “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 47

47

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.7 Hiram Powers, John C. Calhoun, modeled 1836, plaster. Smithsonian American Art Museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson.

engagement with phrenology, a pseudoscience that purported to use skull size and shape to support ideas about the racial inferiority of non-white people.19 As the artist recalled, “Mr. Calhoun’s head is beautifully formed. Nothing could be finer than the outline.”20 Scholars have routinely made it a point to retrospectively frame Powers’s bust as a gesture of professional necessity rather than outright political affiliation with the proslavery secessionist.21 But it is vital to put pressure on the politics of necessity and ask how John Calhoun signaled the sculptor’s investment in whiteness on multiple interconnecting levels, both in its materiality as a neoclassical sculpture whose white marble form was contoured by theories of scientific racism and in the professional networks it helped forge. With plaster models of Andrew Jackson and John Calhoun underway at the beginning of 1835, Powers wrote to his wife, “I am gradually obtaining an influence, which will be worth more to me than all the casts I shall make.”22 48

64433int.indd 48

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

Powers’s work on the Calhoun bust, for one, afforded an opening into an influential circle of southern patrons in Washington. Over the course of modeling, he was acquainted with and produced busts for other prominent South Carolinians, including the state senator William C. Preston and his brother John S. Preston.23 Powers counted the three men as close associates, noting in multiple letters the hospitality and camaraderie of “the Southern Nullifiers”—a shorthand for states’ rights advocates during the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s—during his time in the capital.24 The Prestons’ support continued for years to come, with William Preston helping facilitate the South Carolina state legislature’s 1843 commission for the full-length statue of Calhoun based on the sculptor’s earlier bust that appeared on the banknote mentioned earlier in this chapter. Such lasting networks of influence were particularly important for Powers, who could count neither upon family wealth for his livelihood nor the support of the federal government; unlike Horatio Greenhough, Luigi Persico, and other artists of the day, he did not actively participate in commissions for the ongoing public sculpture projects for the Capitol and other Washington buildings.25 Especially at the outset of his career, Powers frequently drew upon financial support from close friends as well as credit advancements from banks in order to support his practice.26 It was thus crucial that he cultivate long-standing relationships with private benefactors who might become loyal purchasers of multiple works and invest in his career through additional loans and remittances. Most significant was the patronage of John Preston. Preston, who made his fortune through the management of sugar plantations in Louisiana, felt Powers to be “the most promising living sculptor” and offered to outlay funds to support a move to Europe.27 As Powers relayed the terms of this proposal to his wife, “I may draw on him for all the money I may require to go to Italy and subsist there.”28 Not to do so would be, he added, “an insult to good fortune.”29 (Preston recalled the arrangement on similar terms, noting, “He went to Italy very much, I believe, on my persuasion.)30 Thus in the fall of 1837 and on Preston’s dime, Powers sailed to Europe on the cotton trader Charlemagne with the conviction that “Italy must imprint her stamp upon an American artist.”31 Preston continued his support in the years to follow, remitting a regular stipend of $1000 a year for the artist’s rent and studio for six years, and following a brief break, between 1845 and 1861.32 The “good fortune” about which Powers raved to his wife was one accumulated through theft. Preston owned several plantations including Houmas, known colloquially as “Louisiana’s sugar palace,” and it was through labor stolen from enslaved African Americans that these places numbered among the state’s leading sugar producers in the early nineteenth century.33 In later decades, Preston would argue vociferously for Southern secession as a South Carolina state senator alongside his colleague John Calhoun.34 The regular sums of cash he remitted to Powers in the years before the Civil War passed through the financial systems of a plantation economy based upon theft and expropriation. The two men frequently discussed the complex logistics of “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 49

49

22-05-18 10:08 AM

moving money around and across the Atlantic, and a survey of their correspondence and financial records highlights the ways in which Preston’s funds had to be processed through the securities systems of cotton factorage houses in Louisiana, forwarded to banks in Liverpool and London, and were subject to occasional delays by the vicissitudes of markets in New Orleans.35 Many researchers have brought to light the ways the North American university—an emergent yet central institution of nineteenthcentury philanthropy and patronage in the United States and Canada—was financed in large part by money from slavery.36 Much the same can be said for the growth of art markets, private collections, and museums during these same years; the famed Havemeyer Collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, was financed through generations of wealth from the family’s ties to the sugar refining industry in the Caribbean.37 From patronage and production to acquisition and display, few aspects of nineteenth-century American art can be considered without heed to the unfree labor that fueled the core of the country’s wealth. With Preston’s regular support, Powers could access resources necessary to shift his practice from modeling portrait busts to ideal statuary upon his arrival to Florence in 1837.38 Quality marble was readily accessible from quarries in nearby Carrara and Serravezza, as was the paid labor necessary to transform this raw material. From his Via Fornace studio in the Oltrarno, the sculptor employed several local specialists in marble cutting and carving requisite to make full-scale figurative works. The Florentine Remigio Peschi, for example, was responsible for carving the majority of Powers’s work for three decades.39 But as was the case with most sculptors’ assistants, the names of Peschi, Leopoldo Fabbri, Antonio Ambuchi, Berlindo Trentanove, and other Italian carvers were largely limited in their day to the payment notations of Powers’s studio memoranda.40 As Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt have observed of the L’Illustration print depicting Powers showing off works in his studio, “Chisel in hand, the sculptor seems to be claiming credit for works executed largely by the unacknowledged hands of others.”41 It is worth reiterating, too, the different forms and scales of labor that remained essential but largely invisible to Powers’s practice, for the salaries of white Italian studio assistants like Fabbri and Peschi were in part made payable following the munificence of a benefactor whose wealth depended upon enslaved Black labor. Powers’s personal views about slavery shifted over time. Scholars have noted the artist’s ambivalence toward abolition at the outset of his career and situate his increasingly antislavery views in light of a changing political climate in antebellum America.42 Indeed, his letters from around the time of the Civil War were frequently filled with indictments of the slaveholding South. Powers routinely referred to slavery as a toxic bodily presence throughout the 1860s, calling it an “an ulcer,” “a tumor,” and “a disease—as it were—of the heart, a disposition in the very body of the Republic!”43 However, he was far more skeptical of the matter in preceding decades, noting once, “Until the Nebraska bill passed I was dead set against the rabid abolitionists.”44 His 50

64433int.indd 50

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

move toward an increasingly outspoken position against slavery would not have been uncommon at the time, given that the abolitionist movement accrued increasing momentum and mainstream acceptability among white Americans in the late 1850s.45 Powers’s early ambivalence about slavery might also be considered in relationship to his close dependence on a network of southern patrons and the routes of Atlantic capital their support afforded, the connections of which were first forged during the sculptor’s years in Washington from 1834 to 1837. These same years saw strident petitions against slavery and its legality in the capital, including the American Anti-Slavery Society’s widely circulated broadside of images of enslaved Black labor and slave jails (1836, fig. 2.8). Such mounting abolitionist rhetoric subsequently catalyzed the implementation of an eight-year-long congressional gag rule on antislavery speeches and petitions in 1836.46 John Davis has suggested the context of political silencing following the gag rule to be central to understanding visual representations of slavery such as Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South of 1859 (fig. 2.9).47 Johnson’s painting of enslaved people gathered in the backyard of a Washington home is, in Davis’s eyes, a construction of “judicious neutrality” informed by the artist’s navigation of mercurial political circles in a city where speaking out against slavery was all but outlawed for nearly a decade.48 The artist’s representation of Black men, women, and children socializing, dancing, and playing music in a run-down yard—which drew upon and reinforced racialized stereotypes about blackness—was regarded by some white viewers as an indictment of life under slavery and others as an endorsement. Davis estimates that Johnson intended neither to provoke abolitionist outrage nor proslavery apology with his painting. Rather, he created it with the art market in mind, ensuring that it could be consumed and differently interpreted by viewers on both sides of the debate.49 The case of Eastman Johnson helps delineate the ways in which artistic success in antebellum America was contingent upon creating multivalent works that could resonate among different audiences. It also alludes to the vexed legacy of images of slavery made for circulation not only among the most ardent of abolitionists but in a larger commercial art world. We have begun to see how Powers oriented his work with a calculating eye toward the market and prospective patrons, which were by turns connected to racist ideologies and slave economies. However shifting and ambivalent, his politics never precluded the undertaking of commissions such as the Calhoun bust or full-length statue nor did they result in sculptures that challenged the worldviews of patrons like John Preston, who purchased ideal works like Eve and Proserpine in the pursuit of a culturally refined aesthetic for his South Carolina and Louisiana homes.50 Put more simply, Powers’s practice was one motivated chiefly by an art market and its attendant spheres of wealth, and the works he created were thus ones that would readily and successfully circulate within those parameters. Particularly at its outset, Powers’s practice was part of a transatlantic world of artistic production, patronage, and commerce where the spaces of woodcut and banknote—of the European artists’ “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 51

51

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.8 “Slave market of America,” 1836, letterpress with wood engravings. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19705.

64433int.indd 52

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.9 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859, oil on linen. Collection of the New York Historical Society.

studio and the slaveholding American South—were perforce interconnected. The Greek Slave, begun in 1841, would likewise anticipate consumption in these and many more spaces. The following section considers the decisions Powers made in modeling a sculpture of an enslaved woman that could appeal to broad audiences, by turns deflecting and evoking identification with the debates on the future of American slavery. LEGIBILITY

In an ink and graphite drawing, a woman stands nude with her gaze turned to the side, twisting slightly so as to draw her left arm across her waist (fig. 2.10). She leans against a post draped with a plain cloth that is in turn positioned on a rounded base atop a rectangular platform. The figure closely resembles the sculpted The Greek Slave in form and pose save several distinctions: the chains, Phrygian cap, and twisting tasseled wrap included in the pointed plaster and marble versions of the sculpture are conspicuously missing, and the composition is reversed. As such, it presents an image of The Greek Slave with none of the material signifiers of slavery. This small drawing, which has not been cited or reproduced in previous scholarship, was executed in “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 53

53

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.10 Sketch of The Greek Slave in Miner Kellogg, Sketchbook (Italian Travels), 1841, drawing on transfer paper. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Martha F. Butler.

Florence around 1841.51 Made at a time when the model of The Greek Slave was at an early preparatory stage, it invites viewers to consider afresh the visual strategies Powers deployed—and did not deploy—in making a statue of a nude woman legible as an enslaved figure. The Greek Slave was a highly meditated work, resulting from Powers’s careful study of the human figure as well as other works of art. As he wrote to the statue’s first patron John Grant following its completion, “[Florence] has likewise casts (better than marbles to study) and plenty of living models to be had when wanted.”52 The sculptor’s original pointed plaster model (fig. 2.11), which served as a working template for his studio assistants, offers insight into the forms and features upon which five of the six later marbles were carved. The plaster Greek Slave appears slim and youthful, with delicately contoured limbs likely formed by direct body casts from live models, as the research of Karen Lemmey has shown.53 As in the drawing, the figure’s relaxed stance is balanced by a short post, this time energetically draped with a 54

64433int.indd 54

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.11 Hiram Powers, Model of The Greek Slave, 1841–1843, plaster with pointing pins. Smithsonian American Art Museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson.

64433int.indd 55

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.12 H. C. White, “The Venus de Medici, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy,” 1902, stereograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, stereo 1s28192.

twisting, tasseled cloth. The left hand falls in front of the waist and the right rests lightly atop the post. Shallow impressions encircle the figure’s wrists and run across its right thigh, traces of a set of metal shackles once affixed by Powers into the plaster. These indices, with small pointing marks that register the width and placement of the chains to be carved in the final marble, reveal how essential the figure’s enslavement was to the sculpture’s composition from the beginning. Powers’s incorporation of enslavement onto an existing model extended into the art historical past. He drew inspiration for The Greek Slave from Roman copies of ancient Greek sculptures, including the Venus of Knidos and the Medici Venus. The latter stood in the Tribuna of the Uffizi since the late seventeenth century and by the nineteenth was celebrated as one of the most famous antiquities in Florence (fig. 2.12).54 Powers, who kept two plaster casts of the Medici Venus in his studio, demonstrated a clear debt to the classical sculpture in terms of The Greek Slave’s stance and turned profile.55 The manner in which he engaged the Venus model is crucial. Rather than taking visual cues from sculptural figures—both white and Black—whose bodies actively resisted their captivity like Michelangelo’s twisting and muscular slaves, which the artist admired and visited at the Accademia in Florence, or Pietro Tacca’s enchained “Quattro mori” on the Ferdinand I monument in Livorno (fig. 2.13), which 56

64433int.indd 56

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:08 AM

figure 2.13 Pietro Tacca, Monument to Ferdinand I, 1626, Livorno. Photograph by Giovanni Dall’orto, CC Wikimedia Commons.

he would have seen on his weekly trips to the city’s port to send and receive shipments of art and supplies, Powers assimilated the image of the goddess of love and desire into a state of enslavement. This assimilation of certain visual idioms and denial of others, as I will stress in what follows, helped render the sculpture more open and porous to different interpretations. In creating his statue, Powers cast his gaze to the recent Greek Wars of Independence, which waged from 1821 to 1832 and eventually resulted in the establishment of a Greek state separate from the Ottoman Empire. The artist neither witnessed the war firsthand nor did he travel to the region after. His understanding of the conflict’s events instead came filtered through sensationalized and pro-Greek accounts published in American and British periodicals, which often recounted war crimes committed by the Ottoman side.56 The Greek Slave was to represent one of the many Greek women who were captured by Turkish forces for sale into sexual slavery. In so doing, “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 57

57

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.14 Eugène Delacroix, Massacres at Chios, 1825, oil on canvas, Louvre. Artwork in the public domain/CC Wikimedia Commons.

it rehearsed what was by the 1840s an already ingrained literary and artistic trope of a white woman vulnerable to the predations of dark-skinned men in the “Orient,” put to sale in a slave market at which her body was on offer for consumption at once visual, monetary, and sexual.57 Powers was not the first artist to take up the subject of Greek captives, but the manner in which he did diverged from earlier precedents. Two decades before, Eugène Delacroix completed his Massacres at Chios, which depicted the seizure of war prisoners after a Turkish military invasion and was exhibited at the Paris Salon with the subtitle “Greek families awaiting death or slavery (fig 2.14).” His canvas teems with description, featuring a series of complex groupings of suffering men and women, intricately detailed textures and surfaces, and a wide range of emotions and expressions. Delacroix’s figures appear more as imagined types rather than representations of what Greek and Turkish people actually looked like.58 But this Orientalizing lens also allowed the painting’s western European viewers to recognize the contemporaneity of the scene and its figures, the latter of whom, as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has noted, differed distinctly in physical appearance from “their famous white marble 58

64433int.indd 58

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

forebears.”59 Conversely, by working in the beau ideal of neoclassical sculpture—a construct that we have already seen to be embedded in the hierarchical parameters of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudoscience—Powers obscured his statue’s immediate point of reference to more recent historical events.60 If the content and context of a painting like the Massacres at Chios would have been keenly identifiable to its audiences as that of the Greek wars, The Greek Slave withheld such contemporary description and could be open to a variety of interpretations. Period audiences could and did understand the figure in varying ways, with some connecting it to the Greek Wars of Independence and others not. In the United States especially, The Greek Slave both deflected and evoked identification with American slavery. A poem published shortly after the statue’s first American exhibition opened in New York in 1847 anticipated no fewer than nine viewers for the statue, each of whom encounter it in a different manner. While a wealthy young man scrutinizes the statue’s proportions, a “cautious maiden” gazes shyly at the nude figure from behind a veil.61 Others engage the statue in relationship to the contemporary reality of slavery. Two separate stanzas are as follows: A Carolinian, fresh from his plantation Gazed till o’ercome with quite a perspiration— His brains were racked—something was not right— He’d never seen a slave girl half so white A Yankee came—“Dew tell,” at once he cried, “If that’s the slave? I guess,” said he aside, “That she aint ready to be looked at now; There’s nothing on her but a chain, I vow.62

Though fictionalized, the poem’s stanzas underscore the ways in which period audiences did—and didn’t—see The Greek Slave in relationship to American slavery. Powers modeled a sculpture of an enslaved figure that could evoke specific contexts and points of association as much as it eluded them. However, the circulation and exhibition of the statue was very much entangled with the institution of slavery, in particular, the commercial, material, and racial interfaces behind the act of designating a body as “slave” or otherwise. “HOW WOULD IT DO TO EXHIBIT THAT IN NEW ORLEANS”

Powers’s career was on a steady rise when he began to make plans to exhibit The Greek Slave in America. The first marble version was completed in 1844 and displayed in a London print gallery on Pall Mall by its owner, the British army officer John Grant.63 As the Times of London noted of the exhibition, “This is the first specimen of progress in the higher order of art produced by an American, and may be hailed as a promise of “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 59

59

22-05-18 10:09 AM

future excellence.”64 Buoyed by this success, he began to contemplate a touring show of the statue, noting in his studio memorandum his hopes that it might “be exhibited in the principal cities of the United States.”65 The choice to travel The Greek Slave aligned with a flourishing culture of exhibition in antebellum America. The format of the touring show emerged as a popular mode for displaying paintings in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the 1830s saw the rise of single-sculpture exhibitions that traveled between different venues in major cities.66 While a materially and fiscally risky venture—marble sculpture was fragile, bulky, and expensive to insure and transport—such shows afforded sculptors the valuable opportunity to profit from admission fees charged to visitors.67 As his friend and banking agent Sidney Brooks counseled him in a letter, “it is the very best thing you could do; in the first place for your purse; and in the second for your fame.”68 As Brooks’s comments suggest, touring sculpture was as much of an entrepreneurial enterprise as it was an artistic one, and the financially minded Powers understood it well. Collaborating with the artist Miner Kellogg, who worked as the tour’s promoter and coordinated most aspects of the sculpture’s display, Powers arranged to unveil The Greek Slave in New York in late 1847.69 From August to January it appeared in the rooms of the National Academy of Design, open daily to any viewer wishing to pay the twentyfive-cent admission fee.70 After this initial exhibition, the tour continued on to Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans, before returning to Boston and New York for final runs at the end of 1849. This itinerary unfolded largely en route, with Kellogg working closely with Powers and his many contacts to determine viable and lucrative exhibition venues. Of the cities on the circuit, Powers and Kellogg were especially keen to take The Greek Slave to New Orleans. The Louisiana city was one of the South’s largest and wealthiest, and promised high attendance numbers and financial returns. It was also a racially diverse city where both the slave trade and the sex trade had a powerful social and economic presence, a reality to which Powers’s contemporaries obliquely alluded when counseling him about where he might exhibit his sculpture.71 “I think you will reap a rich harvest in New York and Boston,” as Powers’s banking agent Sidney Brooks wrote in 1847, “but more particularly in New Orleans.”72 Caleb Forshey, another of the artist’s friends, likewise surmised, “There is room in New Orleans during the winter and spring for half a dozen Greek Slaves and all would be well patronized.”73 Here Forshey makes allusion to the city’s annual influx of seasonal residents and visitors for a time referred to period parlance as “marketing season”—when planters and merchants from across the South spent the winter between growing seasons in New Orleans to conduct business, purchase slaves, and take in cultural activities.74 If Powers or Kellogg felt that a statue of a chained captive woman might elicit particular interest among this audience they did not say so outright, though they certainly counted on and eagerly awaited the success of The Greek Slave in the Crescent City, with the former quipping, “How would it do to exhibit that in New Orleans.”75 The sentiment was 60

64433int.indd 60

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

reciprocal: as a local newspaper reported, “This chaste specimen of American genius is drawing large crowds in Boston. When will we of this city have the gratification to see this finished statue?”76 New Orleanians had not one, but two occasions to see The Greek Slave. When Kellogg arrived with the statue in tow in February of 1849, there was already another Greek Slave on display in the city. It belonged to a collector named James Robb, a financier who had made his fortune in real estate and venture capital, and who had purchased the second version of the statue from Powers the year prior. By the 1840s, he had established his banking and gas light firms in New Orleans and began to buy art with the wealth amassed through those enterprises.77 In part because it lay outside the parameters of Powers’s and Kellogg’s official tour and its coordinated publicity efforts, Robb’s ownership of The Greek Slave has been the subject of little critical attention. Only recently have scholars begun to examine his exhibition of the statue, with primary focus on the controversies surrounding the work’s acquisition and a subsequent competing display.78 This study builds on existing literature by taking into account a similar historical episode and actors, but differs in approach in that it seeks to ask how the New Orleans exhibition of The Greek Slave exposed the contradictions of a life-size figurative sculpture as both work of art and object of property. Powers anticipated the sculpture as a fungible good—one whose value depended on being seen and shown, purchased and possessed—and its circulation in the slaveholding South at the hands of collectors like Robb further vexed this concept. CONTINGENT VALUE

Before addressing the double presence of The Greek Slave in New Orleans, it is helpful to first clarify several points about the circumstances that preceded it. Nineteenthcentury neoclassical sculptors frequently created multiple replicas of a single work for different patrons and markets. Canova and Thorvaldsen were well known for this, and Randolph Rogers’s Florentine studio—which purportedly churned out 167 replicas of Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii—is an extreme example of such a practice.79 Of the six versions of The Greek Slave carved by Powers’s workmen, numbers two and three traveled to the United States in the antebellum era. Powers produced these second and third sculptures after the first statue’s successful exhibition in London and the flurry of interest that followed from collectors like Robb, the Englishman Lord William Ward, and the Irish nobleman Sir Charles Coote.80 With an eye toward accruing a higher profit margin, Powers had conflicting ambitions for the statues intended for private patrons. As he wrote to Robb’s agent Richard Henry Wilde, “I have long wished to exhibit one of my works in America but I have never been able to get one ready on my own account. I have had to sell them all before they were done . . . this is the only way I know of to help myself out of the difficulties I sometimes meet with for more want of more ample means.”81 In other words, Powers wanted to sell his sculpture and tour it too. In 1846 he thus had two Greek Slaves in “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 61

61

22-05-18 10:09 AM

progress for intended buyers Lord William Ward and James Robb and floated separately to each the idea of delaying final delivery of the statue so as to exhibit it first, suggesting that the additional publicity might “add to its value.”82 As several scholars have documented, Ward released his claim on the statue for the American exhibition and Powers then sent one Greek Slave on tour with Kellogg, and another to go to Robb.83 Owing to a chain of delayed and misunderstood communications between artist and patron, it was unclear which of these statues belonged to whom. This confusion came to a head midway through Kellogg’s tour, when Robb claimed the version of The Greek Slave on display as his own.84 The second version of the sculpture initially on tour was then transferred to Robb and replaced with another replica—the third version produced by Powers and shipped to America in mid-1848 to resolve the issue. Robb returned to his home in New Orleans with his newly acquired Greek Slave and put it on public display, and Kellogg continued the traveling exhibition with the other statue. Such details are worth noting for they highlight the ways in which, to follow Bill Brown, it is in the irregularities of exchange when meanings of objects are produced and established by their subjects.85 Powers’s expectations for The Greek Slave, as well as Robb’s subsequent pursuit and exhibition of it, have much to tell us about the different regimes of value that underpinned the sculpture’s movement. In certain respects, Powers’s ambition for a revenue-generating exhibition of The Greek Slave prefigured the “Great Picture” shows of midcentury landscape painters like Frederic Church, who sought to display monumental canvases like his Icebergs of 1861 to fee-paying audiences in advance of their entry into private collections.86 Scholars of Church’s work have characterized these exhibitions as “speculative ventures” that underscored painting’s status as a commodity in a broader market culture.87 The tour of The Greek Slave might be understood on similar terms. The sculpture’s value— particularly as it stood as an evolving marble block in Powers’s studio awaiting shipment, sale, and exhibition—was partial and contingent, speculative and elusive. Like Church’s landscape paintings in the decade to follow, the success of The Greek Slave depended on its ability to float between realms of culture and commerce, functioning both as work of art and salable good. However, Robb’s ownership of The Greek Slave raises a different set of concerns regarding the Janus-faced nature of art—and figurative sculpture especially—as commodity. As an enslaver and trader in stocks, bonds, and collateral, his notion of property was informed by the speculative metrics of a slave economy that treated goods, capital, and people as fungible entities. Works of art figured into this equation, too, as he regularly bought paintings to resell at auctions for a higher value, much in the manner as he had done with real estate or enslaved people.88 Robb’s pursuit of The Greek Slave fit all too seamlessly in these regimes of liquid value—Powers later recalled how the collector viewed the work as “a joint speculation of his and mine”—and soon after acquiring and exhibiting work he fell into debt following a cotton crop failure and had to quietly sell it in exchange for a cash loan.89 The exhibition he held in the preceding 62

64433int.indd 62

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

months before this sale further put the contradictions of displaying and consuming a life-size sculpted body of an enslaved figure in antebellum New Orleans into sharp and visible relief. THE GREEK SLAVE AT COOKE’S GALLERY

In New Orleans, Robb’s purchased works of art often appeared on public display in the exhibition rooms of the studio of the artist George Cooke, an itinerant painter of portraits and landscapes. Cooke’s studio opened in 1844 as a self-styled “National Gallery of Paintings” with Robb as one of the main benefactors and lenders.90 Standing west of the city’s French Quarter on 13 St. Charles Street, it occupied the third and fourth floors of a cotton gin warehouse owned by the artist’s patron, the industrialist Daniel Pratt.91 There, visitors could view copies of Old Master paintings, panoramas, and works by contemporary artists like Thomas Cole and Emmanuel Leutze. Though a short-lived venture—the gallery failed to turn profits and was shuttered by 1850—Cooke’s was one of New Orleans’s first dedicated exhibition spaces for art.92 The Greek Slave was the main attraction there from November 1848 to April 1849, where it stood in a room reportedly adorned with silk tapestries and modern gas lamps.93 Yet its exhibition differed from preceding ones at Cooke’s, especially in the extent to which it intersected the social and economic surround of the city. Attention to the show’s organization and promotion—from its ticket sales to its purported charitable aims to its advertisement— will reveal the ways in which the sculpture’s display connected to a broader libidinal economy where the slave trade and the slave auction played integral roles. While shows at Cooke’s were generally held for the personal profit of artists, with benefactors like Robb receiving a generous portion of the dividends, the exhibition of The Greek Slave was held for charity. Robb collaborated with a committee of seven local businessmen (two merchants, two doctors, an exchange dealer, a cotton factor, and an attorney) to organize the show as a fundraiser to establish an asylum for “destitute females” in the city.94 At the committee’s helm sat Leonard Matthews, a prominent exchange dealer and insurance agent.95 As Robb wrote to Matthews, “I very cheerfully place at your disposal my statue of the ‘Greek Slave,’ by Power [sic], which you are at liberty to exhibit for its benefit, in any manner you may think fit.”96 According to the frequent announcements that appeared in local papers, visitors paid an admission fee of fifty cents to see the show, or could purchase a season ticket for one dollar.97 The exhibition was by and large a success: it yielded over $1300 over the course of its sixmonth run, with the whole of these proceeds directed to the fundraising campaign.98 That the exhibition was held for charity is significant, and its choice of beneficiaries more so. It is well known that The Greek Slave sparked many debates about propriety and the female body, with the sculpture’s most ardent defenders reassuring skeptical viewers that the figure was not nude but rather “clothed in morality.”99 This period logic may have been sincere for some; for others it was a convenient, morally clothed excuse for looking at a representation of naked woman.100 The exhibition at Cooke’s “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 63

63

22-05-18 10:09 AM

gallery likewise can be understood as an attempt to navigate the ambiguous space between moral decorum and erotic encounter, where the mere act of purchasing a ticket to attend the exhibition was construed as a magnanimous one. As the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported, “The lovers of art in our city will have an opportunity of gratifying a chaste and refined taste and forwarding a benevolent project at the same time.”101 The titillation of seeing one sculptural female body could be cleverly masked by the prospect of saving many other real female bodies. By fundraising for a women’s asylum, the exhibition raised the question of precisely which imperiled bodies in New Orleans were worth saving. As Jessica Marie Johnson has discussed, the very concept of social welfare in New Orleans emerged with the interests of white femininity in mind, when Ursuline nuns in the eighteenth century established convents for the relief of white French girls and women in the wake of Natchez revolts against colonial rule.102 This tradition held sway over a century later; the destitute females whom the charity exhibition at Cooke’s benefited were white women who had entered local asylums as widows, unwed mothers, or orphans.103 Such a cause aligned with the subject of The Greek Slave, which rehearsed the narrative of a vulnerable white female captive threatened by a non-white male “Other”—a pervasive cultural trope in antebellum society.104 What is more, the particular decade of the 1840s saw efforts of an Anglo American planter class to assert social and political authority in an ethnically diverse city that included enslaved and free Black, Creole, Indigenous, French, and Spanish populations.105 At a moment when race and skin color became increasingly powerful ordering forces in New Orleans, The Greek Slave’s subject and its charitable exhibition reinscribed color lines by stressing the urgency of protecting white womanhood in the body politic. The location of Cooke’s Gallery further underscored the ways The Greek Slave intersected issues of whiteness in New Orleans, and more specifically, the divergent fates of white-looking women as they were saved, or enslaved. The gallery stood in the heart of the city’s commercial center just west of the French Quarter, and if viewing and circulating a life-size figure bound in chains and elevated atop a pedestal did not remind viewers of transactions and performative rituals of the slave market, the surrounding environment certainly would have. Visitors to The Greek Slave exhibition at Cooke’s—located at the top of a building whose first and second floors were devoted to the storage of cotton gins—would have had to pass the countless depots, jails, dealers, and enslaved people that populated its surrounding blocks.106 It would have also been impossible to ignore the gallery’s address at 13 St. Charles Street, directly across from the Saint Charles Hotel and Exchange. Along with the neighboring Saint Louis Hotel, the Saint Charles was one of New Orleans’s largest and notorious slave exchanges.107 The auctions that took place in both buildings were highly public and staged events where would-be purchasers and spectators attended to examine and appraise the bodies of enslaved people made to stand still atop auction blocks for sale. The New Orleans slave market and these merchants’ exchanges in particular were 64

64433int.indd 64

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

known for what white enslavers termed the “fancy trade,” in which light skinned mixed-race women, whose Blackness was often identified with the colorist and racist epithet “octoroon” or “quadroon,” were trafficked into bondage as concubines through a system known as plaçage.108 While the white marble body of The Greek Slave was on the one hand intended to be understood in relationship to the destitute white women of New Orleans for whom its charitable exhibition reportedly benefited, it could also be regarded in relation to another group of women in the city, ones whose light skin was deemed by some a pretext for sexual violence and commodification. The marketing of the exhibition at Cooke’s made it nothing short of impossible for viewers to deny The Greek Slave’s connection to the slave trade. When Miner Kellogg arrived in New Orleans and relayed the details of the ongoing rival exhibition back to Powers, he recalled, “The advertisements will show you the game playing here by the committee. They have put out extra handbills and an enormous red flag.”109 Robb and the fundraising committee chose to advertise the exhibition of The Greek Slave with the same tactic used by auctioneers across the South to announce the presence of a slave sale.110 Kellogg’s use of the word “game” to describe Robb’s advertising is likewise significant. It is possible that the committee thought they might attract unwitting passers-by to this exhibition in a neighborhood that teemed with many flags of the sort.111 Or perhaps the use of the flag functioned more euphemistically, aligning with the cavalierly proprietary ways in which Robb and many others—Powers included— would routinely refer to the statue and its many travels in correspondence not by its proper title, but simply as “your fugitive” or “my slave.”112 Significantly, Powers presciently anticipated the later exhibition of his work when he wrote of Robb’s initial interest in purchasing The Greek Slave from the Englishman Lord William Ward several years prior, noting, “The partner of Mr. Robb is now here (Mr. Hoge), and I intend to arrange with him—if possible—for the final payment on his slave.” He added, “This shows you that the slave trade is still going on, even in England.”113 In many ways, Robb’s exhibition of The Greek Slave materialized Powers’s original aim to create a work of art that could tour the world, readily circulating across a wide variety of spaces, contexts, and audiences. The show at Cooke’s made clear that The Greek Slave was a sculpture that could be as readily assimilated into the space of slavery’s commerce and its systems of representation and valuation, as it could at exhibitions in places like National Academy of Design in New York and the galleries of fine art dealers in London.114 And that the business of slavery duly informed the sculpture’s New Orleans exhibition attests to the ways the behaviors enacted at the city’s merchant exchanges inevitably resurfaced in what the performance studies scholar Joseph Roach identifies as the “surrogate forms” of theater, vernacular performance, and art.115 Roach’s idea of the Atlantic world as a “behavioral vortex” is crucial to understanding the ways the ritualized economy of slavery infiltrated nineteenth-century cultures of spectacle.116 The exhibition arguably further extended the rituals of the merchants’ exchange into a comparatively more accessible space of “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 65

65

22-05-18 10:09 AM

Cooke’s Gallery, whose entry fee was not far out of reach for middle-class New Orleanians.117 Yet Roach’s thesis on surrogacy begs further questions when thinking about the space of the sculpture gallery. What precisely was it about its spectacular culture that primed The Greek Slave for entry into this vortex? What of sculpture’s structures and its formal properties made such surrogacy possible? Or put broadly: what were the material factors driving this intimacy between culture and commerce, the mondain and the market? In the case of The Greek Slave, we first must begin by interrogating what aspects of the sculptural medium enabled the statue to move so readily between the art market and the slave market. “A LIVING, BREATHING, SPEAKING SOUL”

The Greek Slave stands just shy of five and a half feet high, and its life-size scale and three-dimensionality lend the figure a bodily presence and engender an anatomizing gaze. To fully take in its form at close range, one must either look the sculpture up and down or physically move about it in a circular motion that is in turn encouraged by the figure’s turned head, downward gaze, and twisting pose. The viewer’s awareness of the statue as a perceptible body is further heightened by the ways in which its polished surface of white Seravezza marble takes on a low sheen in light, whether illuminated by the bright gas lamps of nineteenth-century galleries or the ambient lighting of the modern-day museum. The figure leans against a post, holding a relaxed stance with one foot slightly raised. A carved swath of drapery wraps around the post and spills over the statue’s base to frame and further enhance a sense of theatricality. These material properties led nineteenth-century viewers to imagine The Greek Slave as an enlivened form, one that possessed what scholars of new materialisms would term a “peculiar vitality”—a quality of liveliness or animacy that inhered in but exceeded its material existence as a marble object.118 Such perceived liveliness was clear in writings on The Greek Slave that praised Powers’s skill in carving the surface of the marble into a convincing approximation of human flesh. As one critic wrote, “You forget you are looking at cold and lifeless marble,” while another declared, “I deemed that the heart was beating then, those peerless limbs were warm.”119 In these writings, a willed and impossible anthropomorphism takes place as the sculpture transforms from static image to animate form. The final section of this chapter argues that there was much at stake in claims to sculptural animacy in antebellum America, where the institution of slavery ordered considerations of who might be considered a person, and on what terms. Powers’s technologies for displaying the sculpture anticipated the medium’s capacity for animacy and helped effect it, but in so doing retraced slavery’s dissolution of boundaries between person and thing. When displayed, The Greek Slave comprised two parts. As described earlier, the figure itself was incorporated into a composition that included a post and circular base. This configuration was then affixed to a two-foot-high pedestal featuring at its top a pivot system with iron rollers, an interior rotating wheel (fig. 2.15), and a socket that 66

64433int.indd 66

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.15 Interior rotating wheel for the pedestal of Randolph Rogers, The Lost Pleiad, ca. 1874–1875, marble, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. J. L. Barclay, 09.770. Photograph by Connie Choi.

could connect to the statue’s base.120 Put together, the composite of figure and pedestal could be turned on its axis, affording viewing from all sides. While Powers put a great deal of thought into the design of his rotating pedestals, they are often overlooked or ignored as discrete material objects. Like museum frames, many have been replaced or switched out over time so that instances of correspondence between original base and work of art remain rare.121 Photographs of Powers’s works often favor the figure rather than its support. An early daguerreotype from 1848, for example, shows a cropped view of the pedestal, perhaps in an effort to persuade the viewer to engage the fantasy that the naked form they are viewing is of flesh and not marble (fig. 2.16).122 Yet sources ranging from Powers’s own prescriptions for displaying the sculpture to period criticism reveal the pedestal to have played an integral role in not only viewing The Greek Slave as a sculpture, but as a body too. Powers’s interest in using rotating pedestals can be traced to a career-long investment in exploring the kinematic possibilities of sculpture.123 He learned to prioritize the exhibition of sculpture in spectacular, theatrical contexts early on in his career, when he designed moving wax automata for a Dante-inspired vision of Hell called the “Infernal Regions” at the showman Joseph Dorfeuille’s Western Museum in Cincinnati.124 Later in Florence, he experimented with different devices for making his statues rotate upon a platform, ordering from the mechanic Giovanni Battista Piana bespoke instruments like brass carriages and iron hoops as well as casting his own tools in his small studio foundry.125 While sculptors from the early modern era onwards deployed such mechanical devices in making and displaying their work, the “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 67

67

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.16 Attributed to Southworth and Hawes, “The Greek Slave,” by Hiram Powers, 1848, daguerreotype. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

degree to which Powers was personally involved with the innovation, manufacture, and arrangement of such objects was distinctive, especially in light of his inclination to delegate most studio tasks to assistants. As he recalled toward the end of his career, arranging the pedestal was “a thing I always do with my own hands in order that it may be well done.”126 For the occasion of The Greek Slave’s American exhibition, Powers wrote and drew prescriptions for displaying the sculpture to achieve spectacular effects. In an effort to create what the philosopher Bruno Latour terms an immutable mobile, that is, an object that retains optical consistency despite circulation through time and space, the sculptor sent Miner Kellogg detailed directions and diagrams on how to exhibit the statue during its American tour.127 These descriptions, which have not been cited or discussed in previous scholarship, offer new insight into the material conditions of the sculpture’s display. “With respect to an apparatus for turning the slave around,” Powers devised a cord-and-pulley system that would initiate the movement of the interior rotating wheel sandwiched between the statue’s base and pedestal: The best way would be to have a circle of brass made in two pieces with the little brass groove pieces upon it, to fasten on to the cornice of the pedestal, on the upper side. This should be neatly made and lackered [sic] or gilt. The cord should be fastened to it and go twice round it and then pass round a trundle or windlass at the back of the statue on the railing.128 68

64433int.indd 68

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.17 Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, plan, elevation, and brass grooves for rotating pedestal, November 8, 1847. Hiram Powers Papers, Cincinnati History Library and Archives. figure 2.18 Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, pulley and block for rotating pedestal, November 8, 1847. Hiram Powers Papers, Cincinnati History Library and Archives. figure 2.19 Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, windlass for rotating pedestal, November 8, 1847. Hiram Powers Papers, Cincinnati History Library and Archives.

Powers also included several diagrams showing the configuration of this cord-andpulley system. Brass grooves would be installed in a ring around the perimeter of the pedestal (fig. 2.17) and a cord made of catgut—“in order to make as little show as possible”—would pass through the grooves to pulley blocks and a hand operated windlass (fig. 2.18 and 2.19).129 Kellogg followed these instructions best he could, reporting back a month later with a sketch of a device consisting of a thin vertical cylinder standing parallel to the pedestal, connected to the statue base by a brass ring on one end and a “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 69

69

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.20 Miner Kellogg to Hiram Powers, hand crank for rotating pedestal, December 14, 1847. Hiram Powers Papers, Cincinnati History Library and Archives.

crank extension on the other (figure 2.20).130 When the crank was turned, the cylinder and ring would move against one another and allow the statue to rotate. What did these intricate mechanics achieve? The response to the second of two Greek Slave exhibitions in New Orleans offers a partial answer. During the final months of James Robb’s charity exhibition, Miner Kellogg arrived in New Orleans to mount Powers’s touring show of the statue in the halls of the state legislature, several blocks away from Cooke’s Gallery. What was billed as the “official” exhibition of the sculpture opened in February 1849 and ran three months, outlasting its rival by ten days to close on the first of May that year.131 A reporter for the Daily Picayune went to see both statues and deemed it “a profitable exercise to study them as much in connection as possible.”132 Save an extra twist of drapery in the version of The Greek Slave exhibited by Kellogg, the two works were nearly identical. Yet Kellogg’s installation differed somewhat. “The statue at the State House is more conveniently mounted,” the Picayune continued, “as it can be readily turned on its pedestal.”133 The second statue, exhibited per its maker’s specifications, was easier to see and study. Accounts from viewers around the country further contextualize the Picayune’s interest in The Greek Slave’s turning pedestal, which enabled visibility while simultaneously igniting common period fantasies about the transformation of the sculpture to an animate form. The writer E. Anna Lewis, who saw the statue in New York, recounted, “The Slave stood on a rotating pedestal about four feet high . . . seats were placed in front of it, into one of which we sank into a sort of trance . . .” After admiring the 70

64433int.indd 70

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

statue’s beauty, she continued, “The breast heaved, the lips moved, the muscles breathed, and gently as the mists disappear before the sun, the cold marble mortality vanished, and it stood before us as a living, breathing, speaking soul.”134 Lewis’s evocation of the sculpture as a breathing and moving “soul” that lulls her into a trance calls to mind the properties of automata, whose concealed mechanical movements enchanted nineteenth-century audiences with the illusion of real life.135 Indeed, the animating mechanics of Powers’s turning pedestal had much in common with the wax automata he had designed decades before at the Western Museum, where he first learned that “a little motion in figures would add much to the reality of the show.”136 The spectacular promise of movement and liveliness was as integral to automata modeled in wax as it was ideal sculpture carved from marble. The idea that statuary might turn atop a pedestal or possess an animate presence wasn’t new. The trope of the “living statue” has been a long-standing form of aesthetic praise; the mythical works of Daedalus, for example, were said to be “exactly like living beings.”137 Ovid famously imagined the sculptor Pygmalion’s marble muse brought to life in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare’s queen Hermione, presumed dead and preserved as a statue, is enlivened in the final act of The Winter’s Tale.138 These acts of animation are not neutral; they have much to do with power. As Mel Y. Chen argues, claims to animacy are always political, “shaped by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not.”139 Chen suggests it is in the realm of language where hierarchies of animacy are framed and manipulated according to historical and social configurations of power.140 Such an argument is meaningful because it challenges new materialist claims for the unequivocal vibrancy of matter by framing concepts of animacy as scalar and relational, always mediated by political and structural biases of human actors. In regard to nineteenth-century sculpture, much is at stake in the distinction between a human subject and an object motivated as animate on the grounds of its affective presence—especially in light of period tendencies to conflate sculpted body with human form at a time when definitions of who constituted a subject were arbitrated by a system of racial slavery. Antebellum American law and political economy compromised and commodified conceptions of personhood to position enslaved African Americans as objects of property.141 This breaking down of binaries between person and property was reified by enslavers as well as broader body politics, all complicit in perpetuating the idea that a human being could be a commodity in realms that encompassed the legal, the linguistic, the cultural, and the aesthetic.142 It is thus crucial to look past the liveliness of The Greek Slave as mere outcome of Powers’s artistry and understand the histories of commodification—particularly those related to enslavement—to inhere in art historical understandings of sculpted objects as animate bodies. Efforts of both maker and spectator to animate The Greek Slave by means of engraved illustration, written word, or turning pedestal were representational processes inextricable from slavery’s management of personhood. Powers used the “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 71

71

22-05-18 10:09 AM

pedestal as means of presenting and marketing the sculpted figure as an animate body. Moreover, period commentaries suggest how the rotating pedestal did not simply convey to audiences the idea of The Greek Slave as a convincingly lifelike body. Rather, the pedestal and its mechanical operation entertained a fantasy of perceptually possessing a body: of bringing its form into legibility, of making it visible and consumable.143 The technology of turning—recall here that Powers termed his pedestal “an apparatus to turn the slave around”—helped manage the sculpture as a body, but one whose qualities of liveliness and mobility remained under human control, rotated in order to be evaluated in an exhibitionary space at once commercial and spectacular.144 The premise of bodily management central to Powers’s pedestal was also fundamental to slavery’s subjugating violence. Consider, for one, the visual parallels between a newspaper illustration of The Greek Slave’s display where the nude sculpture was shown clothed and George Cruikshank’s engraving of a slave auction that appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin several years later, which showed the moment at which novel’s character Emmeline was to be sold into slavery (fig. 2.21 and fig. 2.22). As a material interface conceived to manage what stood atop its surface in terms at once commercial and ontological, the alchemical logic of the pedestal echoed that of the slave market’s auction block. As Katherine McKittrick has discussed, auction blocks were sites of racial domination and spectacular seeing that produced Black people as commodities within the economy and geography of slavery.145 Activated through the triangulation of “the gaze, the exchange of money, [and] the evaluation of bodies,” to follow McKittrick’s terms, these structures staged people and aspects of their personhood as commodities for visual scrutiny and consumption.146 With chains prominently placed upon the wrists of a figure to be sold in a market, the narrative of The Greek Slave hinged on the very threat of the commodified body. But, much as the image of the light-skinned Emmeline of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it did so upon the premise that such was a fate unsuitable for a white or white-passing woman: as the official pamphlet Powers circulated with the sculpture noted, the body of The Greek Slave had “a loveliness such that it charms every eye, and yet that has no value for the slave-market.”147 Together, the materiality of both the white marble sculptural figure and the conditions of its display made an explicit racial statement on the different regimes of value that Black and white bodies might occupy in antebellum society. In its Atlantic spaces of production and in its American contexts of exhibition, The Greek Slave intersected the institution and economy of slavery in ways concrete and immaterial. The circumstances that initiated its making were in part made possible by wealth from slavery, and it is not coincidental that the sculpture, once complete, moved through those very circuits of commerce and exchange. If an object like James Robb’s red flag demonstrated how the exhibition of The Greek Slave was embedded into the built environment of slavery, the rotating pedestal pointed to the extent to which this exhibition was also shaped by the racialized hierarchies of subjectivity that sustained that built environment. The entanglements between the sculptural medium 72

64433int.indd 72

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.21 “Hiram Power’s Greek Slave,” in Yankee Doodle (August 1847), 234. University of Chicago Library. figure 2.22 George Cruikshank, “Emmeline about to be Sold to the Highest Bidder,” illustration for Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: John Cassell, 1852), 290. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

and the institution of slavery articulate a broader crisis in discourses of the body in American society before the Civil War, wherein dominant aesthetic and political paradigms sought to manage and manipulate the ontology of persons as things, and things as persons. FUGITIVE BODIES

In January 1851, the antislavery newspaper The National Era published a curious account of the exhibition of The Greek Slave in St. Louis, Missouri. As discussed at the outset of this book’s introduction, the article noted the exhibition’s proximity “within a few steps of the spot” of the city’s slave market. It then spun a fictionalized tale of the sculpture’s display in which the statue, “turning just then upon its pedestal,” came to life to address the injustices of slavery.148 The article mobilized the rotating pedestal to physically set into motion the rhetoric of abolition, describing it as such: “ ‘Why limit your sympathies?’ was the mute language of the marble. ‘Why limit your application to the principles of justice?’ ”149 As the story went, The Greek Slave’s soliloquy, “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 73

73

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.23 Henry Vizetelly, “America,” in Dickinson’s’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson’s Brothers, 1854), chromolithograph. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

albeit silent, was powerful enough that it moved a spectator to realize the immorality of his enslavement of men, women, and children. Such an account appeared at a critical moment in American antislavery debates: the final months of 1850 had seen the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated that persons escaping slavery be returned to bondage upon capture. Six months after the publication of the National Era’s account and across the Atlantic at the Great Exhibition in London, William Wells Brown, Ellen Craft, and William Craft staged an antislavery protest. Brown, Craft, and Craft had each escaped from slavery in the United States several years prior and later went to Britain, in part to void the threat of the Fugitive Slave Act.150 Like Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Henry Brown, and many other formerly enslaved people who had shaped public discourses on abolition in the decades prior, Brown, Craft, and Craft recognized the urgency of centering debates about American slavery in an Atlantic context and traveled around the country giving antislavery lectures.151 The trio looked to make a demonstration for abolition at the Crystal Palace, this time in front of The Greek Slave, which stood in the fair’s American section as a centerpiece of artistry and ingenuity (fig. 2.23). In a widely recounted instance, the trio placed at the statue’s base an illustration by the English illustrator John Tenniel that had recently been published in the 74

64433int.indd 74

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 2.24 John Tenniel, “The Virginian Slave, intended as a companion to Power’s Greek Slave,” in Punch 20 (1851). University of California.

periodical Punch. “The Virginian Slave” was not an image of a real sculpture but rather a satirical indictment of everything The Greek Slave was not: it depicted a Black woman shackled to a post, standing atop a pedestal ornamented with chains, whips, and the US flag (fig. 2.24).152 “As an American fugitive slave,” Brown reportedly declared, “I place this Virginia slave by the side of the Greek Slave, as its most fitting companion.”153 Brown and the Crafts disrupted the fair’s narrative of modern progress by calling attention to fact that such progress was only made possible through enslaved Black labor.154 In juxtaposing representations of Virginian and Greek slaves, Brown asked “The Mute Language of the Marble”

64433int.indd 75

75

22-05-18 10:09 AM

viewers to make sense of the latter in relation to the former. Additionally, such an action attested to the impossibility and reaffirmed the very fictionality of a scenario like the one The National Era imagined in St. Louis: The Greek Slave ultimately revealed very little on the subject of American slavery as a sculpture and had to be fictively figured in print as a speaking subject in order to do so. The illustration of the Virginian slave, placed in front of the sculpture by three people who had themselves absconded slavery, countered the silent hypocrisy of both the fair’s display and the complicit place of the white marble sculpture in it. The National Era’s apocryphal account and the protest mounted by Brown, Craft, and Craft bespeak the political possibilities—and limits—in imagining bodies otherwise circa 1851. A sculpture might come to life to speak about the injustices of slavery, but it could only do so in “the mute language of the marble.” The very impossibility of such an event would be further underscored by a man evoking his own presence “as a fugitive American slave” in a dissident critique of the inert silence of a white marble sculpture.155 The image of the “Virginian slave” Brown then placed next to the statue reminded viewers how the white figure of The Greek Slave stood both distant from and proximate to Black people held in bondage: at once a contrasting figure and a “fitting companion.” Between Florence, New Orleans, St. Louis, and London, Powers’s sculpture traveled far and wide in the nineteenth century. In this international circulation, it overlapped the ends of slavery—its very geographic and conceptual contours—as a material thing implicated the institution’s financial markets, regimes of valuation, and modes of corporeal commodification. Yet at the Crystal Palace, abolitionists exposed and mobilized this reality in a visual, visible critique in a campaign for a different set of slavery’s ends: its outlawing and eradication. In an age of enslavement and abolition in the Atlantic world, The Greek Slave stood on shifting ground.

76

64433int.indd 76

“The Mute Language of the Marble”

22-05-18 10:09 AM

3 SENTIMENT, MANUFACTURED John Bell and the Abolitionist Image under Empire The abolitionists were not radicals.1

eric williams

N

of the Great Exhibition of 1851—where Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave stood center stage—the sculptor John Bell (1811–1895) wrote to the leading British design and luxury metals firm, Elkington, Mason, and Company, regarding one of his works in progress. Bell, an Englishman, was making a sculpture in collaboration with the firm and proposed that the work in question be “on the same scale and in the same style as the Greek Slave.”2 He closed the letter stressing the stakes of the matter at hand, writing, “There is (I think), no time to be lost if the statue is to have the opportunity of being well seen & known this year.”3 Bell’s sculpture depicted a young woman stolen into transatlantic slavery. The statue was first displayed in plaster at the 1853 exhibition of the Royal Academy under the title A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic and was cast as a bronze electrotype by Elkington soon after (see fig. 0.6).4 That Bell had looked to Powers’s The Greek Slave in modeling A Daughter of Eve is evident. The figure appears nude except for a wrap knotted at OT LONG AFTER THE CLOSE

77

64433int.indd 77

22-05-18 10:09 AM

the waist, with a prominent silver chain binding her wrists to denote her captive status. Yet the sculpture is not a mere citation of Powers’s work. If The Greek Slave drew attention from audiences as a figure that calmly faced the burden of enslavement, A Daughter of Eve would appear to be anything but. Her body shows the coercion and pain of captivity: a wary expression, tense muscles, and arms straining with the weight of chains. With such a depiction, Bell diverged not only from Powers’s sculpture but also a broader set of representational and material conventions for imaging the human body in sculpture in the nineteenth century. He chose to depict an enslaved woman of African descent in bronze at a time when European and American sculptors eschewed the representation of Black subjects in their work altogether, opting instead to model mythological or allegorical figures in white marble. Bell’s missive to Elkington suggests that he conceived of A Daughter of Eve as an urgent indictment of slavery, which had been outlawed by name in the British Atlantic in 1833 but would not be abolished in the United States until 1865. By midcentury, Britain had become a crucial place for the campaigns of American abolitionists, with the likes of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Ellen and William Craft, and many others attending antislavery conventions and touring the country on lecture circuits in order to draw international attention to their cause. As discussed in the previous chapter, the critique mounted by Brown and the Crafts in front of The Greek Slave at the Crystal Palace made clear the importance not only of the global stage to American abolitionist discourse, but also the ways in which works of art might center into that discourse. Far from Hiram Powers’s evasiveness on what The Greek Slave had to do with chattel slavery, the white artist Bell sought to align himself with the antislavery cause espoused by Black activists in Britain, writing of A Daughter of Eve in 1853, “A sculptor hopes that his art also may aid in directing a sustained attention to the greatest injustice in the world.”5 This chapter newly assesses how and on what terms A Daughter of Eve directed “sustained attention” to the immorality of slavery by refocusing the scope of Bell’s career within the larger context of British empire and industry. As scholarship by Mia Bagneris and Michael Hatt has discussed, it was through representations of Black and mixed-race captive women such as A Daughter of Eve and The Octoroon that Bell prompted audiences to consider both the ethics of slavery and the complexities of racial formation at midcentury.6 Building on and extending these important interpretations, I address these sculptures as manifestations of phenomena both affective and material: sentiment, industry, and empire. Crucial to this consideration is the fact that Bell came of age as an artist at the dawn of the Victorian era, and the years of his career approximately paralleled those of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). Like many artists of the day, he was committed to an aesthetic sensibility rooted in sentimentality and the idea a work of art might move its viewer to an emotional and moral response.7 And he did so in a moment triply defined by the end of apprenticeship after emancipation in the British Atlantic, the prime of industrial capitalism, and the acceleration of 78

64433int.indd 78

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:09 AM

imperialism in West Africa. What concerns me here are the ways Bell’s practice collided and colluded with these already entangled forces. Not simply the straightforward expression of humanitarian vision that he perhaps imagined, Bell’s art instead gave way to the complexities of the idea of abolition in an age of industrial and imperial accretion. My attention to the making and siting of an early work—a bust of the abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton executed for Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the late 1840s (see fig. 0.4)—will lend initial insight into the contradictory tradition of British antislavery imagery that would in turn shape Bell’s approach to A Daughter of Eve and The Octoroon. With these latter works, however, the sculptor sought out new approaches to appeal to the sympathies of viewers. Abandoning an academic tradition of bespoke commissioned statuary, he crucially seized upon new reproductive and industrial technologies to amplify his abolitionist message. This commitment to what I call “manufactured sentiment” further vexed the ways his sculptures entered into debates about slavery and emancipation. The modes of production and spaces of display that brought Bell’s work into public view, from foundries and potteries in the West Midlands to exhibitions in Lancashire textile towns, remained tied to economies and technologies of enslavement and empire. What are the means by which an image is brought into the world to do political and moral work? Or to reframe and redirect the words of Walter Benjamin, what is the “work” of art in an age of technological reproducibility?8 What forms of violence are shrouded in an appeal to justice? For Bell, if abolitionist sentiment might be manufactured, the terms of that manufacture were inextricably yoked to a long history of racial capitalism and its consequences. SCULPTURE AT THE CROSSROADS

The year 1848 was a bad one for sculpture at the Royal Academy. The medium “may be said to be at a very low ebb in England,” as one critic wrote of the London art school’s annual exhibition, “with fewer works of the High Art class.”9 The nymphs, deities, and ideal marble statuary of a preceding generation of illustrious Academy exhibitors that included the likes of Antonio Canova, John Flaxman, and Joseph Nollekens were long gone, and few notable successors to “great masters of the art” stood on the horizon.10 Much of this grumbling came from the exhibition space itself, which was situated in the dark, cramped basement of the institution’s Trafalgar Square galleries.11 Contemporary reviews also attest to the ways that changing commercial interests of the era were at fault: as another critic noted, “The sculpture demand in the markets of England is more and more every year for its low and vulgar fans.”12 With the heyday of neoclassicism over and its most esteemed proponents dead, British sculpture at midcentury entered new and uncertain terrain. Described by one contemporary as representing a “break away from the usual subjects of his craft,” John Bell stood at the crossroads of this shift.13 Born to a prosperous Norfolk family, he moved to London as a teenager to pursue artistic training under the S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 79

79

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 3.1 John Bell for Minton and Company, Clorinda, 1848, Parian ware. Photograph courtesy of Drove House Antiques.

tutelage of the neoclassical sculptor Richard Westmacott at the schools of the Royal Academy from 1829 to 1832. Working in the capital over the course of the late 1830s and 1840s, he began to steadily accrue fame in the latter decade through monumental public commissions and collaborations with manufacturing firms.14 The two works Bell sent for exhibition at the Academy in the summer of 1848 accordingly epitomized these new dimensions of his career. The first was the model for a marble bust of the reformer Thomas Fowell Buxton and the second his popular statue of the Romantic literary heroine Clorinda, which had just been reproduced as a thirteen-inch-high reduction in Parian ware (unglazed biscuit porcelain) by the Stoke-on-Trent ceramics giant Minton and Company in February of that year (fig. 3.1).15 Both sculptures arguably threatened the older vision of ideal sculpture with which the exhibition’s critics remained enchanted. One review complained of the preponderance of portrait busts 80

64433int.indd 80

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:09 AM

of contemporary figures that threatened “the transcendentalism of art,” and another decried sentimental genre sculptures that stood against the ideals of “High Art” for their proximity to both the market and modes of industrial production.16 There are vast and obvious differences in terms of the subject and genre of Thomas Fowell Buxton and Clorinda. These contrasts bespeak the varied scope and content of what the art historian Benedict Read once identified as Bell’s “idiosyncratic” and “somewhat unusual” career, which encompassed by turns the monumental, the miniature, the political, the sentimental, the industrial, and the useful.17 Yet both works might be understood as expressions of broader changes afoot for sculptors in the Victorian era, a moment that many art historians have characterized by the rise of a kind of sculptural object bound up with commerce, industry, and empire in new and increasingly intimate configurations.18 Clorinda was one of the first “shapes” (to use Minton’s terminology) to result from Bell’s initial foray into collaborations with industrial design firms in 1847.19 And the marble bust of Buxton was destined for the British occupied colony of Sierra Leone, where it had been commissioned by the parishioners at St. George’s Cathedral in Freetown. But neither the Minton Clorinda nor the marble Buxton actually appeared on display in the Academy’s sculpture galleries: the exhibition catalogue notes that Bell sent for exhibition the half-size marble upon which the Parian ware reduction was based and the plaster model for the bust.20 The provisional status of both sculptures on view, then, asked the exhibition’s visitors to think speculatively and shift their minds elsewhere in order to imagine the work of art as it actually existed in the world—in the factory, the industrial showroom, the colony. There was therefore much truth in critics’ assessments that sculpture was “at a very low ebb” at the Royal Academy in 1848, for it had gone elsewhere. It is the stakes of these movements that I wish to address next, beginning with Freetown. A BUST FOR SIERRA LEONE

A Daughter of Eve was not the first work of art that Bell created concerning the matter of slavery’s abolition. Five years prior, he produced a large marble bust featuring the likeness of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845), a white abolitionist and Parliament member who helped pass Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. When the plaster model appeared on view at the Royal Academy as a bust “for Sierra Leone,” the completed marble version was already on its way to Freetown, where it was unveiled and installed on a dedicatory plinth in St. George’s Cathedral, an Anglican church that overlooked the city’s harbor.21 There, the bust joined rhetoric trumpeting the end of transatlantic slavery at the same time it delineated new forms of colonialism in a postemancipation society. While scholars have largely overlooked the making of Thomas Fowell Buxton and its place in Freetown, attention to both matters will reveal much about the contradictory—and imperial—tradition of British antislavery imagery in colonial spaces.22 This tradition would in turn come to inform Bell’s approach to A Daughter of Eve several years later. S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 81

81

22-05-18 10:09 AM

Bell began his bust shortly after Buxton’s death in 1845. The artist came to the sculpture from ties to his hometown of Norfolk, England, where both his family and Buxton’s were part of a prominent circle of social reformers. When the commission arose for the Freetown bust, Bell actively pursued it, writing to a friend in 1845 that he “had the honor of knowing the late Sir Fowell personally” and hoped to be “entrusted with the execution of the tribute.”23 The exact details of this undertaking are unknown, but it’s certain that the tribute fit in with a larger commemoration of Buxton in the British Empire following his death. The most lavish of these unfolded in London, where a committee of “Noblemen and Gentlemen” that included Prince Albert launched a public subscription campaign to raise a monument to the late statesman in Westminster Abbey.24 The sculptor Frederick Thrupp won a competition to complete the monument, which depicted Buxton seated and in classical dress (fig. 3.2).25 Installed in the Abbey’s north transept in 1848 close to the grave memorials to the antislavery campaigners Charles James Fox and William Wilberforce, Thrupp’s monument stood as much of a testament to Britain’s abolition of slavery as it did to the memory of Buxton. The Buxton bust in Freetown connected to this longer history of monuments to abolition in Westminster Abbey in ways ideological, material, and monetary. Bell would have certainly known Thrupp’s monument as well as the memorial to Fox, which his Royal Academy teacher Richard Westmacott executed in 1822 (fig. 3.3). Westmacott depicted Fox in a recumbent pose, flanked by a seated female personification of Liberty and a kneeling male personification of Africa. Although Westmacott carefully rendered the figure of Africa in an idealized manner, his beseeching pose and liminal placement in the monument’s pyramidal composition did little to counter accepted understandings of abolition in Britain.26 Instead, the memorial joined a body of images including Wedgwood’s earlier antislavery medallion that concretized “official” colonial narratives of abolition that falsely situated at its vanguard legislation signed by white Englishmen over acts of redress, flight, and rebellion undertaken by Black people across the African diaspora.27 The polished surface of Bell’s marble sculpture partakes in this partial rhetoric of abolition by reinforcing Buxton’s whiteness. Buxton appears something of a Byronic hero, carved at a scale slightly larger than life and with a furrowed brow, deeply parted flowing locks, and a swath of drapery cast over his shoulder. Such a figure was one whose normative white masculinity was often constructed in relation to encounters with non-white, non-European bodies in period literature.28 The inscription on the plinth below duly details the bust’s installation and dedication in St. George’s Cathedral in Freetown in 1848. The text construes Buxton’s relationship to Sierra Leone in terms of paternalistic intimacy, identifying him as a “friend of the Negro” and noting that the monument was “erected as a testimony of affection and gratitude by the liberated Africans and their friends in the colony of Sierra Leone.” A similarly racist rhetoric of indebtedness appeared on the Westminster monument to Buxton, identifying 82

64433int.indd 82

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:09 AM

figure 3.2 Frederick Thrupp, Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1848, marble, Westminster Abbey. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster, London. figure 3.3 Richard Westmacott, Monument to Charles James Fox, 1822, marble, Westminster Abbey. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster, London.

64433int.indd 83

22-05-18 10:09 AM

“the grateful contributions of many thousands of the African race” among the statue’s subscriptions.29 Indeed, in a set of handwritten annotations to his late father’s memoirs, Buxton’s son noted how the London and Freetown monuments had been financed by the same fundraising campaign, with upwards of a thousand pounds collected from British subscribers and 495 from subscribers in the West Indies and West Africa.30 The latter group, as Buxton’s son wrote, “wished, in addition to that, to have a monument among themselves; they therefore subscribed a further sum of £80, with which they procured a bust, beautifully executed by Mr. John Bell, which has been placed in St. George’s Church at Sierra Leone.”31 This apocryphal story of the bust’s commission and installation at St. George’s must be parsed in several steps, starting first with the longer history of British invasions of the southwestern coast of West Africa. Since the seventeenth century, the harbors and islands surrounding the city now known as Freetown had been sites at which Europeans—first the Portuguese, then the British—trafficked human lives into the catastrophic system of transatlantic slavery. The British presence in Sierra Leone was primarily figured through the Royal African Company until the late eighteenth century, at which point London reformers, in the context of the growing movement to abolish the slave trade, began to look to West Africa as a site of colonization. In 1787, the white British antislavery campaigner Granville Sharp signed a lease with the Temne regent Pa Tham to settle a portion of land at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River estuary.32 What Sharp, along with his colleagues Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, proclaimed as a “Province of Freedom” was actually a British colonization scheme to resettle people previously enslaved elsewhere in the Atlantic world, in a place already inhabited by the Indigenous ethnic groups of the Temne and the Mende. The collective of newcomers to the province comprised formerly enslaved African Americans and West Indians, many of whom who had escaped to Nova Scotia during the American Revolution; Jamaican Maroons; “Liberated Africans” who had been taken captive on slave ships and conscripted into the British Navy; and Black Britons forcibly expelled from London through Sharp’s Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor.33 Following a period of governance by the corporate body of the Sierra Leone Company from 1792 to 1807, Britain assumed colonial control of the region and its diverse population with Freetown functioning as the de facto capital. British views from this midcentury moment, including a lithograph of the city’s harbor rendered by Auguste-François Laby and Jonathan Needham, seem to index this bid for colonial control (fig. 3.4). Views such as Laby’s and Needham’s showed neither the region’s diverse populations nor the coercive terms upon which they were brought there, but rather partook in the visual rhetoric of what Krista Thompson has elsewhere termed “tropicalization” in order to render the lush landscape and its inhabitants at once orderly and picturesque.34 Bell’s bust came to Freetown around the same time these views came into being, four decades after the city’s “establishment” and three into its annexation as Crown 84

64433int.indd 84

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

colony. What did this presence of Buxton’s likeness mean in the 1840s? Like the abolitionists Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson a generation prior, Buxton saw Sierra Leone as a site for British colonization and mercantile expansion. When Sharp first led efforts to establish the settlement at Freetown under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company in the late eighteenth century, he did so on the belief that “free labor” on the western coasts of Africa should replace enslaved labor in the Caribbean—essentially replicating slavery in all but name.35 Buxton was also complicit in this project. After the abolition of slavery and the end of apprenticeship, he drew on Sharp’s earlier aims in forwarding a colonial regime in Sierra Leone based on a trio of ideals he identified as “civilization, commerce, and Christianity.”36 Although it is well known that he never physically visited Sierra Leone—a matter to which we will return in a moment—his vision was consequential to instating an increasingly hegemonic colonial regime after annexation. Institutions like St. George’s Cathedral, which was established in 1817 and opened in 1828 as the official church of the British government, duly played a central role in Buxton’s colonial enterprise.37 Labeled as “Freetown Church” in Laby and Needham’s lithograph, its redbrick structure imposed a stark colonial presence in the cityscape, looming over the main Government Wharf steps downhill from the city’s famed Cotton Tree, which marked the spot where formerly enslaved people had first congregated upon their arrival to Freetown in 1787.38 The bust of Buxton in St. George’s did less to reference this history of Black liberation—which was itself defined by what the historian Alexander X. Byrd describes as a “constantly disappointing struggle for independence” under British governance—and more to prop up the colonial social order aggressively taking shape in the region.39 Though Buxton never went to Freetown, the “marble index” of his likeness may be seen as a performance of political theater in effigy and in perpetuity.40 In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon evokes an image of the colonial world as “a world of statues . . . crushing with its stoniness,” performing not the work of change but rather of petrification.41 The abolitionist image in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone did precisely this in the ways it shrouded and reified the machinations of empire. We have already seen how the bust’s inscription touted the purported “affection and gratitude” of former bondspeople living in Freetown. Outside of the biased commentary of Buxton’s English son, less is known regarding contemporary responses to the commission as church records were lost to a fire in the early twentieth century.42 However, such rhetoric is strikingly similar to what white Southerners figured as the racist trope of the “loyal slave” in monuments to the former Confederacy after the Civil War in the United States.43 Put simply, Bell’s bust of Buxton was not an image that agitated for a new social order or radically different worldview but rather one that nominally commemorated abolition as fait accompli and pretext for colonialism. As a British-installed bishop of Sierra Leone later wrote in 1894, “The building contains with it so many memorials . . . it is almost possible to read a history of the colony on its walls.”44 The S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 85

85

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.4 Auguste François Laby and Jonathan Needham, Freetown, Sierra Leone, ca. 1850, colored lithograph on thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

space of St. George’s Cathedral contrasted with, for example, the nearby edifice of St. John’s Maroon Church, which had been established by Jamaican Maroons who had been exiled from their homes by British forces and taken to Freetown in the forced resettlement scheme. St. John’s was founded not long after in 1808—its structure dates to around 1822—by the Maroon arrivals in a bid for separation from a religious and cultural landscape increasingly defined by the colonial administration (fig.3.5).45 The church was, significantly, built with beams, pews, and bell repurposed from slave ships abandoned in Freetown harbor. It stood as a structure defined not by petrification, to draw again from Fanon, but a series of reversals and transformations. Its establishment testified to the ways Black Freetonians, particularly those who had 86

64433int.indd 86

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

escaped slavery, sought to counter the dominant colonial British narrative taking shape in the city. Material changes to St. George’s Cathedral came later in the nineteenth century, revealing a set of complex negotiations with and challenges to the colonial rhetoric of the town’s built environment. Although many members of its congregation were Krio, or Sierra Leoneans descended from both eighteenth-century Black settlers and Indigenous communities of the Temne and Mende, the church was led by white British colonial administrators and thus remained, according to theologian and historian E. W. Fasholé-Luke, a bastion of Anglo-centric Victorian culture.46 This changed, however, toward the end of the century as the cathedral moved toward its eventual S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 87

87

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.5 Interior and churchyard bell, St. John’s Maroon Church, Freetown. Photograph by author.

disestablishment of the Church of England in 1898.47 In 1882, Samuel Lewis, Freetown’s first Black mayor, formed a memorial committee in order to reconceive the church for what he envisaged as “a new era in the history of the Negro race.”48 As a part of this project, the committee raised a new monument, a marble bust dedicated to the Reverend James Johnson (1836–1917), a Yorùban clergyman born in the neighboring town of Benguema who was an early proponent of Pan Africanism (fig. 3.6).49 Carved with striking realism by the Carraran sculptor Luigi Tosi, Johnson dons clerical dress and casts a steely gaze upward. The bust’s inscription affirmed Samuel Lewis’s vision, noting that the bust was “erected by his countrymen of Benguema” and dedicated to “his public spirit and devotion to the interest of his country and his race.” Installed in a direct sightline opposite the nave from the Buxton memorial, the Johnson bust countered a commemorative landscape largely dedicated to the memory of white Englishmen. Celebrating a living person who frequently preached at the cathedral, the monument opened onto a present increasingly shaped by the vision of Black Freetonians. Bell’s bust was in many respects a retrospective object, commissioned to commemorate the late Buxton and his involvement in Britain’s campaign to abolish slavery. It also differed drastically from the work the sculptor would undertake five years later with A Daughter of Eve. A Daughter of Eve occupied a different kind of temporality in its appeal to an unresolved present in which slavery had been outlawed in the British Atlantic but not the United States; recall that Bell created the sculpture in the hopes that it might “direct sustained attention to the greatest injustice in the world.” Michael Hatt has proposed that Thomas Fowell Buxton and A Daughter of Eve bespeak Bell’s alliance with abolitionism, suggesting that both works reveal not only the artist’s sympathy to the cause but moreover his active participation in reform circles.50 This may be 88

64433int.indd 88

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.6 Luigi Tosi, Reverend James Johnson, late nineteenth century, St. George’s Cathedral, Freetown. Photograph by author.

true, but the very presence of the Buxton bust in Freetown also attests to the ways the legacies of British abolitionism and sympathy for them engendered conditions of unfreedom for people of African descent after emancipation. Given Bell’s engagement with the fraught legacies of British abolition what would it then mean to create another work of art that called attention to the unresolved future of American slavery? “A SCENE ON THE SHORE OF THE ATLANTIC”

In its appearance and commemorative function, Bell’s marble bust of Buxton followed the traditional conventions of the portrait bust, which by the nineteenth century stood as an established genre in British sculpture.51 A Daughter of Eve, on the other hand, was a sculpture that emerged from a world of industrial, commercial, and artistic S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 89

89

22-05-18 10:10 AM

experimentation. Produced by the Birmingham manufacturing firm of Elkington and Company, the statue gained widespread visibility in the British Isles as the firm worked with Bell to reproduce, display, and market life-size and reduced versions at world’s fairs and industrial exhibitions in the decades to follow. As we will see, the decisions Bell made to turn from the depiction of the white abolitionist Buxton to a that of an anonymous enslaved Black woman, and to then produce and circulate that depiction on an industrial scale reveals a great deal about the kind of work of art he deemed crucial to be “well seen & known” in its appeal to the injustice of slavery.52 The title of Bell’s sculpture is far from secure. In early correspondence with Elkington, the sculptor referred to his work in progress as The Negress Slave.53 In 1853, he exhibited the original plaster model at the Royal Academy as A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic. Later versions produced by Elkington as well as Minton appeared in exhibitions and catalogues in the 1860 under the titles The Slave Girl and The American Slave. Toward the end of his career, Bell referred to the sculpture as A Daughter of Eve.54 (The statue has variously appeared in scholarly literature under all of these names.)55 This shifting and contested title is significant, for it suggests there was and continues to be much at stake in Bell’s sculpture in relationship to the historical and geographical context of slavery in the United States. With A Daughter of Eve, Bell created a work of art that called into question to the logic of slavery’s commodifying structures as they related to the human body. By way of the sculpture’s subject matter and materiality, he drew attention to the transatlantic currents of theft and transit in which slavery was embedded, as well as the regional economies of industry that connected Britain specifically to this system well into the mid-nineteenth century. But the fact the sculpture was itself an object of this industrial manufacture complicated its ostensible expression of antislavery ideology. As focus to the production and patronage of A Daughter of Eve will demonstrate, the sale and consumption of a life-size, sculptural representation of an enslaved woman paradoxically threatened to reiterate the proprietary violence of enslavement that Bell and many other sought to challenge. A Daughter of Eve was unusual for its time. The bronze sculpture shows a young Black woman with wrists bound together by a silver chain. The figure wears a wrap at the waist but is otherwise nude, and casts a gaze downward in an expression that suggests melancholy and fatigue. As several scholars have noted, Bell created his sculpture at a moment when many artists eschewed such subjects on the racist grounds that Blackness stood outside of Western, Eurocentric notions of the ideal human form espoused in art academies.56 If the theme of the captive figure was a popular one for European and American artists, it was largely explored through white subjects and in the medium of white marble, as works such as Powers’s The Greek Slave, Erastus Dow Palmer’s White Captive (1858– 1859), and Raffaele Monti’s Circassian Slave (ca. 1851) attest. In the case of A Daughter of Eve, the figure’s downcast gaze, lithe form, and distinctive contrapposto align with the representational conventions of ideal sculpture. Bell would have no doubt learned the importance of such bodily cues at the Royal Academy, for this was a lesson frequently 90

64433int.indd 90

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.7 “ ‘Andromeda’—A Statue in Bronze by John Bell of London (cast by the Coalbrookdale company)” in M. Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Illustrations of the Choicest Specimens Produced by Every Nation, at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 (London: Day & Son), 1852. Wallach Picture Division, New York Public Library.

espoused in lectures on sculpture given by his teacher Westmacott.57 But closer consideration of the sculpture makes clear that the effect of Bell’s deployment of these visual conventions locates the figure not within the realm of the ideal but in the realm of the “real—that is, the historical and geographic specificity of transatlantic slavery. With A Daughter of Eve, Bell calls attention to the constraints of captivity by corporeal means. The figure’s posture is tense, with the smooth surface of the bronze disrupted by the visible strain of muscles in the arms, made to look as if they are weighed down by the heavy silver chain that binds her wrists. This stance differs distinctly from the one Bell deployed in his popular bronze statue of the mythological Andromeda two years earlier, where the figure’s chained hands cross languidly behind her back (fig. 3.7). S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 91

91

22-05-18 10:10 AM

By contrast, the pose he elected to adopt with A Daughter of Eve suggests that the woman is standing so as to prop up and support the heavy silver chain, whose links hang to her knees. This pose is further accentuated by the figure’s hunched shoulders and a twisting pose that seems to communicate a set of resistant gestures designed to shield the nude body from an invasive gaze. Finally, Bell has also taken effort to define the irises on the figure’s face—an unusual choice for an artist, who like most sculptors of his day, generally left the pupils on his statues uncarved—whose expression of wariness and fatigue is accentuated by deep-set eyelids and a furrowed brow. As previously stated, Bell’s emphasis on the figure’s physical and psychological pain departed from representations of captive figures such as Powers’s The Greek Slave. The sculpture also directly engaged and arguably subverted existing literary and visual representations of Black women in the Atlantic world. When the academic painter and illustrator Thomas Stothard produced an engraving of the so-called “Sable Venus” to accompany a poem of the same title written by the English clergyman Isaac Teale, he depicted a Black woman rising from a half-shell drawn by putti and dolphins and wearing a collar to signify her status as enslaved (fig. 3.8).58 Conflating Venus and Galatea iconography, Stothard’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies relocated the Middle Passage into a mythological space to construct an alternate “origin story” for women forcibly trafficked from Africa to the Caribbean. Stothard’s engraving and Teale’s poem were first published in The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), a vehement and lengthy defense of slavery written by the white Jamaican planter and politician Bryan Edwards. Neither poem nor engraving show the violence that enslavers like Edwards committed upon Black women, but rather depict a “Sable Venus” whose body white European men thought to exist for labor and sexual exploitation.59 Stothard assumes his viewer’s knowledge of the white Venuses of antiquity and the Renaissance to rescript a story of dispossession as voyage, and social death as birth. In some ways, the choices Bell made in depicting A Daughter of Eve counter the imagery of Stothard’s Voyage of the Sable Venus. The figure appears as an affective subject responding to and resisting the conditions of enslavement. As a critic for the London Art Journal noted upon seeing the statue on display at the Royal Academy, “She is erect but weeping; on her wrists are chains. The allusion is at once intelligible.”60 The viewer is brought to acknowledge the ways in which this subject, bound in chains and standing on a rocky base with a strand of seaweed and a seashell, is implicated in both the geographies and economies of slavery.61 Bell’s original Royal Academy title, A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic, supports this point by similarly indicating a discrete geographic and narrative context for the sculpture, as if it were a tableau. As Michael Hatt points out, nineteenth-century abolitionists often evoked the Biblical phrase “a daughter of Eve” to suggest that all individuals, enslaved or not, shared Edenic origins.62 Birth, as Bell conceives of it, is then about affirming a common humanity rather than disavowing the social death of the Middle Passage, as Stothard 92

64433int.indd 92

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.8 William Grainger after Thomas Stothard, Voyage of the Sable Venus, 1794, engraving. Library Company of Philadelphia.

64433int.indd 93

22-05-18 10:10 AM

figure 3.9 “Messrs. Elkington & Co.’s Electro-Plate Works,” in Cassell’s Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 1 (London: John Cassell, 1852), 196. Getty Research Institute. figure 3.10 John Bell for Elkington and Company, Eve’s Hesitation, 1852, bronze electrotype. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

does. Perhaps more so than other images of its day, A Daughter of Eve could compel nineteenth-century viewers to acknowledge the slave trade as a geographic network in which millions of people were displaced and commodified. “It is full of truth”; as the Manchester Guardian wrote of the sculpture, “nothing has been sacrificed to beauty.”63 And yet: A Daughter of Eve was an object of industrial manufacture. As noted above, Bell paid close attention to the subject’s appearance and body language in a way that exceeded the subdued aesthetic and narrative conventions of ideal neoclassical sculpture to suggest a sensing subject burdened by enslavement. But other aspects of the sculpture—a highly polished sheen, the lack of a belly button, the incorporation of gold and silver ornamentation, and an allover pattern of finely grained, web-like striations commonly found on the surfaces of electrotyped bronzes—disclose its status not as a real body but as a fabricated thing produced by Elkington’s electrotype baths 94

64433int.indd 94

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:10 AM

(fig. 3.9). The sculpture was not cast through traditional lost-wax foundry methods but copied out of a mold formed by a process of particle transfer in an electrochemical solution. The technology for doing so was quite new. Elkington had begun making electrotype sculptures in earnest in the early 1850s in a move to transition from the manufacture of goods into the realm of fine art, and Bell seized upon the process to make A Daughter of Eve along with the small-scale statue Eve’s Hesitation (fig. 3.10).64 We should not overlook the fact that the first electrotypes Bell made evoked the Biblical Eve, said to have emerged from Adam’s rib. Many Victorians saw electrotyping as a form of modern alchemy, a Frankensteinian process by which sculptural bodies were “grown in a vat” and emerged fully formed.65 While the title A Daughter of Eve raised associations to a shared humanity, the materiality of the electrotype evoked a different kind of birth, one ushered into existence and commodified by industrial capitalism. Here it is critical to state the uneven power dynamics of race and gender enacted by the sculpture’s production: a white male artist creating—physically modeling—a representation of an enslaved woman, ostensibly in the name of abolitionist politics. As Saidiya Hartman argues, representing the vulnerability and pain of enslavement for the sake of empathetic “identification” on the behalf of (largely white) audiences can result in a dangerous feedback loop. Hartman asks, “Does this not reinforce the ‘thingly’ quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity of the enslaved?”66 That A Daughter of Eve was conceived by Bell and Elkington as a commodity in and of itself—an object of industrial manufacture, of marketing and desire—further complicates and compounds this matter. To follow a line of inquiry proposed by the art historians Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, what happens when the logic of commodification takes the body of the enslaved as its object?67 More specifically, what was at stake in the marketing and consumption of a sculpture whose very allusion to slavery happened by means of the representation of the body of the enslaved? In addressing these questions, we must now turn to the work’s industrial modes of manufacture and commercial contexts of display. METALWORK

Though first modeled in plaster in Bell’s London studio, A Daughter of Eve had its origins as a bronze sculpture in Birmingham, the home of Elkington and Company. Situated in a region rich in ore deposits, Birmingham and the West Midlands have long been synonymous with industry and metal manufacture. Mining constituted one of the region’s main economic activities as early as the Middle Ages, with quarries and foundries dotting the rocky countryside in market towns such as Coalbrookdale, Dudley, and Wolverhampton. Production accelerated in the late eighteenth century with the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution, and the creation of the city’s vast network of canals at this same time facilitated the export of goods around the globe.68 By the mid-nineteenth century, the region was said to have boasted S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 95

95

22-05-18 10:10 AM

“a thousand swarming hives of metallurgical industries.”69 In the words of Samuel Timmins, who authored a sweeping survey of the area’s industry in 1865, “Within a radius of thirty miles of Birmingham the whole of the hardware wants of the world are practically supplied.”70 A significant portion of Birmingham’s exports included metal wares for the slave trade. Beginning in 1698, when Britain began its participation in the trade, Birmingham manufacturers shipped guns, chains, shackles, jewelry, and currency (most frequently in the form of bronze or copper manillas) to the western coasts of Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people.71 British exports to Africa and the Americas persisted into the nineteenth century despite parliamentary acts that abolished the slave trade (1807), the equipment, insuring, and navigation of slave ships (1824), and chattel slavery (1833).72 The legislation, while significant, did not bring British involvement in Atlantic and American slavery to a full stop. As one commissioner to Parliament inquired in 1838, “With what but British goods is the African market, the freight which is to be bartered for the slave, supplied? With what but slave labour are the works, originating in British capital and enterprise, carried on in this country?”73 As these words reveal, despite ideological challenges to and legislative injunctions against the trade, the United Kingdom—and the West Midlands specifically—remained an active participant in the sustenance of slavery and its afterlives long after 1833. The Birmingham manufacturer Hiatt, for example, supplied shackles for the slave trade in the nineteenth century and today continues to make handcuffs for American police forces, institutions directly descended from nineteenth-century slave patrols and perpetrators of racist surveillance and state-sanctioned murders of Black people.74 Unlike other Birmingham manufacturing companies, Elkington did not equip the slave trade. Their production instead encompassed two general categories: luxury wares such as candlesticks, vases, and tea services; and electrotype objects that the company marketed as “art manufactures.”75 This latter group included sculpture by contemporary British artists such as Bell, as well as cast reproductions of older objects, particularly replicas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European sculpture and decorative arts. Yet the raw material to make up these objects was directly tied to exploitative economies. Elkington’s company records reveal they sourced the majority of their silver—a key ingredient in the electrotype process—from the Cornish-run mines of Real del Monte in Hidalgo, Mexico.76 Although slavery was abolished by name in Mexico in 1829, the majority of miners at Real del Monte comprised Black and Indigenous men working under exploitative conditions.77 Elkington’s reliance on coercive labor from Mexican silver mines to make mass-produced luxury goods for a new class of upwardly mobile Victorian consumers will not necessarily come as a surprise, for the documents of civilization, as Walter Benjamin famously writes, are at the same time documents of barbarism.78 The critical interventions of the contemporary American artist Fred Wilson lend further specificity to the importance of taking into account the production of luxury 96

64433int.indd 96

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.11 Installation view of Fred Wilson, “Metalwork, 1793–1880,” Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society and The Contemporary, November 1992–February 1993. Courtesy of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, Item ID# RS4625.

wares when examining the scope of economies of enslavement and unfree labor.79 In Mining the Museum, his landmark exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society in 1993, Wilson paired a set of finely wrought silver wares with a set of iron manacles in a vitrine (fig. 3.11).80 This display—“Metalwork, 1793–1880”—compelled audiences to confront the coexisting material cultures of white luxury and Black oppression in antebellum America. In so doing, Wilson’s work visually and materially insists on what the art historian Kay Dian Kriz identifies as an Atlantic world of “rudeness and refinement,” wherein the production of metropolitan luxury cannot and must not be considered without heed to the subject(s) of empire and enslavement.81 The work of artists such as Wilson and scholars such as Kriz offers a meaningful framework for understanding Elkington’s place within the metal trade of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Though destined for different markets, luxury goods produced by Elkington in bronze, gold, and silver nevertheless shared a similar materiality and technology of manufacture with the shackles, jewelry, manillas, and ornamental wares by other Birmingham manufacturers for shipment to western Africa, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. The writings of Connecticut-born Elihu Burritt, who served as the American consul in Birmingham in the 1860s and did much to popularize Elkington’s wares in the United States, lend further insight into period associations attached to the city’s metal industry. As he remarked in his report on the region’s industrial history and exports, S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 97

97

22-05-18 10:11 AM

Birmingham . . . has “worked to order” without asking questions for conscience sake in regard to the uses made of its articles of iron and brass. It has made all kinds of cheap and showy jewels for the noses and ears of African beaux and belles, and the stouter bracelets of iron for the hands and feet of slaves driven in coffles to the sea-board. In the same shops and on the same benches, gilt and silver buckles were made by the million for the shoes of the nobility and gentry.82

The ironies of manufacture Burritt described are strikingly similar to the ironies of material juxtaposition that Wilson’s installations would evoke nearly a century and a half later. But if Wilson’s work of the early 1990s deployed the aesthetics of contrast to juxtapose different metal markets of the nineteenth century, Burritt’s writing and Bell’s sculpture exposed the extent to which those markets were always already entangled with one another. Especially noteworthy in Burritt’s report is his emphasis on the fact that each of the different objects produced by Birmingham’s workshops did not exist in isolation from each other in the minds of contemporaries. Rather, they could be perceived as two sides of the same coin. The practices and objects of manufacture described by Burritt collide in the form of A Daughter of Eve. The gold hoop earrings and silver-plated chain affixed to the figure are markedly similar in material and function to the hardware produced by other Birmingham foundries and jewelers for the Atlantic slave trade, and after 1807, the American domestic slave trade. Both items have been cast separately and attached to the statue. The hoop earrings, similar to those worn by enslaved women, pierce the statue’s ears through small holes wrought into the surface of the bronze, and the chains are fastened together by an interlocking pin system.83 The objects incorporated into and onto the surface of the statue substitute “signs of the real for the real,” to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s language, standing out from the figure’s bronze form as unsettling simulacra of the violent methods employed by enslavers to commodify the enslaved, both with instruments of oppression and with objects of value.84 What was at stake in the statue’s simulation of slavery’s material structures of commodification by way of the metal surface and object? First, A Daughter of Eve inserted the subject of slavery and the enslaved subject into spaces where both were otherwise not present. The sculpture gained its primary forum of public visibility across the nineteenth century by way of Elkington and Company, appearing on view in the firm’s lavish Birmingham showroom, the site of a former ironmonger’s shop. It also stood in industrial exhibitions, including the Irish Exhibition in 1853, the London International Exhibition of 1862, and the Birmingham Industrial Exhibition of 1886 (fig. 3.12). While the contents and contexts of each of these spaces differed, they all shared the key attribute of showcasing the products and progress of modern British industry. Fairs celebrated the mechanized and skilled labor that animated the nation’s industrial production, and in official literature this genre of work was frequently held up in rhetorical opposition to enslaved labor taking place on the other side of the Atlantic.85 By way 98

64433int.indd 98

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.12 John Collier, Elkington and Company Stand, Exhibition of Local Manufactures and Natural History, Birmingham, 1886. Archives, Heritage, and Photography, The Library of Birmingham.

of its subject matter and materiality, A Daughter of Eve had the potential to disrupt the rhetoric of national progress by making visible and exposing the complicity between local manufacturing and a wider circulatory network of goods, people, goods traded for people, and people traded for goods—a transactional and transnational zone of capital accumulation that the economist Giovanni Arrighi calls a “space-of-flows.”86 This visibility also had a more violent implication. At international exhibitions, the sculpture was often staged and marketed as a commercial object alongside other luxury wares by Elkington. Elkington’s visitor books from these events are filled with orders and commissions from buyers around the world, revealing that such displays were important venues for the company’s sales at home and abroad.87 Yet, in a manner not dissimilar to the New Orleans exhibitions of The Greek Slave discussed in the previous chapter, viewers’ appraisal and inspection of a life-size statue whose surfaces simulated the violent situation of enslavement reenacted the speculative modes of S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 99

99

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.13 John Boyne, A Meeting of Connoisseurs, ca. 1790–1807, watercolor on paper. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

looking associated with the buying and selling of people at slave markets and auctions.88 Bell’s work cannot be understood on the terms of antislavery ideology alone. If the sculpture made visible the enslaved subject at exhibitions, it also made present in those spaces the proprietary forms of surveillance that fueled the sale and purchase of human bodies elsewhere. We need only refer to the Irish watercolorist John Boyne’s satirical scene depicting a group of white artists in a studio inspecting the body of a Black male model to see how the practices of connoisseurship could be conditioned by racist gazes in spaces seemingly far from the auction block (fig. 3.13). As scholars have pointed out, Boyne’s watercolor, which was produced at the turn of the nineteenth century, is suggestive of a shared modality of visual assessment at work both in the slave market and in the art world.89 The site of the world’s fair—a spectacular space that Benjamin would later describe as one that glorified the exchange value of the commodity—arguably heightened this practice of racialized looking.90 It should be clear by now that A Daughter of Eve‘s dual status as commodity and a representation of a commodified body complicated its potential for ideological import. When the South Kensington Museum’s George Wallis saw A Daughter of Eve at Elkington’s installation at the 1862 International Exhibition touting the “Art Manufactures of Birmingham and the Midland Counties,” he described the statue as “an appeal against the blasphemous hypocrisy which attempts to justify human bondage” but 100

64433int.indd 100

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

concluded it was “happily embodied in a singularly suitable material.”91 Wallis’s comments regarding both the sculpture’s subject matter and its materiality highlight the instability and obliqueness of an object that traversed overlapping landscapes of art, industry, and commerce. If A Daughter of Eve could operate as an ideological challenge to the institution of American slavery by exposing the system’s morally corrupt processes of commodification, so too could the sculpture relocate and reproduce these very processes within its commercial contexts of display across the Atlantic. A STATUE FOR CRAGSIDE

The eventual acquisition of one version of A Daughter of Eve by the English industrialist William Armstrong sheds further light on the problem of purchasing and owning a sculptural representation of an enslaved body. Trained as a lawyer but an engineer by trade, Lord Armstrong owned a successful manufacturing company based at Newcastle, which specialized in the production of hydraulic machines, ships, and guns.92 In the 1850s, he developed an eponymous breech-loading rifle which would later be used by both Union and Confederate armies fighting in the American Civil War.93 With wealth accumulated from this invention and the armaments industry more generally, Armstrong amassed a formidable collection of modern British art that included works by J. M. W. Turner, Frederic Leighton, and John Everett Millais, among others.94 Sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s, he acquired a full-size version of A Daughter of Eve. Like the other works of art in his collection, the sculpture was destined for his home at Cragside, a sprawling estate in a remote pocket of Northumberland near the Scottish border, built between 1864 and 1884. His acquisition and display of the sculpture offer further testimony and specificity to the deeply unstable nature of Bell’s representation and the ways it could be consumed simultaneously as an expression of abolitionist sentiment, a display of wealth, and an object of desire. The circumstances surrounding Lord Armstrong’s acquisition of A Daughter of Eve remain murky. The sculpture had been purchased in 1862 by Richard SeymourConway, 4th Marquess of Hertford and benefactor of the Wallace Collection, and passed into Armstrong’s acquisition several years thereafter.95 Elkington’s signed visitor books reveal that Armstrong went to the company’s Birmingham showroom in 1865, one year after construction began at Cragside.96 Whether Armstrong visited Elkington’s showroom with specific knowledge of Bell’s work or with a more general interest in purchasing wares and decorations for his new home, he would have likely seen the statue on display in a showroom that a contemporary declared to “look more like a city hall or an art gallery than a factory of the useful kind.”97 But the lacunae of the statue’s history of transaction between Seymour-Conway and Armstrong perhaps speak to the ways in which the medium and subject of this object—an electrotype statue of a slave produced by a manufacturing company—may have eluded easy categorization by collectors more inclined to own landscape paintings, genre scenes, and marble sculptures. S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 101

101

22-05-18 10:11 AM

If Armstrong’s exact motivations behind his acquisition of A Daughter of Eve remain unclear, it is known that he harbored views against slavery generally, and other objects in his collection attest to this.98 Inventories of the Armstrong collection mention, for example, the presence of a miniature marble and onyx column inlaid with a black-andwhite jasperware version of Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion.99 The presence of such an object alongside A Daughter of Eve is suggestive of Armstrong’s engagement with a longer visual and commercial tradition of British antislavery ideology, one whose moral appeals to justice were shot through with paternalist and racist attitudes, as we have seen with the Buxton bust. Though over six decades separated the production of Wedgwood’s medallion and that of Bell’s sculpture, both were commercially manufactured objects designed by white artists mobilizing sculptural images of enslaved Black people in the interest of abolitionism. The institution of slavery had been outlawed in both the British Atlantic and in North America by the time Armstrong acquired A Daughter of Eve. His embrace of abolitionist imagery was belated and may have dovetailed with his own professional interests. For Victorian industrialists such as Armstrong, collecting functioned not only as a mode of self-fashioning but also as a vital means of asserting one’s professional identity and social values.100 Cragside was above all a modern house built on modern money and modern ingenuity, incorporating state-of-the-art hydraulic and electrical infrastructure of Armstrong’s own design. He moved there in the twilight of his career, once he had built his fortune in armaments and shipping—two industries that were historically complicit with slaving and slave trade in the Atlantic world, and, by the 1870s, remained crucial actors in British imperial expansion and colonization.101 It is possible that displaying images that had made appeal, respectively, to the immorality of Atlantic slavery in 1787 and that of American slavery in 1853 was a strategy for Armstrong to distance his wealth from the more insidious associations it could potentially conjure to contemporaries. Although Armstrong had complained in personal correspondence that the “American difficulties” of the 1860s impeded his pursuits in the munitions business, his presentation of objects such as the column and the statue perhaps assured a more public image of morality in a house that regularly welcomed royals, foreign dignitaries, and other prominent elites as guests.102 Put differently, Armstrong’s display of antislavery imagery after abolition was no longer an urgent political matter in the Anglo-American world perhaps said more about his concern for his own persona than about individuals who had once been enslaved.103 Accordingly, Armstrong’s installation of A Daughter of Eve at Cragside suggests that he meant the work to be seen and admired. The sculpture stood apart from the majority of the works of art in his collection, which occupied a gallery on the house’s second floor. Of the statues Armstrong owned, it was Bell’s he chose to install in arguably the most prominent and visible space in the house: a bespoke marble-inlaid niche on the main entry staircase. The oak staircase, fitted with ornately carved railing and electric light posts, had been part of the architect Richard Norman Shaw’s expansions to Crag102

64433int.indd 102

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

side in the 1870s.104 Shaw’s designs for the entryway include a small recess for the niche, indicating that the staircase was planned with the sculpture’s display in mind.105 The statue thus appears on a landing halfway up the staircase beneath a set of family portraits, and opposite a second niche containing a marble statue of a crouching white female nude. The installation of A Daughter of Eve in this manner speaks to an effort to make visible the enslaved subject at Cragside, but it does so on a set of specific and controlled terms. Whereas the crouching marble statue opposite the landing seems cramped and crowded by its shallow, shorter recess, the overall height of the curved niche for Bell’s sculpture appears slightly overlarge, so as to dwarf the life-size figure and accentuate her guarded posture. To follow the geographer Neil Smith’s argument that scale distills “the oppressive and emancipatory possibilities of space,” the niche seems to emphasize the figure’s captivity.106 Its base is elevated so that the statue’s silver chain corresponds directly to eye level, perhaps reminding viewers that the gripping fingers and tense wrists bound into its stasis by links belong to a body both responsive and resistant to the material constraints of enslavement. The surrounding space of the sculpture contains and orders. Set into this niche, Bell’s statue stands out as a captive, anonymous, and raced body. The figure’s dark bronze materiality contrasts with the pale, ruddy skin in portraits of Armstrong and his kin, as well as the white marble surface of the statue opposite. In this familial space—originally ornamented with the Armstrong family standard as well as two watercolors of the estate grounds—an aesthetic of ownership emerges.107 This installation suggests the gendered dynamic of property and paternalism not only between artwork and patron, but also of enslaved female subject and male head of household. In the architectural recess designed expressly for the sculpture, the figure of the enslaved is literally and metaphorically subsumed into the order of the house— an act that could be as easily motivated by a desire to gaze at an exposed female body as an alliance with the histories of abolitionism.108 Although Armstrong’s interest in A Daughter of Eve may have had something to do with antislavery ideology, its display, in ways that echo the display of Thomas Fowell Buxton, revealed the hollowness of an allegiance to such an ideology. To paraphrase Hartman once more, empathetic identification with a vulnerable captive body owes as much to a perceived premise of that captive body’s fungibility as it does “good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery.”109 Not merely visible but deliberately spectacular: the exhibition of A Daughter of Eve at Cragside reproduced the dynamics of ownership of a system from which Armstrong allegedly sought to counter and distance himself. THE OCTOROON IN REPRODUCTION

Much has been said concerning matters of representation and reproduction in and around an Atlantic world shaped by the histories of slavery. Speaking to the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Massachusetts in 1847, William Wells Brown said, “We S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 103

103

22-05-18 10:11 AM

may all represent it as we think it is; and yet we shall all fail to represent the real condition of the Slave . . . Slavery has never been represented, slavery can never be represented.”110 What Brown understood as slavery’s un-representability also figures centrally into the work of modern scholars like Hartman, whose scholarship addresses the violence that motivates and inheres in the very act of representation.111 And as mentioned in the previous chapter, Joseph Roach discusses the ways such acts of representation are then reproduced across time and space through a process he calls surrogation.112 As we have now seen, A Daughter of Eve—like Powers’s The Greek Slave after which it was originally modeled—partook in this surrogacy in terms of its making, its display, and the kinds of engagement it prompted. However, it is another work by Bell to which Roach repeatedly turns in explaining the phenomenon of surrogacy. The Octoroon depicted a figure that would have been understood by many period viewers as a reference to the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1859 tragedy of the same title, which told a tale of forbidden and deadly love between a white enslaver and a light-skinned enslaved woman of one-eighths African descent (fig. 3.14).113 The sculpture, Roach contends, “set in stone” the catastrophic economies of desire and consumption intrinsic to the slave market and represented in plays like Boucicault’s.114 I dwell on his conclusion here because of the striking materiality of its turn of phrase—“set in stone.” However inadvertent, it raises questions about how viewers regarded Bell’s Octoroon a means to relocate, sediment, and reproduce expectations and rituals engendered through slavery. What follows gives further thought to this question of reproduction as it related to The Octoroon as well as Bell’s broader engagement with race and slavery throughout his body of work. Bell completed The Octoroon across a period of historical change. He began the sculpture in the early 1860s, with The Art-Journal reporting from studio visits in 1863 and 1865 that the figure was “well advanced” and “of much beauty.”115 He would have been aware of, if not inspired by, Boucicault’s play, as the production premiered in London in November 1861 and continued a successful run in the capital and in provincial towns for many years after. Conceived over the course of the tumultuous sixties, the sculpture stood as a revision of sorts to A Daughter of Eve, one that again prompted viewers to consider the injustice of slavery by way of a vulnerable and captive female body, this time in relation to the American Civil War that waged overseas. But by the time Bell finished and debuted the sculpture at the Royal Academy in 1868, its subject was identified in the past tense, with the accompanying catalogue description noting, “This American figure represents one who before Emancipation was a slave.”116 Unlike A Daughter of Eve fifteen years earlier, the sculpture appealed not to the present but the past. The Octoroon also differed visually from A Daughter of Eve. While the sculpture also depicted a woman in chains, its marble form differed from the bronze electrotype that came before in almost every other way. Bell placed gestural emphasis on the constrained and confined body of A Daughter of Eve, but this was not the case with The Octoroon. The mixed-race woman—whose Blackness is signified not by sculptural 104

64433int.indd 104

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.14 John Bell, The Octoroon, 1868, marble. Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. Courtesy Hickey & Robertson, Houston, TX/The Menil Foundation.

64433int.indd 105

22-05-18 10:11 AM

medium but through the title inscribed at the statue’s base—stands completely nude and in a relaxed pose. Her left hand connects to the right by a chain carved in high relief from the marble’s surface and rests atop a post covered in drapery and a wreath of magnolias. And while A Daughter of Eve appeared to stand in a guarded pose that shielded her body from the gaze of others, Bell represented a more coyly sexualized figure in his sculpture of The Octoroon, who holds her long hair so that it reveals the body as much as it obscures. Bell posed the latter figure in a manner so as to suggest that the female body is something to be gazed upon and desired by viewers. This much proved true. Several years after its display at the Royal Academy, Bell loaned The Octoroon to a municipal exhibition of art and industry in the Lancashire textile town of Blackburn, England.117 The statue attracted a great deal of praise while on view and soon after townspeople organized a public subscription campaign to purchase the work “as a suitable and desirable Souvenir of the exhibition.”118 In late 1876, the work was purchased directly from Bell for £150 and presented to the newly established Blackburn Museum as a gift from the city.119 Of its subsequent display, one adulatory townsperson observed of the sculpture, “No one with the least feeling for art can look upon the statue without feelings of admiration for it, and a longing to become the possessor of it.”120 Blackburn’s interest in The Octoroon must be understood in light of the town’s history of cotton manufacturing. Like its neighbors Bolton, Wigan, and Manchester, it was a market town whose prosperity came from the growing textile trade during the Industrial Revolution.121 Cotton spun in Blackburn mills came primarily from the United States, where it had been cultivated, picked, and processed by labor stolen from enslaved African Americans. When the region fell into a deep economic depression—dubbed the “Cotton Famine”—as a result of Southern blockades during the Civil War, the Blackburn town council made repeated calls for Britain’s diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy as a legitimate government.122 While the archive yields few, if any, mentions of The Octoroon in relation to Blackburn’s ties to plantation economies in the American South, it’s clear such connections were tacitly understood if not outright acknowledged. The exterior façade of Blackburn Museum, for instance, featured a series of relief panels by the sculptor C. W. Seale celebrating local industries including cotton manufacturing and commerce (fig. 3.15).123 Mia Bagneris rightly understands Blackburn’s embrace of the sculpture as public attempt to “rewrite history,” making a retroactive claim to a “staunchly antislavery position” in order to create distance from their dependence on the failed Confederate state.124 Like Armstrong’s coeval display of A Daughter of Eve at Cragside, The Octoroon worked as a sort of performative scrim, recasting a deep complicity in the machinations of industrial capitalism in a gauzy bid to morality. The naked and raced body of The Octoroon was central to this moral charade. Bagneris traces The Octoroon‘s “acceptance” as an antislavery emblem in Blackburn to the figure’s alluring nudity and implied light skin, aligning with what Anne Cheng describes 106

64433int.indd 106

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.15 C. W. Seale, Cotton Manufacturing, ca. 1870, stone. Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

elsewhere as a dialectical relationship between the consumption of otherness and the disavowal of discriminatory transgressions related to slavery.125 Bell intended for the sculpture to elicit the viewer’s sympathy on these very grounds, noting, “The title denotes the eighth remove from the black race, the ninth being free. The confines for freedom were thus touched but not gained, which forms the pensive motives of the statue.”126 Indeed, he construed the relationship between whiteness and blackness as central not only to the sculpture’s narrative value but its materiality as well. In an 1861 treatise titled “Color on Statues,” Bell counseled his fellow sculptors “to obtain the most beautiful and unblemished marble, particularly for nude figures.”127 The marble he used for The Octoroon was slightly mottled—a warm and variable grey rather than a snowy white—and he reportedly offered the work to the people of Blackburn at a reduced price because of this.128 As a viewer noted at its unveiling, the statue bore “certain ineradicable blemishes . . . that considerably detracted from its beauty.”129 In both Bell’s eye and in the eye of this anonymous beholder, beauty and sympathy were contingent upon whiteness. Bell’s work had traded in these myths before. Recall Clorinda, one of the first sculptures he made for mass reproduction with Minton. She was a popular heroine in the Crusader epic Jerusalem Delivered, written by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso in 1581 and popularized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings.130 Tasso’s Clorinda was a light-skinned princess born to Ethiopian parents and orphaned after birth, and her whiteness and conversion from Islam to Christianity is central to the story’s Orientalizing plot. At the apex of the narrative, Clorinda heads into battle on behalf of the Crusaders and changes into dark armor so as to conceal her pale skin. Just before doing so, she learns of the story of her mother Charikleia, described by Tasso as “black was this queen as jet.”131 While pregnant with Clorinda, Charikleia gazed at pictures of the Virgin Mary—“her lovely face white”—and prayed for a white daughter.132 As S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 107

107

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.16 John Bell for Minton and Company, The Octoroon, 1868, Parian ware. Moore, Allen & Innocent.

64433int.indd 108

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.17 John Bell for Minton, The American Slave (1863) in Minton and Company, Catalogue of Shapes, nineteenth century, SD 1705/MS 1641. The Minton Archive/Fiskars, Ltd.

literary scholars have noted, Clorinda’s armor similarly described “as black as jet” connotes a racial reckoning moments before her death. Bell chose this precise moment to depict his Clorinda, who sits wounded and with the armor partially off: her helmet lies at her feet and she twists in pain, with her tunic slipping down to reveal a bare breast. Both Clorinda and The Octoroon are sculptures that twist and torque around a central axis to reveal the curves of a nude female body. Both do so in order to further a narrative about a light skinned woman at once alluring and vulnerable, whose tragic death hinges on a blackness sublimated by a white sculptural surface. S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 109

109

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 3.18 John Bell for Minton, The Octoroon (1868) and The Abyssinian Slave in Minton and Company, Catalogue of Shapes, nineteenth century, SD 1705/MS 1641. The Minton Archive/ Fiskars, Ltd.

Like Clorinda, Bell made The Octoroon for reproduction. With Minton he designed and released a Parian ware reduction of the sculpture in September 1868, which stood 21-inches high and echoed the marble figure’s pose and attributes (fig. 3.16). The Minton figurine has softer contours. The sculpture never culminates in hard edges or distinct lines; its forms instead merge smoothly into one another to create a gently modulated surface with little detail. These surface transformations can be traced to the manufacturing process, which sacrificed the intricacies of a larger prototype in plaster or marble for a small-scale and affordable “shape” of biscuit porcelain replicable by a mold. A similar phenomenon happened with Minton’s 1862 reduction of A Daughter of Eve—the figure’s earrings are gone, as are the patterns on her wrap and the seashell at her feet (fig. 3.17). The company also renamed the sculpture The American Slave, likely in a nod to their wildly successful version of Powers’s The Greek Slave (and perhaps inadvertently, the title of John Tenniel’s caricature of the statue for Punch).133 Each appeared as a variation within a broader series of captive women that was standardized in size, medium, and appearance through Minton’s molds. 110

64433int.indd 110

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

22-05-18 10:11 AM

Minton’s marketing of Bell’s sculptures suggests a further degree of interchangeability of figures within this series. Significantly, The Octoroon seems to have replaced The American Slave in Minton’s offerings from 1868 on. While the company continued to list the ever-popular Clorinda (shape 203) in their annual catalogues, they removed The American Slave (shape 377) and added The Octoroon (shape 450) in its stead.134 With The Octoroon they also added a “companion figure” designed by Bell titled The Abyssinian Slave (shape 451) (fig. 3.18).135 The Abyssinian Slave in turn recalls The American Slave in terms of her pose, fringed wrap, and base with the distinct addition of a large cross necklace worn around the figure’s neck. Michael Hatt hypothesizes both figures even came from the very same mold, suggesting that the sculptor “recycled the slave figure to protest a new political scandal,” this time the suppression of the slave trade in eastern Africa and in Ethiopia in particular.136 In this respect, the sculpture also calls back to the earlier Clorinda, a subject of Ethiopian descent designed to attract the viewer’s sympathy on account of her light skin. Like the softened contours of their surfaces, the narratives of each of the Minton figures are never specific but rather merge and blend into one another. We are far from 1853, when Bell worked with Henry Elkington to produce A Daughter of Eve as a timely address to abolition. What made A Daughter of Eve a potent work of art in its day was the way the sculpture called attention to the pain and burden of enslavement by way of its pose and materiality as well as its title. That Minton jettisoned the sculptor’s original title in favor of The American Slave may initially seem to add further legibility to the sculpture, demanding that viewers understand the figure in the context of slavery in the United States. But it arguably also suggests a shift in subjectivity—instead of evoking the shared humanity of persons of all races, enslaved or not, it does the opposite, marking out the figure represented on the terms of social death alone. Minton’s manufacture—and transformation—of Bell’s work ultimately exposes an incommensurability of abolitionist appeal and sculptural object in an age of technological reproduction. Bell’s work depended, by turns, on the power of sentiment and manufacturing, one working constantly to magnify the other. If sculptures like A Daughter of Eve and The Octoroon made visible the problem of slavery to mass audiences and markets, the terms on which this unfolded came out of the catastrophic conditions of empire, enclosure, and enslavement.

S e n t i m e n t, M a n u f a c t u r e d

64433int.indd 111

111

22-05-18 10:11 AM

64433int.indd 112

22-05-18 10:11 AM

4 RELIEF WORK Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster Mutual interest, mutual benefit, and mutual relief.1

william hamilton, “an address to the new york african mutual relief society”

Work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the profits.2

the combahee river collective statement

O

N NOVEMBER 20, 1863 , the prominent abolitionist news-

paper the Liberator announced the completion of a medallion by Edmonia Lewis, who had recently arrived in Boston to pursue a career as a sculptor. “Miss Lewis, a young and promising colored artist of this city,” had modeled in plaster a “very creditable medallion likeness of John Brown.” It was to be displayed at the offices of the Massachusetts branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with cast copies on sale for $1.50 apiece. The article closed with the following call to readers: “Give the artist what she deserves—patronage. Call at her room in the Studio Building, Tremont Street.”3 The plaster John Browns numbered among the first of a series of portrait medallions, statuettes, and busts of prominent figures that Lewis created from her Boston studio between the years of 1863 to 1865. In addition to the antislavery radical Brown, she modeled the likenesses of President Abraham Lincoln, the orator Wendell Phillips, and two celebrated officers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, William H. Carney and Robert Gould Shaw. As a group

113

64433int.indd 113

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 4.1 Edmonia Lewis, Robert Gould Shaw, 1867, marble. Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket.

they comprise the earliest works of Lewis’s oeuvre, and research by scholars including Kirsten Pai Buick, Charmaine Nelson, Marilyn Richardson, Melissa Dabakis, Romare Bearden, and Harry Henderson has emphasized their crucial role in her career.4 The sculptor marketed and sold copies of each to a circle of abolitionist patrons in New England, and as a result was able to move to Italy and propel her career to international heights. Indeed, it was at her studio in Rome where she made marble versions of the Shaw bust and the Phillips medallion in 1867 and 1871, respectively (fig. 4.1 and fig. 4.2). 114

64433int.indd 114

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 4.2 Edmonia Lewis, Wendell Phillips, 1871, marble. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Carved with an eye toward a staid neoclassicism, both sculptures hint at the form of their plaster prototypes while at the same time raising questions about their initial production in the early 1860s, much of which remains understudied. How and to what ends did these works first circulate, and what kind of cultural work did they do? This chapter addresses these questions by focusing on Lewis’s engagement with antislavery politics and Black-led relief efforts during the American Civil War (1861–1865), two intertwined spheres in which material culture and the act of making would play a unique role. Lewis’s material engagement with the question of abolition will not come as a surprise, for in 1867 she completed what remains today one of her best-known works, the marble group Forever Free, which depicted a man and woman rising out of broken shackles to liberation (see fig. 4.17). Its completion likewise affirmed the artist’s longstanding ties to prominent antislavery advocates in the United States. In 1869, she traveled back to Boston from her home in Rome to dedicate and present the sculpture to her friend, the abolitionist and former Underground Railroad conductor Reverend Leonard Grimes of Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church.5 Many art historians have also acknowledged the patronage of Boston abolitionists as a cornerstone of Lewis’s career prior to Forever Free, especially in the early 1860s. The Liberator‘s call to its readers to “give the artist the patronage she deserves” certainly went fulfilled as figures such as William Lloyd Garrison (the newspaper’s editor), Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Relief Work

64433int.indd 115

115

22-05-18 10:11 AM

Chapman, Anna Quincy Waterston, and others remained avid public supporters of her work.6 Less considered is the extent of Lewis’s active participation in—in addition to patronage from—abolitionist circles. Yet the subjects of her work and the spaces through which it moved reveal how the realm of sculptural practice constituted a form of political action in its own right. In parsing this claim, I draw from a wellspring of recent scholarly literature on nineteenth-century African American citizenship as an embodied and creative practice that tested bounds of citizenship articulated by the white settler colonial nation-state.7 Attention to works of art—both extant and not— as well as newspaper notices and commentaries will reveal how Lewis’s art figured into a multifaceted engagement with a Civil War-era public culture of Black activism, patronage, and community building.8 Building on early connections to reformers forged through her studies, Lewis debuted her sculpted likenesses of contemporary figures at venues including antislavery meetings, newspaper offices, and soldiers’ relief fairs. Across these spaces and at the fairs in particular, the sculptures intersected a wartime network of Black women’s entrepreneurship and activism where the praxis of making was central to a project of relief for African American soldiers, their families, and the formerly enslaved. With this work, Lewis probed new possibilities for sculpture’s place in projects of redress in a moment of crisis and uncertainty. She did so by mobilizing the era’s increasing fluency and ease through which sculpture could be reproduced both as an object unto itself and through the medium of photography, as well as its novel spaces for the exhibition and promotion of art. If the previous chapter’s discussion of work by John Bell addressed the incommensurability of sculpture as both consumable commodity and antislavery emblem, what follows considers its possibilities as such. As small-scale, reproducible objects circulating in relief networks that coalesced but also countered dominant period models of sociability and commercial consumption, the sculptures of Brown, Carney, Shaw, and others proposed a means through which bodies and collectives could be made, remade, and imagined otherwise. And in this context, their materiality as works not in marble nor Parian ware but plaster—a medium evocative of both the provisional and the palliative—was tantamount. At a moment when the fate of slavery hung in the balance of war, Lewis’s relief work proposed one way of shaping the terms of abolitionist discourse in the material world. BEFORE BOSTON

In an article for his newspaper, the New National Era, in 1873, Frederick Douglass recalled a chance encounter of a decade prior. He wrote, In the Spring of 1863 we remember conversing most earnestly and encouragingly with [Miss Edmonia Lewis], then a student at Oberlin, with regard to art. She had exhibited some signs of talent in drawing and painting; had evinced such enthusiasm for the art 116

64433int.indd 116

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:11 AM

which adorns and ennobles that, from a kindred artistic love, we were led to advise her to seek the East, and by study prepare herself for work and further study abroad.9

These were the opening lines to a profile on the artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, born in upstate New York in 1844. The article went onto describe a steady trajectory to international renown: Lewis went from school at Oberlin to work in Boston to, finally, a career abroad as a sculptor in Rome. This narrative would have been known to many by the 1870s. Having “gained a reputation which many artists might envy,” as Douglass wrote, Lewis was the subject of many features such as the one that appeared on the pages of the New National Era.10 What is especially distinctive about Douglass’s musings is the emphasis placed on Lewis’s education as an important springboard to her artistic career. The article’s very existence also gestures to the ways she built connections to the antislavery movement at an early age in terms of the schools she attended and the people she met there. Indeed, Lewis’s studies in two reform-minded enclaves of nineteenth-century America helped lay foundations not only for the kinds of work she would later undertake as an artist, but also the publics in which it would circulate. At the behest of her well-to-do older brother, Lewis pursued studies at two institutions starting in the late 1850s.11 She first enrolled at New York Central College in the Cortland County hamlet of McGrawville from 1856 to 1858, and from there went to Oberlin in northern Ohio, studying in the recently established Young Ladies’ Preparatory Department from 1859 to 1863.12 Founded by social reformers in the name of progressive ideals, New York Central and Oberlin stood outside the norm of a world of American education that remained largely white, male, and wealthy. Both schools supported the enrollment of students regardless of race or gender, welcoming what was for the era significant numbers of free African American students such as Lewis as well as students who had been formerly enslaved. And both manifested support for the antislavery movement in myriad ways. New York Central harbored an Underground Railroad stop on its grounds and sponsored lectures by luminaries such as Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and James McCune Smith.13 Oberlin was likewise famous as a center of antislavery activism and Black activism, with many students, faculty, and members of the surrounding town committed to the pursuit of radical reform agendas on local, national, and international levels.14 But the ideologies of progressive reform espoused by these institutions unfolded differently in reality. In her germinal study of Lewis’s work, Kirsten Pai Buick discusses the ways the liberal mission of a college like Oberlin did not safeguard against an environment in which students of color and women of color especially were subject to racism and what she terms “domestic imperialism.”15 The women’s preparatory course in which Lewis enrolled proposed a general education across disciplines but above all focused on training students in the virtues and values of sentimental femininity—in particular decorum and religion—so that they would be equipped to navigate the domestic sphere as mothers and teachers.16 Such a vision of womanhood Relief Work

64433int.indd 117

117

22-05-18 10:11 AM

figure 4.3 Edmonia Lewis, The Old Arrow Maker, 1866–1872, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Joseph Sinclair.

was ultimately beholden to a patriarchal white supremacy, upholding the domestic values of white middle-class culture above all else. In the mid-nineteenth century, Oberlin’s enrollment and ostensible embrace of women of color unfolded on these specific terms of white assimilation and “civilization.” The definitions of white womanhood Lewis encountered at Oberlin differed from ones she had experienced before in her youth. Lewis was Black and Indigenous, born to a mother of Anishinaabe (Mississauga Ojibwe) and African American descent and an Afro-Haitian father.17 Following the deaths of both parents as a young child, she was raised in the care of her mother’s sisters on Anishinaabe land by Niagara Falls. During these years Lewis made and sold with her aunts baskets and embroidered moccasins for the fast-growing souvenir trade between Indigenous makers and Anglo consumers in the Great Lakes region.18 She would later make oblique references to such 118

64433int.indd 118

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

handmade objects in works like The Old Arrow Maker, a sculpture based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular midcentury poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” which featured the protagonist Minnehaha wearing embroidered deer hide moccasins and twining a mat in her lap (fig. 4.3).19 In interviews Lewis frequently mentioned her time with her aunts as formative, a significant detail given that, as Cherish Parrish and Kelly Church have noted, Anishinaabe women have acted as “the keepers of cultural traditions and teachings for countless generations” by carrying out a “careful and intentional passing” of artistic knowledge.20 If the practices of this female-centered sphere differed distinctly from the paternalistic ethos of the Young Ladies’ course at Oberlin, Lewis’s early experiences with art—and entrepreneurship—at have distinct parallels to the women-run projects of relief work in which she would later participate in Civil War-era Boston. Lewis’s studies at Oberlin were marked by two incidents that bespeak the racism she faced as a Black and Native woman at an institution that remained mostly white. In 1862, she faced accusations of having poisoned two white classmates with wine and was subsequently taken to trial. During the time of her trial, she was violently attacked by unknown perpetrators, an incident of racial terror that went unacknowledged and unpunished by the college.21 Defended by the prominent Black attorney and Oberlin graduate John Mercer Langston, Lewis eventually won an acquittal and continued with her studies.22 Soon after, however, the college accused her of a separate alleged but undocumented theft and following this incident prohibited her graduation. Many of Lewis’s chroniclers discuss these episodes in detail. I have mentioned, but not narrated them at length here, mindful of what Saidiya Hartman warns of the ways readers are “called upon to participate in such scenes” of subjection by way of their spectacular narration.23 What I wish to emphasize, then, of Lewis’s student years is the ways she confronted both the exigencies of racism at a predominantly white institution while also building ties to a network of abolitionists and reformers both white and Black. John Mercer Langston’s defense of her case, for example, speaks to the different ways Black community leaders supported students of color as they navigated the bounds of racism at the college; as Buick puts simply, “Oberlin provided Lewis with contacts that allowed her to pursue an artistic career.”24 Douglass’s recollections, mentioned previously, further attests to the beginnings of this shift to “seek the East” and become an artist. In addition to Langston and Douglass, Lewis met a host of supporters and colleagues at Oberlin who helped forge the paths to a new career after leaving Ohio. As many have noted, during her studies she lived as a boarder at the home of the white abolitionists Reverend John Keep and his wife.25 The Keeps in turn introduced Lewis to the reformer and Liberator editor William Lloyd Garrison, whose prominence in Boston would later facilitate important links to both the abolitionist press and the art world.26 It was also at the college where she first likely made a series of connections with fellow students who would become central to her professional and social circles. Relief Work

64433int.indd 119

119

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.4 Edmonia Lewis, Drawing after Urania, 1862, graphite on paper. Photo courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

For example, Richard T. Greener, who enrolled in the school’s preparatory department the same years as Lewis, later collected and displayed in his Harvard dormitory one of the sculptor’s early medallion likenesses of Wendell Phillips.27 In the 1860s, Greener was at the nexus of a closely knit circle of Black Bostonians that included Lewis, Adeline Howard, Frances Rollin, and William Cooper Nell, among others.28 Later sections of this chapter will discuss in greater depth how many of these people had also been closely connected to the organization and support of one of the Civil War’s first African American regiments of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. What is crucial to note for now is that it was at Oberlin where Lewis not only became acquainted with white abolitionists who would later help advance her career, but also forged 120

64433int.indd 120

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

connections with Black reformers, educators, and intellectuals who would likewise become key supporters of her work as she moved from student to sculptor. In 1862, a year before her departure from Oberlin, Lewis completed one of her earliest known works, a fourteen-by-twelve-inch graphite drawing of the Greek muse of astronomy Urania that she later presented to classmate as a wedding gift (fig. 4.4). Lewis’s Urania is seated and swathed in drapery, holding in her hands the classical attributes of a pointing rod and a celestial orb. The drawing makes clear not only the young artist’s careful draftsmanship, which she would have honed through courses in linear drawing at the college, but also anticipates the direction her work would soon take. Urania appears strikingly sculptural, with undefined pupils and a body defined by a smooth, polished surface and a sense of three-dimensional heft. Some forms are enclosed with deliberate and steady lines, while others swell and fall through passages of subtle shading, as seen in the drapery that cascades in the foreground just above her signature. While it’s likely the Lewis produced the sketch after studies of an antique Roman statue reproduced either as a plaster cast or illustrated in a printed engraving, this is neither a simple copy nor static form.29 She notably depicts Urania in a threequarters view, an angle that makes it appear as though the muse herself is perhaps sculpting the orb as the rod limns its curved surface.30 As such, it prefigures what would arguably become defining aspects of Lewis’s practice, in which she pushes beyond a neoclassical paradigm to imbue her figures with a sense of liveliness and decisive action. JOHN BROWN AND ABOLITIONIST NETWORKS

Lewis quickly immersed herself in Boston’s artistic circles upon her arrival to the city after leaving Oberlin in mid-1863.31 It was, as she would note in 1864, “the best place for me to learn to be a sculptor.”32 Many of the era’s notable sculptors, including Horatio Greenough, Thomas Crawford, and William Wetmore Story, had begun their careers in the city. And the Boston Athenaeum, which had opened its collection of plaster casts and marble sculptures to the public in the 1830s, boasted galleries of what one contemporary deemed “the richest collections of statuary in the country.”33 With continued financial support from her elder brother as well as the connections to abolitionists previously forged in Ohio, she spent several months studying with Edward Augustus Brackett, an artist primarily known for his portrait busts of prominent men such as Washington Allston, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Charles Sumner.34 With Brackett, Lewis gained foundations in working in plaster and clay, modeling busts and medallions after cast copies and works in his atelier in the Studio Building in downtown Boston. She then took a room in the same building, establishing her practice at room number 89.35 Opened in 1861 at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield streets, the Studio Building was a lively confluence for artists, performers, intellectuals, merchants, and reformers alike.36 The four-story building was, according to one contemporary, “a perfect hive of artists . . . indeed, the head-quarters of the artists in Boston,” with occupants such as Relief Work

64433int.indd 121

121

22-05-18 10:12 AM

the sculptor William Rimmer and the painter and muralist John LaFarge.37 The painter Edward Mitchell Bannister worked several doors down from Lewis’s studio, as did the photographer Augustus Marshall, who would later print cartes-de-visite featuring her work.38 Yet the building was not confined to the arts alone. It was also home to a number of organizations, most notably the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, established in 1862 for the benefit of former bondspeople in South Carolina’s Port Royal and the Sea Islands.39 Lewis would go on to forge a close association with the society over the course of the 1860s: they promoted her work in their periodical the Freedmen’s Journal, and in the summer of 1865, she traveled to Virginia under their auspices to work as a teacher of formerly enslaved children at a school in Richmond.40 At the broadest level, the multifaceted space of the Studio Building served as a key platform for the constellated worlds of making and relief through which Lewis and her practice moved in the 1860s. These spheres of art and reform would soon become foundational to her work, not only in Boston but also in the northeast more broadly. It was in this context Lewis conceived of the plaster medallion of John Brown in late 1863. As noted by newspapers at the time, she modeled the medallion after a plaster bust of Brown completed by Brackett in 1860 (fig. 4.5).41 Though no known copies of this work survive, Brackett’s bust as well as a bust of Brown that Lewis executed over a decade later offer possible indications to its appearance.42 The former had completed his sculpture following a meeting with the white abolitionist as he awaited trial for the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, launched with the intent of initiating a slave rebellion.43 Brackett duly emphasized Brown’s deep-set eyes, sharply furrowed brow, and forked beard, making for a portrait that for many recalled the forbidding presence of Michelangelo’s Moses.44 It was “so alive,” wrote Lydia Maria Child, “[and] this makes it impress me more deeply than anything I have seen of modern sculpture . . . the character of the man looks through the features wonderfully.”45 Lewis’s later sculpture of Brown remains unlocated, but the few published reproductions in circulation reveal it to likewise teem with intensity, suffused too with a sense of contemporaneity owing to the fact that she depicted Brown in period dress rather than in the bare-chested, neoclassical manner as did Brackett. He gazes rightward, with a piercing expression accentuated by hollowed cheeks and wildly flowing hair.46 Given its similarities to Brackett’s bust, it is likely she drew upon the memory of her earlier medallion in modeling the plaster from her Roman studio in 1876. But Lewis’s medallion was neither mere derivative of Brackett’s bust nor an exercise in artistic copying for an aspiring sculptor. Her choice to depict Brown certainly suggested an engagement with antislavery politics by way of her artistic practice, and her promotion of the work in the abolitionist press attested to this more specifically. After the Liberator‘s initial announcement of the work’s completion in November 1863, she took out an advertisement that ran in the paper for several months; as the paper noted, “the subscriber invited the attention of her friends and the public to a number of Medallions” and directed readers to call upon her studio.47 She also traveled to New 122

64433int.indd 122

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.5 Edward Augustus Brackett, John Brown, 1860, plaster. Boston Athenaeum.

York to promote the work in early 1864, presenting at least one copy to the publishing offices of the Weekly Anglo-African. The newspaper reported in February of that year, “We take a great deal of pleasure in speaking of a visit that we received from our only sculptor Miss Mary Edmonia Lewis . . . she furnished us with a medallion of John Brown, a specimen of her workmanship.”48 In regard to this “splendid example of Anglo-African genius,” the paper continued, “we would be happy to receive and forward to her, orders for specimens of her artistic labors.”49 The newspaper continued to publicize the medallion by running weekly advertisements in its classifieds section Relief Work

64433int.indd 123

123

22-05-18 10:12 AM

for several months and keeping a copy for view in its offices at 48 Beekman Street near Printing House Square in lower Manhattan.50 On display at 48 Beekman, the medallion of Brown joined a coterie of printed texts and images central to the antislavery movement within the United States and across the African diaspora. This address was a hub of the abolitionist press, for it was also home to the New York offices of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which circulated the popular National Anti-Slavery Standard as well as numerous tracts, broadsides, and other illustrated volumes.51 But the promotion of Lewis’s work by way of the Weekly Anglo-African specifically is significant. Established by the journalist and publisher Robert Hamilton in 1859, the Weekly Anglo-African numbered among the most prominent Black-run periodicals in the antebellum era, reaching primarily a readership of free African Americans in the Northeast (among its many subscribers were in fact students at Oberlin College, where the campus monthly praised the “excellent literary matter” of its inaugural issue) as well as people of African descent abroad.52 Like other African American publications of the day such as Frederick Douglass’s North Star, the newspaper was an important forum for commentaries on abolition and racial uplift; as stated in its inaugural issue, it aimed “to point the right path for our people, both free and enslaved, throughout the land.”53 Hamilton furthermore sought to address contemporary cultural as well as political spheres, publishing not only articles that explicitly addressed slavery but also ones that touched a broad range of topics including literature, poetry, science, music, and the fine arts.54 Indeed, the Weekly Anglo-African was an important champion of Lewis, standing as an understudied but essential source in understanding the circulation of her work among American audiences, and Black audiences in particular. An image like the John Brown medallion worked as a central tool in the newspaper’s ethos and mission of uniting spheres of culture and politics— and art and activism—in the United States and across the African diaspora. And as a small-scale, affordable object, it, along with other works by Lewis, might be further contextualized within the material culture of what Jasmine Nichole Cobb has termed “the transatlantic parlor”—a sentimental, physical, and domestic space that gave form to new visions of Black freedom separate from slavery in the late nineteenth century.55 Small, sculpted medallions, of course, had long been mobilized in concert with abolitionist discourse. We have already seen how Wedgwood’s “Am I Not a Man or a Brother” cameo of 1787 saw wide reproduction in the British Atlantic world, and in so doing helped mobilize support for campaigns to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. But what did it mean to buttress these efforts in the United States circa 1863, a moment at which the promise of emancipation seemed to depend increasingly upon the contingencies of war? The Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln’s wartime government had gone into effect on the first of the year but had circumscribed purchase as a military provision that did not free all those enslaved.56 Its limited scope subsequently spurred action. The Liberator observed a day after the Proclamation’s issue, “the Abolitionists will therefore increase, not relax their efforts.”57 And if many Black abolition124

64433int.indd 124

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

ists had previously withheld full support for a conflict waged by a federal government that, as an editorial for the Weekly Anglo-African noted, “would sooner consign five millions of human beings to never-ending slavery than wrong one slave master,” the projects to eradicate slavery and support the Union became increasingly intertwined as the aims of war moved more clearly toward a juridical emancipation.58 One arena that united both of these interests was the effort to enlist and support the African American regiments that had begun to be raised for the Union army that year. Lewis’s work over the course of 1864 would unfold amid and participate in this newly invigorated enterprise, wherein support for Black soldiers fighting in the war telegraphed into support for abolition, and vice versa. LEWIS AND THE 54TH MASSACHUSETTS

After completing the medallion of Brown, Lewis began to model two small-scale plasters depicting officers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the war’s first African American regiments.59 The first was a tabletop statuette depicting one of the unit’s celebrated Black officers, Sergeant William H. Carney (1840–1908), and the second was a bust of the regiment’s white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837– 1863). Shaw had been killed as the regiment led a Union assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner near Charleston harbor in July 1863, and Carney, wounded, rushed forward with regimental standards to carry on the charge.60 Like the medallion of Brown, the sculptures circulated amid networks of abolitionists in the Northeast. They also appeared at soldiers’ fairs, where they were marketed alongside other goods, wares, and handicrafts. Neither is known to survive today—likely because of this very context of consumption—but the circulation of both reveals a great deal about the dynamics of commemorating the 54th Massachusetts as well as the broader social and political work of sculpture during the Civil War era. Lewis’s bust of Shaw appeared across a variety of spaces and media. It was first displayed at the National Sailors’ Fair in Boston, an event held to raise funds for the establishment of a home for ex-seamen and marines in the nearby town of Quincy.61 Held in the Boston Theatre from November 9–22, 1864, the sprawling and large-scale fair was in many ways the city’s answer to the famed Metropolitan Fair held by the United States Sanitary Commission in New York earlier that year, featuring exhibitions of arms and armor, model ships, industrial manufactures, and works of art.62 The Shaw bust drew considerable attention amid this array. “Among the thousand objects of interest,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported, “is a bust of the hero Col. Robert G. Shaw by Miss Edmonia Lewis of the Studio Building.”63 Shaw’s family, too, were pleased with what they considered an “excellent likeness” of their late son and sought to disseminate the work widely.64 Following its favorable reception at the fair, they arranged for its display at the showrooms of the prominent Bostonian art dealership Williams & Everett, where it appeared on public view for several months.65 The Shaws also collaborated with Lewis to reproduce the bust in multiple formats, including the Relief Work

64433int.indd 125

125

22-05-18 10:12 AM

creation of one hundred plaster casts taken from the original as well as the cartes-devisite of the work made by the local firm of photographer Augustus Marshall (see fig. 0.7).66 Finally, several years later, one of Shaw’s sisters commissioned Lewis to produce the marble version, which the sculptor completed in Rome in 1867, adding an inscription that had not been present in the earlier plasters—“Martyr for Freedom” carved in block letters on the bust’s rounded socle.67 Shaw’s “martyrdom,” so prominently declared on the marble version of the bust, was embedded in a complex web of narratives constructed around the bodies of both artist and subject depicted. As was the case with John Bell, Charles Cordier, and others, many white male sculptors in the nineteenth century depicted Black female subjects in their work. The poet Tyehimba Jess, who has written extensively on Lewis’s oeuvre, described Lewis’s Shaw as a radical subversion to this norm, noting in his 2015 poem “Colonel Robert Gould Shaw,” “She cut dark witness into this bust.”68 This line reframed the ways that Boston critics and newspapers, a century and a half earlier, seemed unable to mention the sculpture without subsuming it into a larger story about a woman of color daring to model the likeness of a white man from a prominent Boston family who served and died as the colonel of a Black regiment. Both the Evening Transcript and the Liberator ran stories speculating that Lewis had undertaken the bust “out of a grateful feeling of what he had done for her race,” at once erasing her Indigeneity and sublimating her Blackness into an essentializing condition of indebtedness. 69 Anna Quincy Waterston, who wrote a poem about Lewis in late 1864, similarly framed the artist’s Blackness in relation to Shaw’s whiteness, noting, “ ‘tis fitting that a daughter of the race” should sculpt such a work.70 These accounts speak to the ways that Lewis’s work has been so frequently subject to readings as “a representation of a fixed identity,” to draw from Kirsten Pai Buick, rather than the artist’s own nuanced negotiation of the expectations and demands of her diverse audiences.71 Buick and others have addressed Lewis’s choice of subject matter in light of the kinds of work that remained viable in the conservative sphere of mid-nineteenthcentury European and American sculpture. The Lewis scholar Marilyn Richardson reads the Shaw bust in these strategic terms, acknowledging the ways the work responded to a world in which white Bostonians preferred to lionize the colonel who looked like them rather than the soldiers who did not.72 If the organization of the 54th Massachusetts itself replicated dominant racial hierarchies of the day with highranking white commanders in charge of units of noncommissioned Black officers and infantrymen, so too did many of the ways in which the regiment was remembered. For his famous 1897 memorial to the 54th Massachusetts on Boston Common, Augustus Saint-Gaudens cast a monumental bronze panel that foregrounded Shaw on horseback in a relief so high it was nearly in the round, while infantrymen marched on foot behind him in frieze-like formation and their forward motion arrested by rigid marble columns on either side (fig. 4.6).73 Three decades earlier, the Shaw family chose to replicate only the bust of their son—which the sculptor was reportedly “permitted to 126

64433int.indd 126

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.6 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, 1884, bronze and marble, Boston Common. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

sell for her own benefit” at fifteen dollars apiece—and not Lewis’s earlier statuette of his comrade Carney.74 She also sold cartes-de-visite featuring the Shaw bust—likely either versions of the one taken by Augustus Marshall for the Shaws or a similar photograph made by John Adams Whipple (fig. 4.7)—as a more affordable alternative to statuary in the round.75 Strategically speaking, these sales had direct outcomes, as the proceeds from both helped enable her move to Italy in the autumn of 1865. Taking on form through cast copies, cartes-de-visite, and a marble statue, it appears that at first glance Lewis’s Shaw bust was afforded comparatively more visibility than her statuette of William Carney. Although the sculptor conceived of and modeled the Carney sculpture prior to that of Shaw’s, it was the latter that gained outsize attention in wartime Boston for the ways it aligned with accepted narratives relating to both Lewis’s and Shaw’s racial subjectivities. It was through the display and reproduction of the Shaw bust, as we have seen, that white Bostonians commemorated the legacy of one of the war’s first African American regiments by way of the body of its white colonel. The exhibition of the Carney statuette, however, opened onto a different set of commemorative practices directly connected to the welfare of the unit’s Black Relief Work

64433int.indd 127

127

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.7 John Adams Whipple, Edmonia Lewis’s bust of Robert Gould Shaw, between 1864 and 1865, carte-de-visite. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

officers, infantrymen, and their families. In order to better understand this cultural work, it is necessary first to return to both of the sculptures themselves. SHAW AND CARNEY AT THE FAIR

Period accounts and images offer context to the original plaster sculptures that Lewis modeled of Carney and Shaw despite the fact that both have been lost over time. The statue of Carney reportedly showed the officer in the mêlée of battle, perhaps as he 128

64433int.indd 128

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.8 Currier and Ives, The Gallant Charge of the 54th Massachusetts, 1863, lithograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DiG-ppmsca-35357.

had been depicted in a popular 1863 lithograph from Currier and Ives, wielding the regiment’s flag and leading fellow soldiers on at the apex of the print’s composition (fig. 4.8). The only clue to the statuette’s appearance comes from a correspondent for the Weekly Anglo-African, who described the figure poised “in a kneeling attitude holding up the colors lest they touch the ground.”76 The bust of Shaw has also been lost over time, but Lewis’s 1867 marble version as well as the period cartes-de-visite of the original plaster taken from various angles and a late-nineteenth century albumen print showing a frontal view offer insight to what it looked like in the round (fig. 4.9). The squarely furrowed brow and set mouth of the later bust lend a stolid monumentality to the marble Shaw, whose frontal pose, bare chest, and uncarved pupils have much in common with busts of the young emperor Augustus that Lewis created for Roman markets in the 1870s (fig. 4.10). But the earlier plasters reveal a different approach, aligning less with classical prototypes and more with contemporary photographs of the officer from which Lewis was said to have worked (fig. 4.11).77 She modeled Shaw’s head so as to appear slightly cocked to one side, with this expressiveness accentuated by gentle contours around his eyes, carefully delineated pupils, and slightly parted lips. These nuances result in a figure who appears alert—perhaps concerned—as a soldier on the precipice of war. Even from the Weekly Anglo-African‘s limited description of the Carney statuette, it’s possible to see how Lewis imparted to both sculptures an impression of action and Relief Work

64433int.indd 129

129

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.9 Photographer unknown, Edmonia Lewis’s bust of Robert Gould Shaw, before 1883, albumen print. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

liveliness, however pronounced (“in a kneeling attitude holding up the colors”) or subtle (a tilted chin, an opened mouth).78 We will recall Lewis’s interest in presenting a lively figure with her drawing of Urania, and additionally, it was not uncommon for sculptors of this period to infuse smaller works like busts and statuettes with an approachable sense of narrative or anecdote. John Rogers routinely did so with his popular genre groups, and Lewis, too, would go on to emphasize tableau-like settings with statuettes such as The Old Arrow Maker, where the figures of Minnehaha and her father rise from their handiwork to meet the gaze of Minnehaha’s lover Hiawatha.79 Significantly, small-scale tabletop sculptures were made and consumed with an eye to what Elizabeth Hutchinson has discussed as the “sentimental market” in which artists oriented their work toward reform-minded contexts like fundraising fairs.80 Depictions of genre scenes or public figures saw considerable popularity in these spaces as consumable objects that might punctuate social affiliations and common causes.81 The Carney statuette and the Shaw bust functioned much in the same way given their 130

64433int.indd 130

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.10 Edmonia Lewis, Young Octavian, 1870, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Robbins. figure 4.11 John Adams Whipple, Robert Gould Shaw, between 1861 and 1863, carte-de-visite. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-59856.

respective debuts at soldiers’ fairs, where each appeared alongside works of art and goods sold to benefit wartime efforts. The Shaw bust appeared at the National Sailors’ Fair previously discussed, and the Carney statuette at the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair, which took place in Boston one month prior to the Sailors’ Fair in October of 1864. The space of the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair is especially important because it asks us to remap the debut of Lewis’s sculpted tributes to the men of the 54th Massachusetts within a network of Black women’s entrepreneurship, patronage, and activism, rather than the circles of white Boston abolitionists with whom she’s been more frequently associated. Scholars and museums often situate Lewis’s artistic labor in relationship to white women, whether patrons like Sarah Sturgis Shaw, or Lydia Maria Child and Maria Chapman Weston, with whom she collaborated in Boston, or fellow sculptors like Harriet Hosmer and Anne Whitney, alongside whom she worked in Rome.82 But attention to her involvement in the world of fairs opens onto another circle of actors that comprised primarily women of color engaging what Koritha Relief Work

64433int.indd 131

131

22-05-18 10:12 AM

Mitchell terms “homemade citizenship” or what Martha S. Jones calls “war work,” or relief projects such as soldiers’ aid, fundraising, and institution building.83 As Jones argues in her study of nineteenth-century Black women’s activism, war work presented one venue through which some women in northern states were able to stake claims to new forms of public belonging and public culture in 1860s America: “To work for the war,” she writes, “was to claim freedom and citizenship.”84 Moreover, as Lewis’s participation in fairs will bear out, the spheres of war work and of creative production were by no means mutually exclusive. In the space of the relief fair, as we will see, the act of making took on associations at once therapeutic and political, working as a means through which bodies and collectives could be forged anew. SOLDIERS’ RELIEF AND THE POETICS OF PLASTER

The Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair of October 1864, where Lewis exhibited the statuette of Carney, stemmed from the larger efforts of a Massachusetts-based organization called the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission. It was run by the prominent Boston hairdresser and entrepreneur Christiana Carteaux Bannister, whose spouse, the painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, worked several doors down from Lewis in the Studio Building (fig. 4.12).85 The Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission had first been established as a branch of the Contraband Relief Association, an organization founded earlier on in the war by the seamstress and ex-bondswoman Elizabeth Keckley in Washington, DC.86 Like its Washington counterpart, the commission believed in a community-based relief, working to provide aid, housing, and education to formerly enslaved people through the furnishing of funds, food and material goods, and counsel.87 In 1863, Carteaux Bannister and others enlarged the scope of the Boston commission to support soldiers in newly incorporated African American regiments such as the 54th Massachusetts. What is especially crucial to note about the expansion of the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission’s activities into the realm of soldiers’ relief is that this work unfolded in response to the American government’s failure to fully compensate or adequately equip Black regiments fighting in the war. Though the government had authorized the formation of African American regiments in early 1863, provisions such as equal pay would not be federally mandated until a year and a half later. The men of the 54th Massachusetts forwent over a year’s worth of pay in protest of low wages unequal to those received by white soldiers, with infantrymen such as Private Francis Fletcher writing home to express “all the misery and degradation suffered in our regiment.”88 The sanitary fair was held specifically to redress this situation, with the commission declaring it “the most practical method of accomplishing their object” of furnishing aid to soldiers, their families, and children orphaned by war.89 Broadsides detailing these objectives were circulated several months before, and newspapers highlighted Carteaux Bannister’s efforts to work expressly for “the benefit of colored soldiers” in the place of “a government that had treated them so cruelly.”90 Put another way, the relief fair 132

64433int.indd 132

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.12 Edward Mitchell Bannister, Christiana Carteaux Bannister, ca. 1860, oil on canvas. Courtesy of The RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

was not merely a patriotic gesture or supplement, but one of the few viable strategies of sustenance in the absence of institutional supports proffered by the nation state. Like other sanitary fairs and bazaars of the day, the central attraction of the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair was its extensive display of goods.91 Coverage of the event, which came primarily from African American newspapers around the country, gives insight Relief Work

64433int.indd 133

133

22-05-18 10:12 AM

into the scope and content of what the Weekly Anglo-African proclaimed “the greatest fair ever held in Massachusetts by colored people.”92 It ran from October 18 to 24 in Boston’s Mercantile Hall, a multistory building with strong associations to midcentury reform movements as a venue for lectures and meetings on abolition, suffrage, and temperance. The cavernous space had been “tastefully decorated” by the popular society decorator William Beals with swaths of greenery, flags, and patriotic banners.93 Tables representing smaller local divisions of the commission stood laden with handcrafted wares such as furniture, textile, samples of lace, and other “fancy articles.”94 Paintings and sculpture also joined the displays. Carteaux Bannister’s husband Edward Mitchell Bannister submitted a full-length portrait of Robert Gould Shaw, which took prime place at the head of the hall and was said to have attracted “much attention.”95 Lewis’s statuette of William Carney joined Bannister’s portrait of Shaw in a tribute to the 54th Massachusetts, and according to newspaper accounts, she also sent for exhibition a plaster medallion of Wendell Phillips as well as several other unnamed works.96 Handicrafts and works of art were by no means uncommon objects at relief fairs; indeed, they were the mainstays of such events.97 And while the fairs themselves in many ways replicated capitalist structures as fundraising projects, their centering of the handmade and the handcrafted—as opposed to the mass-produced or industrially manufactured—arguably made space for what Stephen Knott sees as a “spatialtemporal zone in which these structures can be stretched, quietly subverted, and exaggerated.”98 To this point, it is worth emphasizing the ways in which the labor and ethos of handiwork conveyed not only women’s domestic gentility but moreover their patriotic industriousness during wartime. Consider Sojourner Truth’s famous cartes-devisite from this same moment, in which the activist appears before the camera as a dexterous maker with yarn and knitting needles in hand (fig. 4.13). Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby writes of the centrality of craft to Truth’s carefully self-fashioned images, noting that “knitting was a form of labor, exertion undertaken as a patriotic duty, not a genteel hobby.”99 Handmade objects could say a great deal about the seriousness and vitality of women’s war work. The plaster works Lewis exhibited at the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair commanded unique associations with the handmade, perhaps more so than an oil painting or a marble sculpture. With their small scale and associations to the domestic sphere, tabletop sculptures invite a sense of close and intimate engagement on behalf of the spectator. And the variegated surfaces of plaster works in particular frequently bear the tactile traces of the sculptor’s hand—marks from a modeling tool, the tiny grooves and speckles to accumulate as the material is exposed to air, or rough passages of clay smoothed out by quickly working fingers. Moreover, the association between plaster, hands, and handicraft was not uncommon in nineteenth-century American sculpture.100 Harriet Hosmer produced a life cast in plaster of the clasped hands of her friends Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a meditation on making and touch, and Hiram Powers routinely cast the hands of his young daughter Louisa as studies for 134

64433int.indd 134

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.13 Sojourner Truth in collaboration with S. C. Wright, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” 1864–1865, carte-de-visite. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg.

larger scale works. Although plaster sculpture is often dismissed as mere preliminary study to more permanent works in marble or bronze, in the Victorian era it evoked the haptic potency and immediacy of the sculptor’s touch. Plaster could also heal, in the most literal of senses, and this perhaps was an association not lost on viewers attending a fair for the relief of soldiers. Physicians in nineteenth-century hospitals often mixed the powdery gypsum-based compound with water in order to set bandages and immobilize limbs into casts. In the 1850s, the Relief Work

64433int.indd 135

135

22-05-18 10:12 AM

Crimean War surgeon Nikolay Pirogov introduced the use of plaster splints in field hospitals after having seen a sculptor at work.101 Civil War doctors a decade later also made liberal use of the material to treat fractures, sprains, and other wounds, as illustrations from field guides issued to army surgeons attest (fig. 4.14). Looking back on her work as a wartime nurse in Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott recalled seeing a man’s wound “held together with straps of transparent plaster, which I never see without a shiver, and swift recollections of the scenes with which it is associated in my mind.”102 If wounds, in Elaine Scarry’s formulation, are themselves unstable referents that open onto infinite constellations of belief and symbolism, what Alcott presents is an identification of a plaster-bound wound with healing on one hand, and the recollections of war on the other.103 Circa 1864, the tactile materiality of plaster hovered at boundaries of “the making and unmaking of the world” and presented a possibility to reconcile one with the other.104 If Johann Gottfried Herder’s evocation of the phrase “touch alone reveals bodies” connoted a thematic of possession, as explored in chapter 1, it might be rethought here to be understood within a poetics of care.105 The relationship between plaster and the making of bodies both sculptural and real coalesced with Lewis’s statuette of Sergeant William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts. Recall again the Weekly Anglo-African‘s brief but enigmatic description of the figure as he appeared “in a kneeling attitude holding up the colors lest they touch the ground.”106 Here, it is clear that Carney’s body is whole. Marilyn Richardson has rightfully singled out the statuette as Lewis’s first recorded full-length figure, and moreover, one that dealt with “the singular experience of a specific, named, and in turn nationally recognized individual African American soldier.”107 As such, it presented a distinct departure from another contemporary small sculpture—John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman, which depicted an anonymous African American man with broken manacles at his wrists (fig. 4.15). Ward’s plaster statuette also debuted during the war, at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1863 and was later cast into bronze. According to Kirk Savage, the figure embodies a state of liminality as he twists his body upward and outward from a seated, earthbound pose.108 By contrast, the Carney statuette hinged on the representation of a decisive action and a specific actor. If Ward’s work presented an anonymous Black figure as an embodiment of a general idea or type—in keeping with a longer history of such figures in Western sculpture—Lewis’s statue presented one of the earliest ruptures to this tradition in the depiction of an African American man as a named individual connected to a specific historical event. Lewis’s decision to depict the officer wielding the regiment’s flags bore deeper resonance beyond mere fidelity to historical narrative. Carney had been gravely wounded at the battle of Fort Wagner, with bullets passing through his chest and hip as he held the standards of the 54th Massachusetts aloft. Much had been made of his heroic gesture to save the flags, an important symbol of the regiment. Significantly, it was the Colored Ladies’ Relief Society that had furnished and presented the 54th Massachusetts with regimental colors upon their incorporation in early 1863 in a fundraising 136

64433int.indd 136

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.14 Illustration in James Little, On the Use of Plaster Splints in Military Surgery: Report Made to the United States Sanitary Commission (Washington, DC: Printed for the USSC, 1864), 12. Wellcome Collection.

64433int.indd 137

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.15 John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, modeled 1863, bronze. The Art Institute of Chicago, Roger McCormick Endowment.

campaign spearheaded by Lewis’s good friend Adeline Howard.109 (Lewis would later travel with Howard to Richmond, Virginia, to teach freedmen at the war’s end in 1865, part of what Frances Ellen Watkins Harper later described in her Reconstruction-era novel Iola Leroy as “the new army . . . that had come to supplant ignorance with knowledge.”110) And although the sculptor had yet to arrive to Boston at the moment of the flag’s presentation, her creation and display of Carney plaster at the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair one year later perhaps reminded viewers that Black women’s circles of making and relief had long been central to the regiment’s formation. An additional contemporary image helps underscore this idea. In 1864, Carney posed for a photograph with the battle-worn flag that he had famously wielded at Fort Wagner, holding it with one hand while steadying himself with a cane in the other 138

64433int.indd 138

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:12 AM

figure 4.16 Photographer unknown, William H. Carney, 1864, carte-de-visite. Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Garrison Family in memory of George Thompson.

(fig. 4.16). The voluminous standard bisects his body, with the vertical stripes of tattered fabric falling downward to both obscure and visually stand in for his injured right leg. The carte-de-visite’s matte surface and midrange sepia tonality further reify this illusion as the folds of Carney’s trousers blend visually into those of the flag; it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. In parsing this detail, it is useful Relief Work

64433int.indd 139

139

22-05-18 10:13 AM

to draw again from Scarry, who writes that pain becomes comprehensible in new ways when conceptualized as an entity outside of the body.111 She suggests that such an action of reimagining pain can be palliative. Hurt, when projected onto an object, “by its very separability from the body becomes an image that can be lifted away, carrying some of the attributes of pain with it.”112 As limb melds into flag and vice versa, the photograph—much like Lewis’s plaster statuette—gestures to the place of material culture in the remaking of bodies in the wake of war.113 The circulation of Lewis’s work during the Civil War era gestures to the possibilities of sculpture to work with, but also against, dominant social, commercial, and political realities of the day. Fairs—such as the industrial exhibitions and world’s fairs discussed elsewhere in this book—in many ways stood as manifestations of nineteenth-century commodity culture par excellence (Marx, after all, reportedly wrote Capital‘s famous passages on commodity fetishism after seeing firsthand the dazzling displays of goods at the Crystal Palace in 1851). Relief fairs occupied what might be best understood as an alternative economy to these spaces, for their structures to raise funds reflected and refracted mainstream practices of entrepreneurship and commerce in order to reimagine present realities. The fair held by the Colored Ladies’ Relief Society was ultimately a redressive project, one that performed an essential politics of care to unfold in response to inequities of federal pay and support for African American soldiers and their families. This vision was radical in scope and scale as it explored the possibilities of mutual aid outside and in place of existing frameworks—what Derrick Spires has elsewhere termed a “critically and collaboratively constructed citizenship practice” that unfolded apart from the nation-state.114 Objects like Lewis’s plaster statuette of William Carney embodied these ideals in concrete way, asking viewers to consider how single acts of making might promise generative and reparative possibilities for individual bodies and broader collectives like. FOREVER FREE AND NARRATIVES OF EMANCIPATION

On the evening of October 18, 1869, crowds gathered at Boston’s Tremont Temple for the unveiling of the sculpture Forever Free (fig. 4.17). Completed by Lewis in Rome two years prior, the three-foot-high marble group showed a young Black couple on the metaphorical “morning of liberty,” as the artist had initially titled the work.115 A woman bends down on one knee with hands clasped upward in a prayerful position, while her male counterpart stands at right, holding one arm over her shoulder while lifting the other toward the sky with a broken manacle hanging from his wrist.116 The couple rise together, with their gestures rhyming one another. The inverted V of the women’s grasped hands is echoed by the swell of her partner’s diaphragm, and Lewis has carefully navigated the negative space between their two bodies so as to emphasize the way their bent knees propel an energetic, upward lift. The message is clear: they have emerged from the chains of slavery, which snake in fragments at the statue’s base. In the eyes of one contemporary viewer, the statue presented “a telling in the very poetry of stone the story of the last ten years.”117 140

64433int.indd 140

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:13 AM

figure 4.17 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867, marble. Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC/Licensed by Art Resource NY.

64433int.indd 141

22-05-18 10:13 AM

At Tremont Temple—a building long associated with the antislavery lecture circuit—Lewis presented Forever Free to the abolitionist and the former Underground railroad conductor Reverend Leonard Grimes of the Twelfth Baptist Church.118 This dedication, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, gestured to the important place of Lewis’s work in antislavery circles in Boston and beyond long after she had left the city. “The story of the last ten years” also punctuated a long-standing network of Black activism in Boston—one of which the sculptor had been a part of from the very beginning of her career. Grimes and his spouse Octavia had been actively involved in wartime circles of reform, with Octavia Grimes working as one of the organizers of the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission and its 1864 fair. Scholars have persuasively understood Forever Free as a work of reclamation, as Lewis asserts the couple as a family unit in the wake of slavery’s dissolution of kinship bonds.119 The histories of Lewis’s relief work opens onto an additional dimension to this well-known sculpture, one that has to do with the ways in which women’s wartime labor participated in a project of familial and communal uplift in an age of abolition. Emancipation came after the end of the American Civil War, with the ratification of Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude in December of 1865. Yet what this juridical emancipation would entail and what it might mean for the embodied experience for people who had been enslaved was unknown. Whether the realm of the visual could—or should—make space for narratives about the end of slavery also remained uncertain. Forever Free does not present its viewers with a decisive answer but rather suggests, with the upward momentum of both figures, possibilities still unfolding. Yet the spaces of relief work from which it emerged presented one prospect, wherein practices of citizenship and collectivity might take shape in the poetics of the material world.

142

64433int.indd 142

Relief Work

22-05-18 10:13 AM

5 BETWEEN LIBERTY AND EMANCIPATION Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery Both the art of the sculptor and the bronze are causes of the statue1

aristotle, physics This isolated figure . . . is a whole history.2

“lo scoltore pezzikar e l’abolizione della schiavitù,” il cittadino, 1876

O

N MAY 10, 1876 ,

the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine— otherwise known as the Centennial Exhibition—opened at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Like world’s fairs that came before it in places like London, Paris, and Vienna, it boasted displays of goods from the world round for the admiration and consumption of millions of visitors. Held one hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and just eleven after the end of the American Civil War, the Centennial Exhibition was above all a celebration of modern progress and national unity.3 Organizers and exhibitors alike thus faced one urgent question in conceiving of their displays: how best to articulate a vision of freedom for the modern United States? The sculptor Francesco Pezzicar put forth one possibility. From his studio in the Mediterranean port city of Trieste, he sent to Philadelphia for exhibition L’Abolizione della schiavitù in America, 1863, or The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863, a nearly eight-foot-high bronze statue depicting a formerly enslaved 143

64433int.indd 143

22-05-18 10:13 AM

African American man with remnants of a broken chain at his feet (see fig. 0.5). The figure strides forward with arms outstretched, bearing a broken shackle with one hand, and hoisting overhead Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with the other. Pezzicar had initially envisioned The Abolition of Slavery with the document in mind: as a close friend of the artist relayed, the sculpture “owed its origins to the enthusiasm aroused in Mr. Pezzicar’s mind by the news of Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863.”4 But it is well known that the wartime act did not effect emancipation in totality, for it decreed freedom only for people enslaved in areas under military control of the Confederacy.5 The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery in the eyes of the law when ratified two years later in 1865. The Abolition of Slavery, in other words, had little to do with the actual abolition of slavery. This chapter takes Pezzicar’s mistranslations as a starting point to consider the challenges and implications of imagining emancipation on visual and material terms. Or, to draw from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s remarks on the construction of history, it looks to understand how and on whose terms artifacts and bodies turn event into fact.6 On prominent display at an event devoted to the formation of national narratives, Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery did precisely this. Although in his lifetime Pezzicar was not well known outside of the environs of Trieste, then a prosperous port at the edge of the Austrian Empire and now part of present-day Italy, he was a tireless advocate of the international exhibition as a site for the promotion and display of art throughout his career.7 He conceived of The Abolition of Slavery expressly for the Centennial, anticipating at once a broadly global and uniquely American audience for a work he envisioned as a commemoration of freedom. Period images and archives from both American and European contexts, many of which remain understudied, especially in conversation with one another, will help us make sense of the implications of this vision. As we will see, responses to the sculpture’s exhibition in Philadelphia—in particular the narratives of its making subsequently relayed upon its display—were as much entangled with the histories of slavery as they were with any idea of subjective freedom. In making this claim, this chapter adds to existing scholarship on The Abolition of Slavery, which recognizes the many ways the sculpture stood apart from other contemporary images made to commemorate the end of slavery.8 The larger-than-life figure assumes a dynamic, powerful stance, one distinctly different from the image of the kneeling former slave that figured so prominently in many late nineteenth-century sculptures about emancipation.9 Yet this paradigm-breaking representation was not without contradiction. And if the terms of the sculpture’s reception related to the limits as well as the possibilities of freedom at the ends of slavery, so too did its materiality. Circa 1876 artists and critics alike regarded bronze above all as a modern medium, one that might grasp at universal truths in a new and monumental way; Pezzicar was no exception. Indeed, the broader program of sculpture at the Centennial held great promise in this respect, or so it seemed. In the final weeks of the fair, 144

64433int.indd 144

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:13 AM

another monumental statue joined The Abolition of Slavery in the fair’s sculpture displays: the colossal torch-bearing hand of what was to become the Statue of Liberty, created from copper and iron by workmen under the employ of French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. Though distinct from one another in many ways, both sculptures gestured to the limitations of figuring the abstract concept of “liberty” in corporeal form. The respective cast and hammered metal bodies of Pezzicar’s statue and Bartholdi’s hand were on the one hand spectacular, visible, and largely unprecedented, yet on the other deceptions unto themselves, always already partial and fragmented, fictive and hollow. A GLOBAL WORK OF ART

The Abolition of Slavery was an international object, created by an Italian artist living in the Austrian Empire with a specific vision of American history in mind. Pezzicar completed a plaster model for the sculpture from his Trieste studio in 1873, and it was put into bronze two years later at the Imperial and Royal Foundry in Vienna, Austria, in anticipation of its exhibition before American audiences at the Philadelphia Centennial. In some ways parallel to the urgency with which John Bell undertook A Daughter of Eve as a work to “be seen and known,” Pezzicar sought to create a sculpture that might be legible on the global stage.10 The circumstances that made this possible grew from his early studies, which unfolded at the crossroads of the Austrian Empire and the unifying Italian states, and in turn primed him for a career oriented toward an international sphere of exhibitionary cultures.11 Originally from Duino, a small town on the far eastern reaches of the Italian peninsula, Pezzicar began his career as an artist in nearby Venice at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied sculpture from 1857 to 1863.12 He was by all accounts an accomplished student (one instructor mentioned his talent for rendering “colossal proportions of plastic forms,” which no doubt later informed the seven-foot, eight-inch-high figure of The Abolition of Slavery) and upon his departure won the school’s Alunnato di Roma, a premium that afforded pupils three years of additional study in Rome.13 After departing Rome in 1866, he spent the majority of his career in Trieste, where he gained fame primarily as a sculptor of funerary and civic monuments in the region.14 Although Pezzicar never traveled to the United States, his time in the cosmopolitan centers of Rome, Venice, and Trieste no doubt informed his choice to pursue a work about the abolition of slavery. In Rome, the young artist would have would have been a member of an international community of sculptors that by the mid-1860s encompassed the Americans William Wetmore Story, Harriet Hosmer, and Edmonia Lewis, who over the course of the decade responded to cataclysmic events such as the end of the American Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the abolition of slavery in sculpture.15 Story’s Cleopatra of 1858 and The Libyan Sibyl of 1861 drew attention from Americans and Italians as works sympathetic to the abolitionist cause in their monumentally scaled portrayal of figures of African descent; the sculptor claimed the latter as Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 145

145

22-05-18 10:13 AM

figure 5.1 William Wetmore Story, The Libyan Sibyl, modeled 1860, carved 1861, marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Erving Wolf Foundation, in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 1979.

his “anti-slavery sermon in stone” (fig. 5.1).16 Hosmer started work on her Freedman’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1865, and, as discussed in the previous chapter, Lewis started work on The Freedwoman on the First Hearing of Her Liberty (no longer extant) as well as The Morning of Liberty (later retitled Forever Free) in early 1866 following her arrival to the city several months before.17 If Pezzicar was ostensibly inspired to create The Abolition of Slavery upon hearing “news of Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863,” his horizon of knowledge in so doing may have included the work of contemporary American sculptors addressing like topics in the Eternal City.18 146

64433int.indd 146

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:13 AM

The maritime histories of Venice and Trieste are also significant when considering a broader understanding of slavery that Pezzicar brought to bear on his sculpture. As ports connected to trade routes to Africa, Asia, and the Atlantic world, Trieste and Venice were diverse places and home to significant populations of people of African descent. In Venice, references to the enslavement of Black Africans took visual and visible form, with the racist motif of the so-called “blackamoor” figure appearing in painting, sculpture, and decorative arts in the city from the early modern era on.19 Indeed, the open and unbound figure of The Abolition of Slavery seems a sculptural inverse to the crouching forms of enslaved Black men that Baldassare Longhena and Melchior Barthel modeled for a funerary monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Frari (1665–1669) (fig. 5.2).20 And if Pezzicar would have been acquainted with histories of enslavement and their iconography from his studies in Venice, he was also likely aware of its contemporary effects on Trieste, the free port that Marx described as an ascendant center of global commerce, capital, and “revived navigation” in an 1857 article for the New-York Daily Tribune.21 Historians have documented how the port maintained a close economic relationship to American slave economies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, importing sugar and cotton in exchange for Austrianmanufactured guns, mortars, and munitions.22 Like the metal and textile towns of Birmingham and Blackburn—two places that we have seen to be central to the work of John Bell—Trieste, too, profited from Atlantic economies of theft, enslavement, and expropriation. The Italian contexts that arguably shaped Pezzicar’s undertaking of The Abolition of Slavery were duly intertwined with his decision to exhibit the completed work at the Philadelphia Centennial. Most certain of the artist’s time spent between Venice, Rome, and Trieste is that all three places directed him to a professional career decisively oriented toward broader geopolitical spheres and international exhibitions specifically. In the late 1860s, Pezzicar worked as a delegate for an international exposition held in Trieste and later as an exhibition commissioner for the Vienna Weltaustellung of 1873.23 He began work on The Abolition of Slavery during these same years, completing a plaster model of the sculpture first in Trieste and then collaborating with casters Joseph Röhlich and Franz Xaver Pönninger in the imperial capital of Vienna to produce a version in bronze expressly “intended for the exhibition in Philadelphia,” as Viennese newspapers reported. The cast was completed in 1875 and traveled to the United States the following year as one of the crowning pieces of the Austrian Empire’s entry to the Centennial Exhibition.24 The choice to exhibit The Abolition of Slavery as the main sculpture in the Austrian selection for Centennial fit in with the broader vision of the fair as an anniversary celebration of the United States Declaration of Independence, signed in the city one hundred years earlier. Other nations also sent works that spoke to this theme. France, most notably, displayed a fragment of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s yet-to-be-completed Statue of Liberty that became one of the fair’s most popular attractions.25 Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 147

147

22-05-18 10:13 AM

figure 5.2 Baldassare Longhena and Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1665–1669, marble, Basilica dei Frari, Venice. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource NY.

According to Caroline Jones, the world’s fairs of the nineteenth century created a new kind of “global work of art” as artists and exhibition committees alike sought to “forge an internationalism” in their practice in such a way that anticipated these international contexts of display.26 Regardless of the intent or moral interest behind its conception, Pezzicar’s undertaking of the sculpture and its subsequent display must also be understood in this context of opportunism, one that cast the very material 148

64433int.indd 148

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:13 AM

prospects of fame and financial gain within an increasingly global art market in an abstracted appeal to universalism. When the sculpture did not attract a buyer at the exhibition and instead returned back to Europe, the local Trieste newspaper L’Adria noted, “When The Abolition of Slavery went on its way to America, everyone fervently believed it would remain there.”27 L’Adria went on lament that sculpture did not find a home with one of the wealthy patrons of Gilded Age America, mentioning by name the dry goods merchant Alexander T. Stewart, who, incidentally, purchased the third version of Powers’s The Greek Slave several decades prior and had recently put it on display in his New York mansion in 1869.28 But unlike The Greek Slave—which Jones cites as one of the first “global works of art” to come out of the world of fairs— Pezzicar’s sculpture could not so readily deflect or evade associations to the topic of American slavery.29 Rather, as attention to its form will bear out, he took great measures to assure that the work would be legible on precisely those terms. PEZZICAR AND THE REPRESENTATION OF EMANCIPATION

The Abolition of Slavery was one of many works of art created in commemoration of emancipation over the course of the nineteenth century. Massimo De Grassi and Kirk Savage have noted that the frontal, open pose of Pezzicar’s figure recalls images made by white English artists after the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Atlantic, including a medallion struck by the Birmingham medalist Joseph Davis and a popular mezzotint engraved after Alexander Rippingille entitled The First of August (figs. 5.3 and 5.4).30 Davis and Rippingille show Black men in triumphant poses with arms outstretched, situating them in vaguely tropical landscapes strewn with the detritus of broken chains and whips. Both traded in exoticizing, essentializing stereotypes about race, slavery, and abolition; in their depiction of joyful ex-slaves, they elided not only the long histories of enslaved resistance and marronage in the Caribbean but also the stipulation of eight years of forced apprenticeship for people decreed free in the wake of the Slavery Abolition Act in the British Empire. Pezzicar does something similar with his sculpture, making visibly obvious the specter of slavery with the broken manacle on the figure’s right wrist and the fragmented chain at the statue’s base. Like other sculptors of the day, including Charles Cordier and John Quincy Adams Ward, he connotes racial Blackness by manipulating the patina of the bronze itself, chasing the figure’s hair to effect a matte texture and differentiating corporeal skin from paper—while the body of the statue retains a uniform deep brown hue, the Emancipation Proclamation has been burnished to shine like bright copper. Pezzicar’s statue nevertheless differed from other contemporary sculptures, most notably the American sculptor Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial, which was unveiled in Lincoln Park in southeastern Washington, DC, the same year that The Abolition of Slavery appeared on view at the Philadelphia Centennial (fig. 5.5). Ball’s bronze group depicted an African American man with shackled wrists kneeling before Abraham Lincoln, recalling the long and perjorative iconography of abolition from the Wedgwood Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 149

149

22-05-18 10:13 AM

figure 5.3 Joseph Davis, medal commemorating the abolition of slavery, 1834. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0.

figure 5.4 Stephen Gimber after Alexander Rippingille, Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies, 1838, engraving. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-068321.

64433int.indd 150

22-05-18 10:13 AM

figure 5.5 Thomas Ball, Freedman’s Memorial, 1876, Lincoln Park, Washington, DC. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-npcc00108.

medallion on.31 The man represented by The Abolition of Slavery conversely stands upright in a striding pose and his calf muscles tense and flex to propel him forward. And while his outstretched arms and broken chain recall the earlier imagery of Davis and Rippingille, Pezzicar imbues the body of the figure with dynamism and strength as if to suggest he has secured his own liberation. He wields a sheaf of bronze inscribed with excerpts of the Emancipation Proclamation; here Lincoln is present only in word rather than body. The figure has less in common with Ball’s group and more with the pair represented by Lewis’s Forever Free of 1867, whose standing male figure gazes upwards while raising a left arm with a broken shackle. What is more, The Abolition of Slavery was a corporeally capacious statue that engaged space in a dynamic way. The figure steps forward with his movement accentuated by a flowing cloth knotted at the waist. His stride might be read as radical; the motif of mobility, as Anne Lafont reminds us, can be an invitation to explore the possibilities of a work of art beyond its original colonial frame.32 The sculpture’s large scale further lends the figure a commanding presence. The seven-and-a-half-foot-high statue approaches a colossal scale when placed atop an additional pedestal, as it was Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 151

151

22-05-18 10:13 AM

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33 If the shackled figure in Ball’s composition kneels beneath Lincoln with the arc of his back ensconced beneath the president’s extended arm, it is the viewer of The Abolition of Slavery who must duck beneath and conform their body to the space occupied the statue, thus initiating a phenomenologically active and deferential engagement with this powerful figure. Such a bold composition was unprecedented in nineteenth-century sculpture.34 The figure represented is over-life size, dynamic, and powerful: as one period critic noted, “The attitude is impressive and full of vital force.”35 Indeed, Pezzicar’s sculpture proved striking to many Centennial viewers, and it is their responses to which we now turn. “A GREAT BRONZE PHOTOGRAPH”

The Abolition of Slavery appeared on display at the Centennial in Memorial Hall, the Beaux Arts building erected for the fair’s fine arts exhibitions. It stood amid other sculpture entries from Austria—mostly portrait busts in marble and religious statuary in wood—and was installed flush against the wall in a loggia that divided galleries between the hall’s main section and its annex (see fig. 0.3).36 Visible from the balcony, it was “striking to the eye upon entering,” as one contemporary viewer observed.37 Another exhibition chronicler noted of its popularity, “F. Pezzicar has a colossal bronze statue of ‘The Freed Slave,’ about which crowds gather daily in admiration.”38 Yet this response was not entirely positive. The many period commentaries on the sculpture reveal it to have been an embattled site of criticism, in large part because of the ways it diverged from viewers’ expectations, assumptions, and ideas as to precisely how emancipation should be commemorated on visual terms. In parsing the tenor of these responses, it is first helpful to consider the longer history of images and abolitionist activism in Philadelphia, a city well known as a nexus of the American antislavery movement. The Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society had long mobilized visual material in their work; we will recall from chapter 1 that it was to their Philadelphia headquarters that Josiah Wedgwood famously mailed a packet of his jasperware medallions in 1788. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Society regularly published engravings and lithographs alongside their usual fare of pamphlets, tracts, and treatises. One especially famous image circulated by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society was a mezzotint featuring the likeness of the Mende revolutionary Sengbe Pieh, or Joseph Cinqué, who in 1839 led a revolt on the Spanish slaver Amistad en route to Cuba (fig. 5.6). The insurgents, many of whom were fellow Mende from Sierra Leone, successfully overthrew the ship’s captain and diverted its course with the intent of returning to west Africa, but remaining Spanish crew members instead navigated the boat to New York.39 The men were subsequently captured by government officials, incarcerated in New Haven, and brought to trial, at which point Cinqué sat for the local portrait painter Nathaniel Jocelyn.40 Commissioned by the Black abolitionist Robert Purvis, a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Jocelyn’s portrait of Cinqué was part of a successful bid to 152

64433int.indd 152

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:14 AM

figure 5.6 John Sartain after Nathaniel Jocelyn, Cinque, The Chief of the Amistad Captives, 1840, mezzotint. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-08220.

64433int.indd 153

22-05-18 10:14 AM

convince American public of the heroism and innocence of the insurgents who had been illegally enslaved aboard the Amistad.41 The Philadelphia printmaker John Sartain—who would, incidentally, later go on to lead the art department at the Centennial Exhibition—engraved the mezzotint after Jocelyn’s portrait around 1840 and circulated it widely on behalf of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Both Jocelyn’s portrait and Sartain’s mezzotint were critical sites of antislavery discourse in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. As Richard Powell and Ross Barrett have separately discussed, Purvis submitted the original portrait for exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but it was censored on the grounds that it might incite violence in light of white attacks on celebrations held by Black Philadelphians in commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.42 Barrett notes how the mezzotint that subsequently circulated upon the painting’s censure proved nevertheless an important visual anchor for the politics of antislavery and Pan-Africanism in the city.43 For many, the image of Cinqué standing in a resolute pose and clutching a staff of sugarcane made for a powerful statement of Black heroism and resistance. It was Jocelyn’s portrait of Cinqué that a journalist for the Philadelphia African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder had in mind when viewing The Abolition of Slavery at the Centennial. The paper’s correspondent R. D. Dove hoped that Pezzicar’s sculpture might be as effective as Jocelyn’s portrait had been decades before, writing, “We are all familiar with the portrait of Cinque, the hero of the Amistad, who himself struck the blow for liberty.”44 But if “Mr. Jocelyn, in transferring to canvas the African Liberator, has been very successful,” the case was different for Pezzicar, who “failed in his endeavor.” Dove wrote of the sculpture, It could not be well more realistic. So true it is to nature, that it seems a great bronze photograph, if that were a possibility, and causes one to regret that it is formed of such enduring material. . . . The subject should have been endowed with beauty of form, grandeur of action and an ideal development approaching the heroic.45

Dove grounds his anxieties about what Pezzicar’s sculpture was—and was not—in relationship to an aesthetic ideal to which images might be held and judged. His comments on what the sculpture ought to be evoke the language of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose famous pronouncement that representations of the human figure must evoke “a noble simplicity and a calm grandeur” remained an unquestioned standard for sculptors and their critics well into the late nineteenth century.46 Previous chapters of this book have addressed the ways that Winckelmann’s prescriptions for sculpture were enmeshed in racism. He makes clear in The History of Ancient Art (1764) that the only bodies capable of such noble simplicity and calm grandeur were white ones.47 Yet Dove’s critique of The Abolition of Slavery gestures to the broader issue of sculptural materiality as well as what was at stake in the representation of Black subjects at the Centennial and why recourse to a neoclassical ideal might have some value (his praise 154

64433int.indd 154

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:14 AM

figure 5.7 Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876, marble. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois.

for the Jocelyn portrait is relevant here, for in it Cinqué does not don period attire but rather a bright white toga reminiscent of ancient Roman senatorial garb). Not far from Pezzicar’s statue in Memorial Hall stood Edmonia Lewis’s monumental marble Death of Cleopatra, which depicted the famous Egyptian queen just moments after her suicide by the bite of a venomous snake (fig. 5.7).48 Unlike her colleague William Wetmore Story, who also exhibited a sculpture on the same subject, Lewis did not depict Cleopatra with the features of a Black Egyptian woman.49 Drawing upon research she had conducted while visiting displays of Egyptian art at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, Lewis located “Egyptian” motifs in Cleopatra’s royal headdress and on the throne itself, which features sphinx heads and hieroglyphs, but based her facial features on profile views from ancient Roman coins.50 Charmaine Nelson argues that this refusal of “visible racial signs of Blackness” by way of the medium of marble and the representational choices Lewis made was a way to deflect racial Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 155

155

22-05-18 10:14 AM

stereotypes in responses to her work.51 Despite—and because of—its associations with an unmarked white ideal, neoclassicism could paradoxically function as a strategy to deflect the most vitriolic of anti-Black racism. Indeed, much of the commentary surrounding The Abolition of Slavery consisted of unbridled racism masquerading as art criticism, even as it came from the pen of self-avowed abolitionists like William Dean Howells.52 As Pezzicar’s son would recall in a reflection on his father’s career several decades later, the sculpture “touched the sensibility of white Americans a little too much.”53 Circa 1876 in the United States, the intersection of sculptural realism with the representation of a racialized body proved an impossibility. CHRONICLING THE MAKING OF THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AFTER THE FACT

It is not surprising that Pezzicar’s statue elicited a great deal of commentary. We have already seen how it did not fit in with established sculptural paradigms of the nineteenth century. It came neither from the world of idealized marble statuary that had been the mainstay of sculpture galleries at international exhibitions up to that point, nor did it resemble contemporary monuments to emancipation like Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial. Several months into the Centennial, the journalist Alexander Wheelock Thayer published an exposé on the sculpture’s origins in the Boston Daily Advertiser. Thayer was privy to inside knowledge about the work: he lived in Trieste, where he had been appointed to the diplomatic post of American consul, and also happened to be a close friend of the artist.54 As he noted, news of the statue’s display “induced me to visit the sculptor in his studio, and obtain from him some particulars concerning its conception and execution.”55 Thayer’s lengthy excursus has not yet been mentioned in scholarship on the sculpture, and adds much to our knowledge of its making. Of its many details, perhaps the most compelling is the larger narrative he weaves and the ways it relates to histories of enslavement and freedom. If The Abolition of Slavery was, as one contemporary critic noted, “a statue emblematical of emancipation,” its conception turned upon the obligations and contradictions to inhere in that very term.56 We will recall that Pezzicar was moved to create his sculpture “by the news of Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863.” This was how Thayer opened his account as he traced the sculpture’s origin to “events which he then determined to commemorate in a suitable work.”57 But neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment two years later brought about abolition in any totality. Liberal narratives of history have routinely framed slavery and freedom in oppositional terms and, in turn, posited emancipation as a temporal turning point in this dialectic. Yet, as scholars of the Black radical tradition have discussed, emancipation did not translate into a larger condition of “freedom” for formerly enslaved people in the United States after 1865. As a juridical operation set into motion by a constitutional amendment, it confronted the maintenance and shoring up of existing racist power structures formed through enslavement.58 This is what Saidiya Hartman terms the 156

64433int.indd 156

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:14 AM

afterlife of slavery.59 Emancipation was “nonevent,” as she writes in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), as sweeping narratives of liberty obscured formulations of resubordination and indebtedness.60 The Abolition of Slavery figured, in a corporeal sense, the phantasmagoria of liberty put forth in the Reconstruction era. In both siting and ethos, the Centennial commemorated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as they were imagined by the nation’s white male framers at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 1776. The celebration of the document’s core ideals of liberty and equity was rendered even more urgent in the wake of both the Civil War and of slavery’s abolition. Pezzicar spoke to this impulse in a nominal, titular sense. But if The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863 reads almost like the title of a history painting, the work itself mobilizes a single, anonymous Black man to stand in for and personify a monolithic concept of abolition. Yet, as Maurice Wallace reminds us, to see symbolically in the form and figure of Black masculinity is to see selectively, if at all.61 The figure embodied by the sculpture is at once spectacularly visible and always already out of view. Corporeal Blackness is thus yoked to—or bound to appear, to draw from Huey Copeland—a narrative of the history of slavery and its abolition.62 Put another way, Pezzicar construes emancipation as event and body, fusing together the former and the latter. Thayer’s account of the making of the sculpture itself is especially striking in this respect. In relaying “some particulars concerning its conception and execution,” he notes that Pezzicar began his project with a series of small-scale clay sketches before modeling a life-size figure.63 The sculptor reportedly based these early maquettes upon two models: “Buisson, a colored man of Trieste, for characteristics of race, and an employee in the port office,—a fine gymnast; a man of noble figure,—for muscular development.” The result was “two fine expressive figures, but not truly African.”64 The consul then recounts a defining moment in Pezzicar’s search for a model, a passage worth quoting at length, In the spring of 1873, two vessels—the “Supply” and the “Guard”—belonging to the United States navy came to Trieste with cargos for the Vienna Exhibition, and the Guard remained here throughout the season. Several officers—Mr. Pezzicar thinks at the invitation of the United States consul—visited his studio and confirmed the consul’s opinion that the statue was lacking in the characteristics of his race. Luckily, there was employed on the Guard an emancipated slave from North Carolina, shipped under the name of Brown, a fine type of his race. Lieutenant Hitchcock, acting commander, offered the services of this man to the sculptor, who gladly accepted them, and patiently began his third full-sized figure, which, with some fifteen or twenty visits of Brown, was completed. Our officers, on seeing the result, heartily commended it in all points save the modeling of the chest, which they were highly dissatisfied. Pezzicar, from the want of a language in common, was unable to argue the matter, and the question was decided by the gentlemen coming again and bringing Brown with them. He stripped, placed himself in position, and, to their surprise, the figure was seen to be a faultless copy of the man.65 Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 157

157

22-05-18 10:14 AM

It is unclear the extent to which aspects of this tale are apocryphal or embellished. (It is, however, plausible: the Supply and Guard called at the port of Trieste in 1873 while transporting cargo to the Vienna world’s fair, and certainly Thayer, as both consul and friend of the artist’s, could have facilitated the exchange he describes.)66 More compelling though, is the very choice to offer such an anecdote to an American newspaper as an essay authenticating the work’s making. A pivotal moment in Thayer’s account hinges on the body of the studio model. As Denise Murrell has argued, Black models were important agents in the aesthetics of European modernism in the late nineteenth century. In Édouard Manet’s Olympia of 1863, for example, it is the Black model Laure who “figures modernity with an ambiguity, a contingency, that captures the fraught interracial interface of the era.”67 The contingency that Murrell rightly evokes also opens onto the question of artistic labor, particularly as it unfolded in the space of the studio. To what extent did the labor of modeling, and the social and economic circumstances to precede it, stem from histories of enslavement and colonialism? Nineteenth-century artists’ studios could be sites of racist and sexual violence for models of color especially, and scholars have drawn parallels between the domain of bodily control that was the studio and the carceral surveillance of the plantation.68 Thayer’s image of white naval officers “[offering] the services” of a Black sailor to a white artist over the course of “some fifteen or twenty visits” is no exception. The palimpsest of enslavement and the labor of the formerly enslaved haunted the making of The Abolition of Slavery. The terms of its creation and the identity of its model paralleled the very conditions of Lincoln’s proclamation to which Pezzicar initially sought to respond. Those newly free, as the 1863 document decreed, “will be received into the armed service of the United States.”69 These terms undergirded the formation of units like the 54th Massachusetts, discussed in the previous chapter, a quarter of whose enlistment comprised formerly enslaved men; many scholars have observed how military service was the rubric through which white men recognized the masculine personhood of Black men in the United States after emancipation.70 Thayer reifies this idea only to further defer the subjectivity of the North Carolinian artist’s model, who by turns figures into the narrative as ex-slave, sailor, and “faultless copy” for the sculpture. Blackness remains fungible rather than liberatory. In attempting to commemorate emancipation, Pezzicar exposed its contingencies, which were themselves tethered to the history of slavery and its enduring effects. OF MONUMENTS, FAILED AND PARTIAL

Pezzicar’s sculpture was a study in contradiction. He produced a composition that proved radically different than other depictions of formerly enslaved people in commemorations of emancipation. One American critic described the figure as one “who has broken his chain;” the very idea of action as implied by its dynamic pose had the potential to suggest narratives of abolition in which the enslaved stood as agents 158

64433int.indd 158

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:14 AM

figure 5.8 Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1876, bronze. National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson.

rather than recipients of liberation. Yet Thayer’s account of the sculpture’s making, published after the sculpture’s initial reception and several months into its display at the Centennial, arguably contained its meaning. While Pezzicar may have sculpted a largely unprecedented image of a free Black man in both form and scale, the story behind the conception of that image was deeply entangled in the slave past and its economy of fungibility. The sculpture’s materiality was not inconsequential to this paradox. By 1876, many artists and critics had turned to bronze—as opposed to marble—as the medium par excellence of modern sculpture for its tensile strength and ability to render textural detail with sensitive accuracy, particularly in depictions of the human body.71 It was in this moment that a young Auguste Rodin, then at the outset of his career, cast The Age of Bronze, a youthful male figure “so remarkably real” that many wondered whether he Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 159

159

22-05-18 10:14 AM

had created the nude figure directly from body casts of his model (fig. 5.8).72 If the Canovan neoclassical body—white, marble, and idealized—had previously reigned as the pinnacle of academic achievement for a sculptor like Hiram Powers, in the later decades of the century artists began to explore other possibilities of how a statue could be made and what it might look like. Consider the praise of the Trieste newspaper Il Cittadino, which proclaimed The Abolition of Slavery to be “a major advance in statuary: the artist has distanced himself from classicism, aligning himself with the modern aspiration that seeks the truth in everything and for everything.”73 Yet the truthfulness of bronze could equally be a liability, as R. D. Dove revealed in his critique of the sculpture for the Christian Recorder. Mobilized by a white artist as an index for corporeal blackness, bronze did not so much open onto truth as it did to critics’ essentializing stereotypes about race and the body. Bronze sculptures are themselves fraught with a series of contradictions and inversions. Röhlich and Pönninger, who produced Pezzicar’s statue in at the Royal and Imperial Foundry in Vienna, followed the traditional conventions of lost wax casting to produce the figure over a multistep process. They would have begun by creating a plaster mold from an original model, into which molten wax would be poured. The resulting positive wax model then received two treatments: an “investment core” (usually a slurry of a harder plaster- or ceramic-based compound) poured into its interior, and then an exterior layer of plaster investment atop its surface. This plaster-waxplaster sandwich was then fired in a kiln, at which point the wax would melt and drain out. The result was a plaster body with a thin deposit within—recently vacated by the molten wax—into which molten bronze could be poured. Once the liquid metal cooled and set, the foundrymen removed the exterior plaster layer and interior investment core to reveal a hollow bronze body.74 Not unlike the process of reproductive printmaking—which Jennifer Roberts evocatively describes as an “art of estrangement”— bronze casting relied on the speculative deferral and reversal of multiple bodies, often ephemeral and always partial.75 This is especially apparent when viewing The Abolition of Slavery from close range. Seam marks run through several areas of the figure’s body; the composition was so large and spatially diffuse that its casting had to be completed in several pieces. For centuries the skill of foundrymen at the Hapsburg court had been indexed by their ability to cast a bronze sculpture in a single unified composition, but Pezzicar’s statue proved an unruly body in this respect.76 Such contingencies are perhaps befitting of The Abolition of Slavery. We might do better to think of the sculpture as a failed monument. Pezzicar and Thayer hoped the sculpture would remain in the United States, though it did not attract a patron and returned to the artist’s studio in Trieste after the exhibition’s close. Its scale and medium suggest the artist envisioned it to function as a monument, perhaps one that might be erected in a public space, as was the case for Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, DC. Indeed, Thayer even remarked that he wished “it could take the place of some of the Italian platitudes which adorn (?) the Capitol in Washington.”77 But the 160

64433int.indd 160

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

22-05-18 10:14 AM

1877 observations of the newspaper L’Adria upon the sculpture’s Trieste homecoming are especially revealing in this regard. “No country raises monuments as a sad reminder of civil strife,” they reported, “and on the other side of the ocean, The Abolition of Slavery would have this meaning.”78 These remarks hint at the impossibility of the task Pezzicar set for himself in commemorating emancipation. It was not a discrete event that could be embodied by a single figure, but something far more ambivalent and complex. What a sculptural monument to abolition might look like—and if indeed it were possible—remained yet to be seen circa 1876. As Sarah Lewis notes of nineteenthcentury sculpture, “Public monuments were meant to historicize, but emancipation asked citizens to consider futurity. This enterprise challenged sculptors . . . that which would have happened had not yet occurred.”79 Recall the upward yet unresolved motion of the two figures in Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (see fig. 4.17). As active and dynamic figures, the couple, and the man especially, has much in common with Pezzicar’s sculpture. Yet the two works diverge in critical ways. Lewis’s pair gaze upward while they rise; the narrative of the sculpture remains unresolved. The title she ultimately chose for the work suggests that freedom is eternal and assured, but the shape it will take hovers out of the viewer’s field of vision. Conversely, Pezzicar’s figure gazes outwards and assumes a declarative stance, and the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation he wields seems thus to function as a legible statement of his freedom—a terminus of the composition in both a spatial and narrative sense. But this text itself is incomplete, with the majority of Lincoln’s original text removed and replaced with sets of ellipses, some lengthier than others, to read: I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves . . . are, and henceforward shall be free . . . . . . . Upon this act . . . I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. . . . A. Lincoln, January 1st, 1863.

Pezzicar transforms a military order rife with conditions, technicalities, and expectations of what emancipation would assure and for whom it would be assured into a universalizing statement on freedom. At the ends of slavery, The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863 related to both the possibilities and fraudulence of what it might mean to be free.

Bet ween Libert y and Emancipation

64433int.indd 161

161

22-05-18 10:14 AM

64433int.indd 162

22-05-18 10:14 AM

CODA “Sculptured Dream of Liberty”

I

of the Centennial Exhibition, another monumental work joined Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery. As part of their nation’s entry, France sent the right arm and torch-bearing hand of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s colossal statue entitled Liberty Enlightening the World, more commonly known today as the Statue of Liberty. Installed outdoors on the grounds of Fairmount Park, Bartholdi’s thirty-foot-high fragment was more architecture than sculpture, consisting of plates of thin hammered copper supported by a maze of internal iron scaffolding.1 It was sent to Philadelphia as the first completed part of what promised to be larger statue of a feminine allegory of liberty, presented as a gift of friendship from France to the United States.2 The rest of the statue remained under construction in Bartholdi’s Paris workshop; indeed, the artist saw the Centennial display as a chance to raise money to complete the monument and its pedestal. Fairgoers could thus pay an admission fee of fifty cents to enter the edifice and climb a ladder up that led to an exterior balcony surrounding the flame of the torch, or they could buy bronze N THE FINAL WEEKS

163

64433int.indd 163

22-05-18 10:14 AM

figure 6.1 Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, presentation drawing of “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” 1875, charcoal, heightened with white chalk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry G. Sperling Fund, 2014.

presentation maquettes featuring the yet-to-be completed statue in its entirety in a tent installed at the statue’s base (see fig. 0.8). The display was thus speculative in nature, as the statue’s completion was contingent on its reception and a set of funds that Bartholdi had not yet secured. The fragment certainly created a spectacle. The many stereographs of the enormous metal arm seemingly sprouting from the Centennial fairgrounds enjoyed a wide circulation during the fair and its years after, especially after the full-scale statue was finally completed and dedicated on Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor in 1886 (fig. 6.1). But its reception at the Centennial was decidedly lukewarm. With the completion of a very expensive statue—one that that many Americans were not even sure they wanted—not yet assured, what the New York Times dismissively called “the French statue” was merely “an isolated and useless arm and hand.”3 While Bartholdi and his French colleagues touted their work in progress as a “Monument of Independence,” critics in the United States did not yet see beyond its base corporeality to these loftier allegorical ideals.4 Although corporeal figurations of liberty were tangibly and visibly present at the Centennial in the form of both Pezzicar’s sculpture and Bartholdi’s fragment, they were partial and incomplete. Bartholdi, significantly, first conceived of Liberty Enlightening the World with the abolition of slavery in mind. In what would later become a widely recounted anecdote, 164

64433int.indd 164

Coda

22-05-18 10:14 AM

he came to the idea in conversation with Édouard René de Laboulaye, the former president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, who in 1865 suggested a monument be made to celebrate the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the United States.5 This commemorative impulse will, of course, remind us of Pezzicar’s idea to create The Abolition of Slavery. But unlike his Italian counterpart, Bartholdi chose not to personify liberty as formerly enslaved Black man bearing a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. He instead chose to embody this abstract concept as a white woman draped in a classicizing Roman stola, standing before a set of broken shackles. What was specific became universal in the two decades that spanned the statue’s conception and completion, and a monument to emancipation turned into an allegory of liberty. Bartholdi and his workmen eventually completed Liberty Enlightening the World in 1886, and it was unveiled in New York amid great fanfare in October of that year. Among the day’s festivities included the reading of a dedicatory ode to the statue composed by John Greenleaf Whittier, an acclaimed poet and reformer who had been one of the founding members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The poem celebrated the statue as a gift from France, connecting the “sculptured Dream of Liberty” to the history of abolition on “Freedom’s soil” in the United States.6 Whittier’s dedication also stood in many ways as a bookend to one of the first poems he wrote nearly fifty years prior. “Our Countrymen in Chains!” was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, printed on a broadside beneath an engraved adaptation of Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion. If Whittier had originally deplored “the fetter’s clank” on those enslaved “in a land of light and law,” in 1886 he envisioned Liberty Enlightening the World as an embodiment of quite the opposite, standing as beacon of “light and hope to all who sit / In chains of darkness.”7 Three decades after emancipation, the avowed abolitionist saw the colossal statue as a universalizing symbol of slavery’s ends. A few years after its dedication, Bartholdi’s allegory of liberty would prove a striking sight for the American sociologist, activist, and author W. E. B. Du Bois when he entered New York harbor by steamship in 1894. Du Bois had been on an extended sojourn in Europe, at work on his doctoral dissertation about the suppression of the African slave trade.8 Many decades later he recounted this moment in his autobiography, recalling how he observed the hope and excitement of many white European immigrants aboard the ship who anticipated building new lives in the United States. He did not, however, share this sense of anticipation, noting instead, “I know not what multitude of emotions surged in the others.”9 At a moment of Jim Crow segregation and mounting racial violence across the country, the idea of liberty as promised by the statue seemed a fiction for many Black Americans. In the decades to follow, Du Bois would go on to conceive of enslavement as a system with no discrete material ends in time or space but rather one defined by a series of reversals, deferrals, and reverberations, noting in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”10 At the turn of the twentieth century, it was yet unclear what vision of freedom—if any—sculpture might offer at the ends of slavery. Coda

64433int.indd 165

165

22-05-18 10:14 AM

64433int.indd 166

22-05-18 10:14 AM

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 15. 2. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), xi. 3. “Powers’ Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, November 27, 1850, 2; “The Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, November 30, 1850, 2; “Powers’ Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, December 1, 1850, 2; “The Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, December 10, 1850, 2. 4. “Powers’s Greek Slave in St. Louis. For the National Era [Saint Louis, December 1850],” National Era, January 16, 1851, 9. 5. The sculpture was displayed in Nathaniel Phillips’s music store, located in the four-story Wyman’s Hall on Market Street opposite the Courthouse. “Powers’ Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, December 8, 1850, 2; “The Greek Slave,” Daily Missouri Republican, December 10, 1850, 2. 6. “Powers’s Greek Slave in St. Louis. For the National Era,” 10. 7. Josiah Wedgwood to Benjamin Franklin, February 29, 1788, Mss.B.F85, Benjamin Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society. 8. See especially Michael Leja, “Issues in Early Mass Visual Culture,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 507–524. 9. The literature on the consumption and reproduction of nineteenthcentury sculpture is extensive. Especially relevant to this study are R.

167

64433int.indd 167

22-05-18 10:14 AM

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

168

64433int.indd 168

Tess Korobkin, “The Greek Slave and Materialities of Reproduction,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/korobkinon-the-greek-slave-and-materialities-of-reproduction; Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Image Peddling,” New-York Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (2006), 64–74; Thayer Tolles, “Modelling a Reputation: The American Sculptor and New York City,” Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000); J. R. Oldfield, “Abolition, Visual Culture, and Popular Politics,” Popular Politics and British-Anti Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 155–185. Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic as a zone of cultural interchange forged out and in spite of the economic, social, and political relations of plantation slavery is an essential model here. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Key studies that take Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as a frame for considering circum-Atlantic histories of art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries include Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Kay Dian Kriz and Geoff Quilley, eds., An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003). See also Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, eds., Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (London: Tate Publishing, 2010). On the transnational dimensions of nineteenth-century sculpture, see Tomas Macsotay, ed., Rome, Travel, and the Sculpture Capital, c. 1770–1825 (London: Routledge, 2017); Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); Karen Lemmey, “The Invention of Hiram Powers: American Sculptor Abroad,” in Hiram Powers a Firenze: Atti del Convegno di studi nel bicentenario della nascita (1805–2005), ed. Caterina Del Vivo and Katherine Gaja (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), 83–93; Cinzia Maria Sicca, The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy, c. 1700-c. 1860 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 2000). Cedric Robinson, “Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 9–28. Robinson, Black Marxism; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963). For discussion of Robinson in relation to contemporary art, see Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11–12. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 [1935] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. Fred Moten, In the Break: Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967), 12–23. Henry Tuckerman, “To the Greek Slave,” New York Daily Tribune, September 9, 1847. Tuckerman’s ode to The Greek Slave is also a clear reference to Shylock’s monologue in The Merchant of Venice, in which he makes the appeal for his own humanity in the face of anti-

NOTES

22-05-18 10:14 AM

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

Semitism. William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 3.1.44–60 in Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 1364. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue—The Emancipated Slave,” Boston Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1876; “La statua di Pezzicar,” L’Adria, May 15, 1877. On the reception of Ovid and metaphors of the sculptural in eighteenth-century art criticism, see especially Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “The Artist-Painter and the Philosopher-Sculptor,” The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 55–97. See also Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 11; Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006), 175–207. Along a similar vein, Mark Seltzer identifies a central problem of nineteenth-century American literary culture to be “a concern about the status of person, as subjects and as living property, and collaterally, a concern about the status of material things, such as chairs or tables, or more anxiously, bodies.” Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48. Roberts acknowledges this in her own introduction. Roberts, Transporting Visions, 11. See also David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999), 415–455. Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Neoclassical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020), 16; Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York; Wendy Bellion, “Pitt on a Pedestal: Sculpture and Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” European Journal of American Studies 14, no. 4 (2019). See also Luke Syson et al., Life Like: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018). Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 88. Sianne Ngai, “Animatedness,” in Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 89–125. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), 1720. Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6–8. Best anchors his analysis of Blackstone’s Commentaries in the text’s discussion of the “twinned embodiment” of the kingly body as “one that exists in a twofold structure of doubling and projection—of a supernatural body in a natural body.” He argues that this way of corporeal thinking was transformed in the wake of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the new formations of sovereignty that followed. More specifically, he identifies a “similar structure of embodiment” at work in nineteenth-century American property law—for which the Commentaries, published and circulated widely in the United States, were foundational—with the figure of the chattel slave. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties, 6–8. Ibid., 9. As Wendy Bellion notes, statues “exert presence and excite relations” because of their formal qualities of shape, height, mass, volume, density, color, and texture. Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: From Revolution to Reenactment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 9. On sculpture as “marble index,” see Malcolm Baker, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 49–75. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear, NOTES

64433int.indd 169

169

22-05-18 10:14 AM

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

170

64433int.indd 170

1–22; and Copeland and Krista Thompson, “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual,” Representations 113, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 1–15. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfreide Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, IL.: Open Court, 1987). Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Representing the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 60–62. James Smalls, “Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 283–312; Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Michael Hatt, “ ‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 1 (July 1992), 21–35; Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1787), 148; Josiah Wedgwood, Catalogue of Cameos, Intaglios, Medals, Bas-Reliefs, Busts and Small Statues, with a General Account of Tablets, Vases, Ecritoires, and Other Ornamental and Useful Articles: The Whole Formed in Different Kinds of Porcelain and Terra Cotta, Chiefly After the Antique, and the Finest Modes of Modern Artists (Etruria, 1787), 2. For an astute analysis of Jefferson’s text in relationship to eighteenth-century print and aesthetics, see Jennifer Y. Chuong, “Engraving’s ‘Immovable Veil of Black’: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique,” Art Bulletin (forthcoming, June 2022). Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1916), xx. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 71. Michelangelo’s fundamental idea of sculpture as an art of reduction and of taking away is pertinent. Michelangelo Buonarotti, “Madrigal, 1538–1544 [Poem 152 for Vittoria Colonna]” in The Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 305. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966), 42–44, and “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966), 20–23. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 5–6. Chen, Animacies, 42. For Chen’s discussion of Fanon, see Animacies 23–55, especially pp. 33–35; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lan Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967). Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). See also Chen, Animacies, 5–6; and Chen, “A Questionnaire on New Materialisms,” October 155 (Winter 2016), 21–22. The original passage appeared as, “Überhaupt brauchte die verhülte Sklaverei der Lohnharbeiter in Europa zum Sockel die offene Sklaverei in der neuen Welt.” Marx’s use of “sockel” has been consistently translated into the English as “pedestal.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 759–760. An extended analysis of this passage appears in Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 299–308.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:14 AM

44. “Powers’s Greek Slave in St. Louis,” 9. 45. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Truth as Libyan Sibyl,” in Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 37–44. 46. Scott v Emerson, 15 Mo. 576, 586 (Mo. 1852) preceded Scott v Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857). For a history of the Scotts’ case, see Paul Finkelman, ed., Dred Scott v. Sanford: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997). 47. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015), 49. 48. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 63–65. 49. Two recent and influential studies include Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: An Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). See also Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 50. For further, see Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). 51. Hartman’s conception of emancipation as “nonevent” is essential here. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 116. Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); King, The Black Shoals; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 52. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 48. 53. Wedgwood to Franklin, February 29, 1788. 54. Franklin to Wedgwood, May 15, 1788, #3927–1, Benjamin Franklin Collection, Yale University Library. 55. On gender, race, and what Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James patronizingly referred to as “white marmorean flock” of American women sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, see Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors, 1–14; and Nelson, The Color of Stone, 7–15, as well as forthcoming work by Gloria Bell and Julia Sienkewicz. 56. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, 9. 57. Vivien Green [Fryd], “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave: Emblem of Freedom,” American Art Journal (1982), 31–39; Jean Fagan Yellin, “Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers’ Statue of Liberty,” American Quarterly (Winter 1986), 798–826. 58. “Local and Provincial: Mr. John Bell’s Bronze ‘A Daughter of Eve,’ ” Manchester Guardian, August 27, 1853, 6. 59. On this topic, see especially Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 15–55. 60. On the relationship between the neoclassical and the monumental across the nineteenth century, see Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). 61. Many thanks to Keir Gravel for sharing his photograph of the felled Colston statue with me. 62. Vanessa Kisuule, “Hollow,” June 9, 2020, Video recording, 1:57, https://youtu.be/b3DKfaK50AU. 63. On this topic, see especially Courtney R. Baker, “The Loud Silence of Monuments,” Dilettante Army (Winter 2020), http://www.dilettantearmy.com/articles/the-loud-silence-of-monuments; Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., The National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 64. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 15. NOTES

64433int.indd 171

171

22-05-18 10:14 AM

1. GRASPING IMAGES

1. Étienne Falconet, “Reflexions on Sculpture,” 1761, in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000), 596. 2. Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1916), xix-xx. 3. The contours of the early modern paragone are rooted in the debate over painting versus poetry in the ancient world, in particular the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis. A classic and comprehensive account appears in Rennselaer W. Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 22, no. 4 (December 1940), 197–269. 4. Leonardo da Vinci, “The Difference between Painting and Sculpture,” in Claire Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in Codex Urbinas (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1992) 281. See also Martin Kemp, “What Is Good about Sculpture? Leonardo’s Paragone Revisited,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture, ed. Gary M. Radke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 63–81. 5. Leonardo, “The Difference between Painting and Sculpture,” 281. 6. Francis Ames-Lewis, “Image and Text: The Paragone,” in The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 141–162; Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor, MI; University of Michigan Press, 1982). 7. Key dates in the abolition of slavery in the Western hemisphere include 1794 (first abolition of slavery in the French colonies; reinstated under Napoleonic rule in 1802), 1804 (Haiti), 1826 (Bolivia), 1829 (Mexico), 1833 (British colonies), 1842 (Uruguay and Paraguay), 1848 (second abolition of slavery in the French colonies), 1851 (Colombia and Ecuador), 1853 (Argentina), 1865 (United States), 1886 (Cuba), and 1888 (Brazil). 8. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, 22. 9. A comprehensive account appears in J. R. Oldfield, “Abolition, Visual Culture, and Popular Politics,” in Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 155–185. 10. See especially Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Meredith Gamer, “George Morland’s Slave Trade and African Hospitality: Slavery, Sentiment, and the Limits of the Abolitionist Image,” in The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, ed. Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing (London: Warburg Institute, 2015), 297; Jane Webster, “The Unredeemed Object: Displaying Abolitionist Artifacts in 2007,” Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 2 (2009), 311–325; Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-century Design,” Journal of Design History 13, no 2 (2000), 93–105. 11. Meeting minutes, May 22, 1787, Minute books of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slavetrade, vol. 1, May 22, 1787–July 9, 1798, Add MS 21254, British Library. 12. Finley, Committed to Memory, 32. 13. J. R. Oldfield, “The London Committee and the Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade,” Historical Journal 35, no. 2 (June 1992), 331–343. 14. Meeting minutes, July 7, 1787, Minute Books of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slavetrade, vol. 1. 15. Meeting minutes, August 17, 1787, and October 16, 1787, Minute Books of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, vol. 1. 16. Already an active participant in other campaigns for reform, Wedgwood joined the London Committee in August 1787 and was a regular attendee of meetings through the 172

64433int.indd 172

NOTES

22-05-18 10:14 AM

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

1790s. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 155; Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion,” 96. Josiah Wedgwood to Benjamin Franklin, February 29, 1788, Mss.B.F85, Benjamin Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society. Franklin to Wedgwood, May 15, 1788, #3927–1, Benjamin Franklin Collection, Yale University Library. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade, by the British Parliament, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 192. Anne Lafont, L’Art et la Race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’oeil des Lumières (Dijon, France: Presses du Réel, 2019); Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, eds., Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Epiphany of the Black Magus Circa 1500,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 1: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, ed., David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11–13. Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (Fall 2017), 89–113. Saidiya Hartman with Catherine Damman, “Saidiya Hartman on Insurgent Histories and the Abolitionist Imaginary,” Artforum, July 14, 2020. Josiah Wedgwood, Experiment Book, July 21, 1774, quoted in Robin Reilly, Wedgwood Jasper (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 74. On silhouettes, race, and enslavement, see Asma Naeem, Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “ ‘Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles’: Silhouettes and African American Identity in the Early Republic,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 1 (March 2005), 22–39. I thank Iris Moon for introducing me to these objects and sharing with me her insights on the token-like quality of the Wedgwood medallion. For further on wage tokens as “emergency money,” see Aileen Dawson, The Art of Worcester Porcelain, 1751–1788, Masterpieces from the British Museum Collection (London: British Museum Press, 2007), 194–195. These included William Dillwyn, George Harrison, Samuel Hoare Jr., John Lloyd, and Joseph Woods Sr. On Meeting for Sufferings and abolition, see Judith Jennings, “The First Abolition Association,” The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 23–24. David Brion Davis, “Quaker Ethic and Antislavery International,” The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1832 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 218–220. Meeting minutes, July 7, 1787, Minute Books of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slavetrade, vol. 1. Mention of this subcommittee, with an engraved illustration of the seal, also appears in Clarkson, The History of the Rise, 1: 450–451. Generally, multifigure groupings or mythological figures with specific attributes appear with a ground, whereas cameo portraits of individuals do not. These distinctions are readily apparent in institutions with large holdings of Wedgwood materials, including the Wedgwood Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Harvard Art Museums. For additional examples, see Reilly, “The Colour Plates,” in NOTES

64433int.indd 173

173

22-05-18 10:14 AM

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

174

64433int.indd 174

Wedgwood Jasper, 31–68; and Elizabeth Bryding Adams, The Dwight and Lucille Beeson Wedgwood Collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1992). Cynthia Hamilton also discusses the antislavery medallion in relationship to Hercules, albeit a different set of images. Hamilton, “Hercules Subdued: The Visual Rhetoric of the Kneeling Slave,” Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 4 (2013): 639–640. Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse X, Delivered to the Students of the Students of The Royal Academy on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 11, 1780,” in Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 177. Hamilton, “Hercules Subdued,” 638–643; Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21–23. Claudia Mattos, “The Torchlight Visit: Guiding the Eye through Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Antique Sculpture Galleries,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (Spring-Autumn 2006), 139–150; Malcom Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000). On Canova’s display strategies, see Christina Ferando, “Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1843,” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2011; Ferando, “Staging Neoclassicism: Antonio Canova’s Exhibition Strategies for Triumphant Perseus,” in Das Originale der Kopie: Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, ed. Marcus Baker, Tatjana Bartsch, Horst Bredekamp, and Charlotte Schreiter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 139–163; Kristina Herrmann Fiore, “Sulle Virtù Dinamiche di Statue e Colossi del Canova,” Sculture Romane del Settecento (Rome: Bonsignori, 2002), 269–294. John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the End of Book III. Chap. VI,” in The Works of John Locke, in Nine Volumes, 12th ed., vol. 1 (London: Rivington, 1824), 459. Ribera’s The Sense of Touch (1615, Norton Simon Museum) shows a blind man cradling an antique bust in his hands, while a painting of a face is cast to the side. A decade and a half later, he returned to the theme in a work originally titled Gambazo, the Blind Man, Famous for his Sculptures—Blind Gambassi, now also known as The Sense of Touch (1632, Museo del Prado). Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” 459. Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007), 895–914. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. by Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35. “ . . . almost without wishing it, our sense of touch is drawn toward every pliant curve and every delicate form.” Herder, Sculpture, 91. Emphasis is original. Herder, Sculpture, 36–37. Herder, Sculpture, 39. Ibid., 40–41. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 55. Clarkson, History of the Rise, 1:14–15. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 218. On slavery, truth, and questions of “witness,” see also Sarah Thomas, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in an Age of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Finley, Committed to Memory, 58–59; Description of a Slave Ship (London: James A. Phillips for the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1789).

NOTES

22-05-18 10:14 AM

48. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 49–50. 49. On architectural rendering, see James S. Ackerman, “The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 28–65; and Ackerman, “Introduction: The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing,” in Conventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrepresentation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2000), 9–36. 50. Charles Baudelaire, “Why Sculpture Is a Bore,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 98. 51. Herder, Sculpture, 39–41. 52. Ibid., 41. 53. Clarkson, History of the Rise, 2: 153. 54. Finley, Committed to Memory, 77–81. 55. Ibid., 81. 56. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14. 57. On slavery and surveillance, see Browne, Dark Matters, 33–62; Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 28–65; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 58. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 41. 59. Clarkson, History of the Rise, 2:187. 60. Examples of the Wedgwood medallion set into jewelry are numerous and varied, ranging from a simple metal pendant in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (accession number 1987.0005) to an ornate ivory brooch at the Art Institute of Chicago (1912.326). These modifications were generally made by consumers, as Mary Guyatt has discussed. Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion,” 94. 61. Although Murray does not mention the Wedgwood medallion by name, his discussion of a sculpture such as Meta Warrick Fuller’s Emancipation of 1913 as “emptied of the usual accessories as well as of the frequent claptrap . . . no crouching slave with uncertain face,” evokes both recent works such as Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial as well as the prototype of the medallion. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 65. 62. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 3. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Ibid., 3. 2. “THE MUTE LANGUAGE OF THE MARBLE”

1. “British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,” Anti-Slavery Reporter 6, no. 68 (August 1851), 135. 2. Henry Tuckerman, “The Greek Slave,” New York Tribune, September 9, 1847. 3. The completion dates and present locations of the six full-scale marble versions—of which five remain extant—of The Greek Slave are version one, 1844, Raby Castle, County Durham, UK; version two, 1846, Corcoran Collection/National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; version three, 1846–1847, Newark Museum, NJ; version four, previously at Whitley Court, Worcestershire, UK, but destroyed during World War II; version five, 1849–1850, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; version six, 1865–1866, Brooklyn Museum, NY. For further details on provenance, see Martina Droth, “Mapping the Greek Slave,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

NOTES

64433int.indd 175

175

22-05-18 10:15 AM

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

176

64433int.indd 176

15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/droth-on-mappingthe-greek-slave; Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, vol. 2 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 157–171. Charmaine Nelson convincingly argues that it was in only the context of post-emancipation America that Powers felt compelled to switch the chains to shackles in his sixth version of The Greek Slave. Nelson, “White Slaves and Black Masters: Appropriation and Disavowal in Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave,” The Color of Stone: Representing the Black Female Subject in NineteenthCentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 74–112. Samuel Gerdts and William Roberts, “The Greek Slave,” The Museum 17 (Winter-Spring 1965), 1–32; Linda Hyman, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture,” Art Journal 35, no. 3 (1976), 216–233; Green [Fryd], “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave: Emblem of Freedom,”31–39; Yellin, “Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers’ Statue of Liberty,” American Quarterly (Winter 1986), 798–826; Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Nelson, The Color of Stone, 75–112; Maurie McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 182–190. Literature on The Greek Slave’s exhibition at the Crystal Palace addresses the sculpture’s role in Anglo-American debates on abolition, including Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014); and Lisa Merrill, “Exhibiting Race ‘under the World’s Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 2 (2012), 321–336. Finally, the most recent writing and digital humanities resources on The Greek Slave, appearing in an online volume edited and compiled by Martina Droth and Michael Hatt, addresses on more forthright terms the sculpture’s relationship to American slavery in a transatlantic context. Droth and Hatt, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: A Transatlantic Object,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org /summer16/droth-hatt-intro-to-the-greek-slave-by-hiram-powers-a-transatlantic-object. B. H. Révoil, “La sculpture en Amérique,” L’Illustration 21 (June 1853), 405. On the allusion to Roman antiquity in John Calhoun, see Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 70–97; and Maurie McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 150–153. William C. Allen, The United States Capitol: A Brief Architectural History (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2001). William C. Allen, History of Slave Laborers in the Construction of the United States Capitol (Washington, DC: Office of the Architect of the Capitol, 2005). Powers’s biography has been rehearsed by many critics and scholars. The most comprehensive account remains Richard Wunder’s monograph and catalogue raisonné: Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, 2 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). On the early decades of his career between the United States and Florence, see also Droth and Hatt, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers”; and Karen Lemmey, “The Invention of Hiram Powers: American Sculptor Abroad,” in Hiram Powers a Firenze: Atti del Convegno di studi nel bicentenario della nascita (1805–2005), ed. Caterina Del Vivo and Katherine Gaja (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), 83–93. Nicholas Penny and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755),” in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, 450–456.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

13. Winckelmann, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,” 455. 14. Ibid., 455. 15. Nelson, The Color of Stone; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves; Hatt, “ ‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 1 (July 1992): 21–35. 16. Johann Johachim Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art [1764], vol. 2, trans. Giles Henry Lodge (New York: J. R . Osgood and Company, 1880), 77. These theories have since been debunked by art historians, curators, and archaeologists. See, for example, Roberta Panzanelli et al., The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008); and David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 17. Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, October 2, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, Cincinnati History Library and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center (hereafter cited in abbreviation as CMC). Scans of the Cincinnati Powers Papers also appear in Reels 815–816 of the Hiram Powers Papers at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. 18. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 2, 26. The marble version of the bust, which was carved in 1859 and presented to the State of North Carolina in 1861, is in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art. 19. On Powers and phrenology, see Charles Colbert, “Faces,” in A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 151–211; Charles Colbert, “Each Little Hillock Hath a Tongue: Phrenology and the Art of Hiram Powers,” Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 (June 1986), 281–300. 20. Quoted in Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts, 188. 21. Wunder, for instance, points how “as time went on [Powers] grew less enchanted with Calhoun’s political theories,” Wunder, Hiram Powers, 2:26. See also Colbert, A Measure of Perfection, 188–189. At the time of this book’s publication, the current object label for the plaster model of this sculpture in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum likewise emphasized how the artist “felt it would be beneficial to his career to do the portrait.” 22. Hiram Powers to Elizabeth Gibson Powers, January 30, 1835, HP 1.01.006, Carte no. 17, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, Florence (hereafter cited in abbreviation as Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux). 23. Powers modeled the bust of William Preston in March 1836. The bust of John Smith Preston appears reproduced in Wunder, Hiram Powers, 86. 24. Hiram Powers to Elizabeth Gibson Powers, June 28, 1836, Carte no. 19, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux. Additional mentions of Calhoun and the Prestons appear in letters to Elizabeth Gibson Powers dated March 11, 1836, May 1, 1836, and May 11, 1836, Carte no. 18; and June 16, 1836, Carte no. 19. 25. Powers executed several minor federal commissions over the course of his career, including statues of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson for the capitol, though as Karen Lemmey notes “neither was of much consequence to Powers’s career and both are all but forgotten.” Lemmey, “The Invention of Hiram Powers: American Sculptor Abroad,” in Hiram Powers a Firenze, 87. A comprehensive discussion of the US Capitol sculpture projects appears in Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 26. A helpful summary detailing Powers’s complex business arrangements, used in this project as a starting point for further archival research at the Gabinetto Vieusseux and the British Institute in Florence, appears in the appendix of Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1, 370–373.

NOTES

64433int.indd 177

177

22-05-18 10:15 AM

27. John Preston to Hiram Powers, November 11, 1842, Box 8, Folder 18, Hiram Powers Papers, 1819–1953, bulk 1835–1883, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited in abbreviation as Hiram Powers Papers, AAA). 28. Hiram Powers to Elizabeth Gibson Powers, June 16, 1836, HP1.01.032, Carte no. 19, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux. 29. Ibid. 30. John Preston to Richard Henry Wilde, March 11, 1841, reproduced in Nathalia Wright, ed., “The Letters of Richard Henry Wilde to Hiram Powers, Part 1,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (September 1962), 304. 31. Hiram Powers to Elizabeth Gibson Powers, June 28, 1836, HP1.01.034, Carte no. 19, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux. 32. “I remitted to you $1000, as heretofore a house in Florence,” John Preston to Hiram Powers, July 11, 1840, Box 8, Folder 18, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. Toward the end of 1842, Preston notes that he will cease to “continue regularly the remittances” because of financial difficulties but promises support when he is “afloat again.” In 1845, he informs Powers, “I can now indulge myself by rendering services . . . in that glorious career you are now running.” Preston to Powers, November 11, 1842, Box 8, Folder 18; and Preston to Powers, July 28, 1845, Box 8, Folder 19, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 33. Scholars have mentioned Preston’s financing of Powers’s career before, usually in brief and with little reference to the source of his wealth. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 1, 79–81; Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 8; Nelson, The Color of Stone, 94; Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 50. On Houmas, see William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the MidNineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 137. 34. John Preston, Address of Hon. John S. Preston to the Convention of Virginia, February 19, 1861 (Columbia, SC: R. W. Gibbes, 1861). 35. John Preston to Powers, October 29, 1836; Preston to Powers, July 11, 1840, Box 8, Folder 18. See also Powers to William C. Preston, February 5, 1852, when he writes to John Preston’s brother to ask “at what seasons is he at Columbia or at N. Orleans.” Box 8, Folder 21, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 36. Charmaine Nelson, “Landscaping Montreal,” Slavery, Geography, and Empire in NineteenthCentury Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 157–194; Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 37. Laura D. Corey and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “Visions of Collecting,” in Making the Met, 1870–2020, ed. Andrea Bayer with Corey (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), 130–151; Frelinghuysen, Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). 38. Discussions of Powers’s Florentine years can be found in del Vivo, ed, Hiram Powers a Firenze; Wunder, “Florence: 1837–51,” in Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, vol. 1, 137–180. 39. “Lists of Work done by Remigio Peschi, circa 1877,” Box 1, Folder 5, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 40. Katherine Gaja, ed., Hiram Powers a Firenze: Mostra documentaria in occasione del bicentenario della nascita (Florence: Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, 2005), 11. On Peschi and Fabbri’s work in carving The Greek Slave, see Karen Lemmey, “From Skeleton to Skin: The Making of the Greek Slave(s),” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/lemmey-on-from-skeleton-to-skin-the-making-of-the-greek-slave. 41. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, “Sculpture Victorious,” in Sculpture Victorious, 26.

178

64433int.indd 178

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

42. Nelson, The Color of Stone, 92; Yellin, “Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers’ Statue of Liberty,” 798–826. 43. Hiram Powers to Louisa Powers Ibbotson, October 12, 1862, HP01.01.83, Carte no. 16; Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, January 14, 1861, Note Biografiche 1247; Hiram Powers to Messrs. George, Peabody, and Company, March 10, 1857, HP.3.114.012, Carte no. 8, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux. 44. Powers is referring to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed new territories to determine whether slavery would or would not exist by vote of popular sovereignty. Powers to John Richardson, July 10, 1854, Box 8, Folder 20, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. A similar statement is made by Powers to Samuel York Atlee, February 10, 1856, Box 1, Folder 20, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. Excerpts of these letters also are cited in Nelson, The Color of Stone, 92–93; and Yellin, “Caps and Chains,” 809. 45. Patrick Rael, Eighty Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 198–236. 46. “The Gag Rule: Floor Debate on the House of Representatives, 1837,” in Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787–1848, ed. Sean Wilentz (Lexington, MA: DC Heath, 1992), 373–393. 47. John Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 1 (March 1998), 67–92. 48. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C,” 67. 49. Davis discusses the sugar magnate Robert Stuart’s purchase and ownership of the painting after the Civil War, suggesting the ways in which the painting was readily co-opted into postbellum narratives of white nostalgia for slavery. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.,” 84–88. 50. For example, Preston wrote to Powers upon moving to Louisiana, “My home hereafter is to be on the Mississippi near New Orleans, and I hope to ornament my house there with some of the works which are to render you immortal.” Preston to Hiram Powers, July 28, 1845, Box 8, Folder 19, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. On the collecting patterns of South Carolinian planters and the taste for neoclassical sculpture, see Maurie McInnis, “A Love of Display,” in The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, 287–326. 51. The drawing, executed on transfer paper, is interfiled in Miner Kilbourne Kellogg’s 1841 sketchbook of travels to Florence. The absence of a connecting support between post and figure suggest that this image could have been a way to reflect upon issues of sculptural composition and pose, or as a record of a living model in a studio setting. However, the question of why and by whom it was made remains largely inscrutable. It is possible it corresponds to a description of a sketch by Richard Henry Wilde in an 1844 letter to Powers, who mentions, “I have seen a pen and ink sketch by Kellogg of the Greek Slave, which delights me. If the daguerrotype [sic] could be employed to give outline sketches of such things, it would be a great advantage.” Wilde to Powers, 3 May 1844, reproduced in Nathalia Wright, “The Letters of Richard Henry Wilde to Hiram Powers, Part I,” Georgia Historical Society 16, no. 3 (September 1962), 313. 52. Hiram Powers to John Grant, May 22, 1845, Box 4, Folder 52, Hiram Powers, AAA. 53. “Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, July 3, 2015—February 19, 2017; Lemmey, “From Skeleton to Skin.” 54. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 56–60. 55. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 1, 209; Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives; Nathaniel Hawthorne also recalled visiting Powers’s studio and seeing “two casts of the Venus de’ Medici in the rooms.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1871), 304.

NOTES

64433int.indd 179

179

22-05-18 10:15 AM

56. Francesca Petrucci, “Powers nella Firenze degli anni Quaranta,” in Hiram Powers a Firenze, 29–40. 57. Nelson, The Color of Stone, 82–86; Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 51–55. 58. On Delacroix’s depiction of race in Massacres at Chios, see Darcy Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 245. Discussions of Massacres at Chios also appear in Beth Wright, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 59. Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Revolutionary France, 245. Grigsby points out that Delacroix adheres to a more “Hellenic model” when depicting the single allegorical Greek woman in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi two years later. 60. Colbert, “Faces,” A Measure of Perfection, 151–211; Colbert, “Each Little Hillock Hath a Tongue,” 281–300. 61. C.L., “An Ode to the Greek Slave,” New York Herald, September 1847, in Scrapbook, “Notices of Powers’ Work,” 1847–49, 1873–1876, Box 14, Folder 1, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 62. Ibid. 63. Secondary accounts of this exhibition appear in Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 246–251; McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 181–182; Wunder, Hiram Powers, 210–217. For Graves’s Gallery, see Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Selected Galleries, Dealers and Exhibition Spaces in London, 1850–1839,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1839 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011), 305. 64. Quoted in Edward Everett to Hiram Powers, May 28, 1845, Box 5, Folder 51, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 65. “Studio Memorandum, Etc.,” Transcript, 1841–1845, Box 10, Folder 27, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 66. For a discussion of traveling painting exhibitions, see Tanya Pohrt, “Touring Pictures: The Exhibition of American History Paintings in the Early Republic,” PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2013. The sculpture exhibitions of the 1830s are detailed in Thayer Tolles, “Modeling a Reputation: The American Sculptor,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 135–168. 67. Tolles, “Modeling a Reputation,” 141. 68. Sidney Brooks to Hiram Powers, March 29, 1846, Box 1 Folder 49, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 69. Kellogg was the ideal candidate for the task at hand. A prolific landscape and portrait painter, he traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East and would have thus been familiar with the statue’s subject matter and connection to the Greek Wars of Independence. He also had valuable skills in transporting goods and negotiating shipping logistics owing to a brief stint as a diplomatic courier to Naples in the early 1840s. Kellogg assumed official duties as the tour’s manager in 1847, signing with Powers a business contract that stipulated he would “superintend the exhibition of the statue called ‘the Slave’ during a period not exceeding two years” and receive one-fifth of the tour’s proceeds in so doing. For the tour contract, see Kellogg to Powers, August 13, 1847, Powers Papers, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. Descriptions of Kellogg’s preparations for the tour appear in Miner Kellogg to Hiram Powers, March 16, 1845, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. A comprehensive discussion of the traveling exhibition appears in Tanya Pohrt, “The Greek Slave on Tour in America,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016). 70. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 2, 161. 71. On the convergence of the slave trade and the sex trade in New Orleans, see Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cam180

64433int.indd 180

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

bridge University Press, 2016); and Jennifer N. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Sidney Brooks to Hiram Powers, October 15, 1847, Box 1, Folder 50, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. Caleb Forshey to Hiram Powers, January 11, 1849, Box 4, Folder 30, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. Discussions of this phenomenon appear in Scott Marler, The Merchant’s Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23–24; McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 155–156. Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, October 2, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. “Greek Slave,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, August 23, 1848, 2. S. Frederick Starr, Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 112. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 1, 231–237; Cybèle Gontar, “Robbed of His Treasure: Hiram Powers, James Robb, and the Greek Slave Controversy of 1848,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/gontar-on-hiram-powersjames-robb-the-greek-slave-controversy-of-1848. Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft, eds., Sculpture and its Reproductions (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Lauretta Dimmick, “Nydia,” in Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, 117. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 2, 158–159. Powers to Richard Henry Wilde, December 19, 1846, James Robb Papers, AAA, Frame 765, MF 3948. Powers to Wilde, December 19, 1846, James Robb Papers, AAA, Frame 765, MF 3948. Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 1, 231–237; Gontar, “Robbed of his Treasure.” For reference to the “Robbery,” see Kellogg to Powers, February 19, 1849, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. The exchange that Kellogg and Powers would later call “the Robbery” unfolded during the statue’s exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1848, the details of which have been documented both in the artist’s own time and by many scholars. See Wunder, Hiram Powers, vol. 1, 231–237; Gontar, “Robbed of his Treasure.” Bill Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998), 936. On the exhibition of Church’s paintings, see Kevin Avery, Church’s Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993); Gerald Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), 23–30, 83–85. Avery and Carr note how the shows of Church’s “Great Picture” paintings, exhibited mostly in the 1860s, were modeled after similar European tours of work by Rosa Bonheur and John Martin in the previous decade. A discussion of the commercial dimensions of exhibitions of French and British painting appears in Richard Altick, “Fine Art for the People” and “Entr’acte: Inside the Exhibition Business,” in The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 404–434. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church, 30. A discussion of how the internal logic of Church’s paintings related to a broader commodity culture appears in Jennifer Raab, “Narrative Luxury,” Frederic Edwin Church and the Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 65–86. Starr, Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans, 88. Hiram Powers to Sampson Powers, January 17, 1849, Box 8, Folder 8, Powers Papers, AAA. B. M. Norman, Norman’s New Orleans and Environs (New Orleans: B. M. Norman, 1845), 170. In cross-referencing nineteenth century atlases of New Orleans city lots with present-day records from the Orleans Parish Assessors office, the location of 13 St. Charles Street, following NOTES

64433int.indd 181

181

22-05-18 10:15 AM

92.

93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 182

64433int.indd 182

the renumbering of New Orleans streets at the turn of the twentieth century, is now 121 St. Charles Avenue. In comparison to a daguerreotype of the street taken by Thomas Martin Easterly in 1847 and in the collections of the Missouri Historical Society (N17157), the present-day building appears to be the same structure that stood in the nineteenth century—a four-story brick building attached to a second-story brick building, which would have been previously numbered as 15 St. Charles Street. This is consistent with City Directory listings that specify the location of Daniel Pratt’s commission warehouse at 15 St. Charles Street, and Cooke’s Gallery at 13 St. Charles Street. Pratt made his wealth in the manufacture of machines for harvesting cotton and was a close friend and patron of George Cooke’s throughout the artist’s career. Pratt and his business partner Henry Kendall Carter ran the cotton factor company H. Kendall Carter & Co. out of a four-story warehouse at 13–15 St. Charles Street. To Cooke went the third and fourth stories, out of which he operated a studio. Michel & Co., New Orleans Annual and Commerical Register for 1846 (New Orleans: E. A. Michel & Co., 1846), 144. I thank Sally Reeves and Erin Albritton, archivists at the New Orleans Notarial Archives, for their assistance and insight in navigating these records. For further on Pratt, see also Norman, Norman’s New Orleans and Environs, 169; Curtis J. Evans, The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); and Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 97-121. Donald Keyes, ed., George Cooke, 1793–1849 (Atlanta: Georgia Museum of Art, 1991), 19. Discussions of Cooke also appear in Jessie Poesch, The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1650–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 279–280; William Nathaniel Banks, “George Cooke, Painter of the American Scene,” The Magazine Antiques (September 1972), 448–454; Marilou Rudolph, “George Cooke and His Paintings,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1960), 117–153. “The Greek Slave,” New Orleans Daily Tropic, December 22, 1845. It is plausible that lamps that lit The Greek Slave at Cooke’s gallery were furnished by Robb himself, who at the time led the New Orleans Gas Light Company. For a discussion of Robb’s work with this firm, see Starr, Southern Comfort, 107. Leonard Matthews to James Robb, October 2, 1848, published in “Power’s [sic] Greek Slave,” Daily Picayune, November 14, 1848. The New Orleans City Directory of 1842 lists Matthews at the helm of “W. M. and F. Insurance Company.” The City Directory of 1851 notes he is a banker and exchange dealer for “Matthews, Finley & Co.,” as well as an agent of Sun Mutual Insurance Company. New Orleans City Directory 1842, Louisiana Division, Main Branch, New Orleans Public Library; New Orleans City Directory 1851, Louisiana Division, Main Branch, New Orleans Public Library. James Robb to Leonard Matthews, September 27, 1848, published in “Power’s [sic] Greek Slave,” Daily Picayune, November 14, 1848. “Power’s [sic] Greek Slave,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 20, 1849. The reported total of the exhibition’s proceeds was $1315.80. The committee also ran a lecture series over the months of February, March, and April 1849 as a part of its fundraising efforts, which netted an additional $531.83. “Special Notices,” Daily Picayune, April 27, 1849. For lecture notice, see “Advertisements,” Daily Picayune, February 21, 1849. Orville Dewey, “Powers’ Statues,” Union Magazine 1, no. 4 (October 1847), 160. Joy Kasson aptly describes The Greek Slave as a site of “morally sanctioned erotic pleasure.” Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave,” 175; see also Nelson, The Color of Stone, 79. “Power’s [sic] Greek Slave,” Daily Picayune, November 14, 1848.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

102. Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 117–119. 103. Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 118. For further on asylums and charity in early and antebellum New Orleans, see also Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Pamela Tyler, New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). 104. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 213–217; John Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; reissued 2007), 19. 105. On race in nineteenth-century New Orleans, see Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 219–232; and Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, 178–214. 106. McInnis, “Mapping the Slave Trade in Richmond and New Orleans,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 20, no. 2 (Fall 2013), 116–119. 107. The Saint Charles Hotel and Exchange opened in 1837 and the Saint Louis Hotel and Exchange opened in 1838. Both were Greek revival buildings with ornate rotundas erected for the express purpose of conducting slave auctions, with the Saint Charles designed by architects James Gallier and James Dakin (who based their designs off Benjamin Latrobe’s renderings for the United States Capitol, and the Saint Louis designed by Jacques-Nicolas-Bussière de Pouilly. The New Orleans press was quick to make note of their neoclassicism upon their opening, with one reporter describing how the latter’s “pure, classical taste [was] evinced in the finish and arrangement of this beautiful mart of commerce and exchange.” “City Exchange—St. Louis Street,” Daily Picayune, May 24, 1839. Several years later, the Irish engraver William Henry Brooke’s rendering of the neoclassical rotunda, “Sale of Estates, Pictures, and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans,” appeared as the frontispiece to the English traveler James Silk Buckingham’s Slave States of America, an expository indictment of the American South. Buckingham, The Slave States of America, 2 vols. (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1842). For detailed renderings and specifications of the neoclassicism of the Saint Louis, see also Notarial Act, Amedée Ducatel, February 23, 1838, no. 7, vol. 71, Clerk of the Civil District Court, Notarial Archives Division, New Orleans. On the ways Southern enslavers appropriated the aesthetics of neoclassicism in defense of slavery, see McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, 287–356; and Eric Slauter, “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Early American Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 81–122. 108. Emily Clark, “Selling the Quadroon,” The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 162–187; Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 113–115. 109. Miner Kellog,g to Hiram Powers, March 13, 1849, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. 110. On red flags and slave auctions, see McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 85–86; McInnis, “Mapping the Slave Trade in Richmond and New Orleans,” 116–119. 111. McInnis notes how one commentator noted that the French Quarter of New Orleans had “little red flags hanging in all possible positions, placed in the most conspicuous manner.” McInnis, “Mapping the Slave Trade in Richmond and New Orleans,” 112. 112. The “fugitive” reference appears in Samuel York Atlee to Hiram Powers, February 12, 1853, Box 1, Folder 20, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. John Grant, another of the statue’s patrons, routinely referred to the statue as “my slave.” See, for example, Grant to Powers, June 11, 1844, Box 4, Folder 52 and August 6, 1844, Box 4, Folder 52; Powers to Grant, May 22, 1845, Box 4, Folder 52, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. NOTES

64433int.indd 183

183

22-05-18 10:15 AM

113. Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, October 12, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. 114. On the impossibility of sequestering the sphere of culture from the business of slavery and empire, see Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Unviersity Press, 2011). 115. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 213–217. On the early modern genealogies of this phenomenon, see also Jean E. Howard, “Staging Commercial London: The Royal Exchange,” in Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 29–67. 116. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 30–31. 117. My thinking here is informed by Jean Howard’s discussion of the relationship between the culture of London merchants’ exchanges and other spectacular cultures, specifically the theater. She argues that the performance of “Exchange scenes” on the stage made accessible “a monumental, but not intimately known urban site” to broader publics. Howard, Theater of a City, 39. 118. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 119. Excerpt from the National Intelligencer in Powers’ Statue of the Greek Slave (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1847), 29; and J. H. Robinson, “The Greek Slave,” Boston Weekly Museum in Scrapbook, “Notices of Powers’ Work,” 1847–1849, 1873–1876, p. 29, Box 14, Folder 1, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 120. Powers seemed to deploy this system with regularity across both statues and busts; his description for the setup of the life-size allegorical figure of California, for example, is more or less the same as that he used for a bust of Diana. See Hiram Powers to M. M. Holloway, December 24, 1853, Box 5, Folder 24, and Hiram Powers to Milton Latham, June 3, 1867, Box 6, Folder 1, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. On the history of rotating pedestals more generally, see Kristina Herrmann Fiore, “Sulle Virtù Dinamiche di Statue e Colossi del Canova,” Sculture Romane del Settecento (Rome: Bonsignori, 2002), 269–294; and Nicholas Penny, “The Evolution of the Plinth, Pedestal, and Socle,” in Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Penny and Eike D. Schmidt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 461–487. 121. The original pedestal for the second version of the sculpture was switched out in 1885. Reports for 1886, Corcoran Gallery of Art archives, Box 2, Folder 1, National Gallery of Art. 122. For a discussion of photographs by Owen and Southworth & Hawes, see catalogue essays by Tess Korobkin in Sculpture Victorious, ed. Droth, Hatt, and Edwards, 308–311. 123. My use of the word “kinematic” (rather than the more commonly found “kinetic”) follows Helmut Müller-Sievers’s definition of the term, which describes “the science of forced motion, of motion in mechanisms and machines.” He situates the “rise of modern kinematics” alongside the rise of nineteenth-century industrialization and period preoccupations with the mechanization of motion. Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), esp. 20–39. 124. Powers worked at Joseph Dorfeuille’s Western Museum in the 1820s, designing figures for a tableau of Dante’s Inferno. A discussion of his work for Dorfeuille’s appears in Dennis Looney, “ ‘Flame-Coloured Letters and Bugaboo Phraseology’: Hiram Powers, Frances Trollope, and Dante in Frontier Cincinnati,” in Hiram Powers a Firenze, ed. Caterina Del Vivo, 135–152. 125. Gio.[vanni] Battista Piana e Figlio to Hiram Powers, February 20, 1854, HP3.067.001, Catalogo commerciale, Fondo Hiram Powers, Gabinetto Vieusseux. 126. Powers to Thomas Evans, May 22, 1867, Box 3, Folder 48, Hiram Powers Papers, AAA. 127. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Representation in Scientific Activity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 25.

184

64433int.indd 184

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

128. Hiram Powers to Miner Kellogg, November 8, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. I thank Sarah Staples and Christine Engels for their assistance with obtaining images of the sketches in these letters. 129. Ibid. 130. Miner Kellogg to Hiram Powers, December 14, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. 131. Preston W. Farrar to Miner Kellogg, February 16, 1849, in New Orleans Daily Crescent, February 23, 1849. The State House was built in 1815, and housed the state legislature until 1846, when the capitol city moved to Baton Rouge. 132. “The Greek Slave,” Daily Picayune, February 22, 1849, 2. 133. Ibid. 134. E. Anna Lewis, “Art and Artists of America,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Fashion 47, no. 5 (November 1855), 398. 135. The movements of famed nineteenth-century automata like the Great Chess Player were achieved by way of a man-operated pantograph—a machine that was, fascinatingly enough, first developed and made commercially famous for its ability to copy the forms and proportions of statuary and medallions. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 66–67. The pantograph was developed by the Englishmen James Watt and Benjamin Cheverton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a discussion of their machine, see Clive Edwards, “The Mechanization of Carving,” in Graham Hollister-Short, ed., History of Technology, vol. 20 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 136. Hiram Powers to Stan Smith, August 7, 1866, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. 137. Didorous Siculus 4.76.2, in J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 202. On Daedalus’s automata and their oft-cited connection to slavery, see Page Dubois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 138. David Raeburn, trans., Ovid Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 243–297; Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale,” 5.3.87–88, in Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 3202. See also Amelia Rauser, “The Sensate Statue,” in The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Neoclassical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020), 87–91; and Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 81–160. 139. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 33. See also Chen, “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” October 155 (Winter 2016), 21–22. 140. Chen, “Language and Mattering Humans,” Animacies, 23–55. 141. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), 1720; Paul Finkelman, “Slavery in the United States: Persons or Property?,” in Jean Allain, ed., The Legal Understanding of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 105–134. On slavery as a form of “social death,” see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 142. On the ways in which the “structure of embodiment” of slavery infiltrated broader matters of legal and aesthetic representation in American life, see Stephen Best, “The Slave’s Two Bodies,” in The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–25. A discussion of this topic also appears in Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006), 201. 143. The rotating pedestal is in some respects similar to mid-nineteenth century philosophical toys which, as Jonathan Crary has argued, were mechanically produced moving images sold and consumed as popular entertainments. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity

NOTES

64433int.indd 185

185

22-05-18 10:15 AM

144. 145.

146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151.

152. 153. 154.

155.

186

64433int.indd 186

in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 106. Building on this work, Tom Gunning has described the perceptual composite of mechanical operation and moving picture as a “technological image,” “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (Spring 2012), 510. Powers to Miner Kellogg, November 8, 1847, Box 2, Powers Papers, Mss qP888 RM, CMC. Katherine McKittrick, “The Authenticity of This Story Has Not Been Documented: Auction Blocks,” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 65–90. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, 65–90. Powers’ Statue of the Greek Slave (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1848), 18. “Powers’ Greek Slave in St. Louis. For the National Era,” National Era, January 16, 1851, 9. Ibid., 9. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Written by Himself (London: C. Gilpin, 1849); and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860). Brown discusses his travels with the Crafts in William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe, or, Places I have Seen and People I Have Met (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852). On the abolitionist writings, lectures, and performances of formerly enslaved people from the Caribbean and the United States in Britain, see Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen, eds., Black Writers in Britain, 1760–1890 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). See also Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York; Penguin Books, 2003); Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (London: F. Westley & A. H. Davis, 1831); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1836); Henry Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, who escaped from slavery enclosed in a box 3 feet long and 2 wide (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849). John Tenniel, “The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Counterpart to Power’s [sic] ‘Greek Slave,’ ” Punch, or the London Charivari 20 (1851), 236. William Farmer, “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition,” The Liberator, July 18, 1851. Many scholars have discussed the protest staged by Brown, Craft, and Craft. See, for example, Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: Word’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 66–71; Lisa Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/volpe-on-abolitionistperformance-at-the-london-crystal-palace-1851; Lisa Merrill, “Exhibiting Race ‘under the World’s Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 33, no. 2 (2012), 321–336; Michael Chaney, “Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism),” in Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 49–79. In understanding Brown’s claim to fugitivity as a mode of critique, my thinking is informed by Uri Macmillan’s argument that Black artists across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have reimagined objecthood as “a performance-based method that disrupts presumptive knowledges of black subjectivity” and “as a way toward agency rather than its antithesis, a strategy rather than simply a primal site of injury.” Uri Macmillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 9.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

3. SENTIMENT, MANUFACTURED

1. Eric Williams, “The ‘Saints’ and Slavery,” in Capitalism & Slavery [1944] (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), 181. 2. John Bell to Henry Elkington, May 13, 1852, Elkington and Company Records, AAD/1979/3/1/8, 151-152, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter cited in abbreviation as AAD). 3. Ibid. 4. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, The Eighty-Fifth, 1853 (London: W. Cloves and Sons, 1853), 51. 5. “Local and Provincial: Mr. John Bell’s Bronze ‘A Daughter of Eve,’ ” Manchester Guardian, August 27, 1853, 6. 6. Mia Bagneris, “Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell’s Octoroon,” Art Bulletin 103 (June 2020); Michael Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun: John Bell’s The American Slave,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016). 7. Caroline Arscott, “Sentimentality in Victorian Paintings,” Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain, ed. Giles Waterfield (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 65–81. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” [second version] in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, and trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. 9. “Royal Academy,” The Athenaeum, May 20, 1848, 513. 10. “Royal Academy,” 513. Canova died in 1822, Nollekens in 1823, and Flaxman in 1826. 11. Martina Droth, “1848: Sculpture in the Basement,” in The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018, ed. Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Jessica Feather (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018). The Royal Academy was at Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. On the history of sculpture exhibitions at the Royal Academy, see Allison Yarrington’s classic essay, “Art in the Dark; Viewing and Exhibiting Sculpture at Somerset House,” in Art on the Line: Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, ed. David Solkin (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001), 173–188. 12. “Royal Academy: Sculpture,” The Athenaeum, June 17, 1848, 609. 13. The Comprehensive Dictionary of Biography, Embracing a Series of Original Memoirs of the Most Distinguished Persons Living and Dead (London and Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Co., 1860), 7. An early and extended draft of this entry appears in f. 131, Add. MS 28509, Charles Griffin Letters, British Library. 14. Bell’s name appears in most major surveys of British sculpture, but the writer Richard Barnes has produced the only monograph of the artist’s work to date. Barnes, John Bell: The Sculptor’s Life and Works (Kirstead, Norfolk, UK: Frontier Publishing, 1999). See also Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 251; Ingrid Roscoe, Emma Hardy, and M. G. Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660–1851 (New Haven, CT, and London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009), 97; Diane Bilbey and Marjorie Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002); Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 65, 199–200, 310. 15. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy. MDCCCXLVIII. (1848). The Eightieth. (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1848), 53, 55; Paul Atterbury and Maureen Batkin, eds., The Parian Phenomenon: A

NOTES

64433int.indd 187

187

22-05-18 10:15 AM

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

188

64433int.indd 188

Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain, Statuary, and Busts (Shepton Beauchamp, UK: Richard Dennis, 1989), 67. The whereabouts of the Clorinda marble remain unknown. “Royal Academy: Sculpture,” 609. On sentimental sculpture and the market, Cora Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 242; and catalogue entries in Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, eds., Sculpture Victorious, 267–273. Read, Victorian Sculpture, 65, 199–200, 310. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, eds., Sculpture Victorious, 20–22; Read, Victorian Sculpture, 65–68. Bell came to work with Minton as a result of collaborations with his friend and neighbor Henry Cole, who ran the short-lived industrial design firm Felix Summerly’s Art Manufactures from 1846 to 1849. Entries in Cole’s diaries reveal that during this time the two men met frequently to discuss their work and also made numerous visits to the manufactories at Minton, Elkington, and Coalbrookdale. Henry Cole Diaries: typed transcripts, 1837–1854, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum; see also Barnes, John Bell, 32–39. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy. MDCCCXLVIII. (1848), 53, 55. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy. MDCCCXLVIII. (1848), 55. Passing mentions of the bust appear in Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun”; and Barnes, John Bell: The Sculptor’s Life and Works, 32. John Bell to Dawson Turner, September 15, 1845 (currently on the market: “Historical Autographs,” Julian Browning Ltd, cat. no. 6704). I thank Michael Hatt for sharing photographs of this letter. On Bell’s family and their relationship to the Buxtons as well as the prominent Gurney family, see Jane Southcott, Sarah Anna Glover: Nineteenth-Century Music Education Pioneer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 20, 168–169; Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 97; Barnes, John Bell: The Sculptor’s Life and Works. A period discussion of the Bells of Norfolk also appears in Charles John Palmer, The Perlustration of Great Yarmouth, with Gorleston and Southtown, vol. 2 (Great Yarmouth, UK: G. Nall, 1875), 159–160. “Public Testimonial to the Late Sir T. F. Buxton, B.,” Norfolk Arms, January 3, 1846, 1. See also “Home Intelligence,” Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, January 1, 1846, 14; “The Buxton Monument,” The Watchman, January 3, 1849, 1. I thank Katherine Fein for her help in obtaining these newspaper notices. Thrupp won the Westminster commission following a small competition held in 1846, with Henry Weekes, William Calder Marshall, and Musgrave Watson also submitting entries. According to brief notices reproduced in several newspapers, Bell as well as the sculptor Edward Hodges Baily “declined to compete,” although the reasons for this are not stated. “Fine Art Gossip,” The Athenaeum: A Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 980 (August 8, 1846), 820; “Gleanings,” Westmorland Gazette, August 15, 1846, 3. For an extended analysis of the Fox monument, see Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, 195–197. For further discussion of the Westminster Abbey memorials, see Madge Dresser, “Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London,” History Workshop Journal 64, no. 1 (Autumn 2007), 162–199; and Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (London: Routledge, 2000). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 93-200. See also Seyed Mohammad Marandi, “The Oriental World of Lord Byron and the Orientalism of Literary Scholars,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 15, no. 3 (2006), 317–337. Dresser, “Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London,” 162–199. Charles Buxton, Annotated copy of Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Baronet: With Selections from His Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1849), 604, Papers of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet (1), MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 444*, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

31. Buxton, Annotated copy of Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Baronet, 260, Papers of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. 32. As Joseph Bangura notes, Temne-speaking people were the dominant Indigenous group in the coastal area that became known as Freetown. The historiography of Sharp’s of lease and “purchase” of this land from the Pa Tham (often Anglicized by scholars as “King Tom”) is itself a British colonial construction, as Sharp’s treaty did not make clear the terms that the land would be ceded permanently. Bangura, “Rethinking History and Freetown Historiography,” The Temne of Sierra Leone: African Agency in the Making of a British Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3–29. 33. On Freetown and its inhabitants in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Paul Lovejoy and Suzanne Schwarz, eds., Slavery, Abolition, and the Transition to Colonialism in Sierra Leone (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2014); Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Akintola Wyse, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History (London: Hurst, in association with the International African Institute, 1989). An earlier extensive history of Sierra Leone is by Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). 34. Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Landscape (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–26. 35. The British colonial presence in Sierra Leone bespeaks the ways that, as Lisa Lowe argues, the promise of liberal abolition—and after 1833, emancipation—converged with “new imperial experiments” around the globe. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 37. For the history of this transition, see also Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1–13, 107–127. 36. Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (London: J. Murray, 1839); Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone, 107–127. 37. St. George’s was first established in 1817 as an Anglican church and became a cathedral in 1852. P. J. Bart-Williams, The Story of St. George’s Cathedral (Freetown, Sierra Leone: Government Printing Department, 1970), 7–10. 38. Byrd, “Arriving in Sierra Leone: Catastrophe and Its Aftermaths,” in Captives and Voyagers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 242. See also Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors. 39. Byrd, “Arriving in Sierra Leone,” 200–243. 40. I am referring to Malcolm Baker’s understanding of the eighteenth-century portrait bust as a “marble index” for the perpetuation of one’s personhood and fame. Baker, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 31. 41. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 15. 42. Bart-Williams, The Story of St. George’s Cathedral, 4. 43. Dell Upton, “Dual Heritage,” in What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 25–65; Karen L. Cox, “The Monument Builders,” in Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 49–72; Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause; Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003). NOTES

64433int.indd 189

189

22-05-18 10:15 AM

44. Rt. Rev. E. G. Ingham, Sierra Leone after A Hundred Years (London: Seeley and Co. Limited, 1894), 320. 45. Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, 179; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, vol. 1, 139. 46. E. W. Fasholé-Luke, “Religion in Freetown,” in Freetown: A Symposium, ed. Christopher Fyfe and Eldred Jones (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1968), 128–130. On the Krio, see Gibril Cole, The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013); Cole and Mac Dixon-Fyle, eds, New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Akintola Wyse, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History (London: Hurst in association with the International African Institute, 1989). 47. Bart-Williams, The Story of St. George’s Cathedral, 71–73. 48. “Correspondence,” West African Reporter, September 23, 1882, n.p. 49. Mark Lipschutz and R. Kent Rassmussen, eds., Dictionary of African Historical Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 93; Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele, Holy Johnson, Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917 (London: Cass, 1970). 50. Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun.” 51. Baker, The Marble Index. 52. John Bell to Henry Elkington, May 13, 1852. 53. Ibid. 54. John Bell, Catalogue of Statuary by J. Bell, St. Mary Abbots, Kensington (London: Farmer & Sons, 1890), 5. 55. Portions of the research in this chapter appeared in a previous article, which referred to Bell’s sculpture as The American Slave for editorial consistency. Caitlin Beach, “John Bell’s American Slave in the Context of Production and Patronage,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/beach-on-john-bell-americanslave-context-of-production-and-patronage. See also Bagneris, “Miscegination in Marble,” 68; Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun”; Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 251–254; Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 97; Alison Smith, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York: Watson-Gupthill, 2002), 37; Barnes, John Bell: The Sculptor’s Life and Works, 49. 56. On Bell’s depiction of the Black female subject, see Hatt, “The American Slave, 1853,” in Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901, ed. Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, and Michael Hatt, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014),252; and McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 200–202. 57. The curriculum at the Royal Academy schools as taught by Westmacott, who served as Professor of Sculpture from 1827 to 1856, was organized chronologically and centered on studies of objects in their cast collections. Instruction began with Egyptian and Etruscan art and continued with lectures on the art of ancient Greece (with emphasis on the Parthenon sculptures) and Rome, medieval art and architecture, the revival of antique sculpture in the Renaissance, English sculpture, and the use of metals, materials, and color in sculpture. Manuscript Lectures, circa 1844–1856, Sir Richard Westmacott RA, Lectures 1844–56, Royal Academy of Arts Archive. 58. Isaac Teale, “The Sable Venus: An Ode,” [1765] in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London: John Stockdale, 1793–1801), 32–38. 59. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008), 1–14. See also Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); Rosalie Smith McCrea, “Dis-ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century: The Voyage of the

190

64433int.indd 190

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

Sable Venus: Connoisseurship and the Trivialising of Slavery,” in Beyond the Blood, The Beach, and the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies, ed. Sandra Courtman (Kingston, Jamaica: Randle, 2004), 287–288; Marcus Wood, “Celebrating the Middle Passage: Atlantic Slavery, Barbie, and the Birth of the Sable Venus,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 123–144. “The Eighty-Fifth Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1853,” The Art-Journal 5 (1853), 152. On the geographies of slavery, see McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xvii. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 251. “Local and Provincial: Mr. John Bell’s Bronze ‘A Daughter of Eve,’ ” 6. Alistair Grant and Angus Patterson, The Museum and the Factory: The V&A, Elkington, and the Electrical Revolution (London: Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing, 2018), 11–23. Grant and Patterson, The Museum and the Factory, 11. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual,” Representations 113, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 12; see also Robin D. G. Kelley, “Burning Symbols: The Work of Art in the Age of Tyrannical (Re)Production,” in Hank Willis Thomas: Pitch Blackness (New York: Aperture, 2008). Eric Hopkins, The Rise of the Manufacturing Town: Birmingham and the Industrial Revolution (Thrupp, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998). Samuel Griffiths, Griffith’s Guide to the Iron Trade of Great Britain (London: Griffiths, 1872), 46. Samuel Timmins, ed., The Resources, Products, and Industrial History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District: A Series of Reports, Collected by the Local Industries Committee of the British Association at Birmingham (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866), vii. Clive Harris, Three Continents, One History: Birmingham, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Caribbean (Birmingham, UK: Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, 2008); Andy Green, “Remembering Slavery in Birmingham: Sculpture, Paintings, and Installations,” Slavery & Abolition 29, no. 2 (May 2008), 189–201; Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), 157–159. This legislation included the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, the Slave Trade Consolidation of 1824 (prohibition of British equipment, insuring, and navigation of slave ships), and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. For a comprehensive overview of this legislation, see Marika Sherwood, “Britain, the Slave Trade, and Slavery, 1808–1843,” Race & Class 46, no. 2 (Autumn 2004), 54–77. Sherwood, “Britain, the Slave Trade, and Slavery,” 54–77. Joseph Yianelli and Christine White, “Shackles and Handcuffs: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Racist Policing,” History Workshop Online, July 9, 2020, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk /shackles-and-handcuffs/. Illustrations of Art Manufactures in the Precious Metals Exhibited by Elkington & Co. (London: Elkington & Company, 1873). Notes on Elkington’s sourcing of silver from Real del Monte appears in “Material concerning works of art and other miscellaneous papers, 1835–1863,” AAD/1979/3/1/8, 279. In the 1840s, Elkington also explored the possibility of investing in metal mines along the basin of the Rio de la Plata in South America, a region heavily dependent on enslaved labor, but the English and French naval blockade of the river at this time prevented the project’s development. River Plate Agency to Henry Elkington, June 16, 1845, Elkington and Company Records, AAD/1979/3/1/1, 245, AAD; “Prospectus of the River Plate Steam Navigation Company,” Elkington and Company Records, AAD/1979/3/1/1, 251–251, AAD.

NOTES

64433int.indd 191

191

22-05-18 10:15 AM

77. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock, eds., Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Tom John Cassidy, British Capital and the Mexican Silver Mining Industry, 1820–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1974). 78. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. 79. Copeland and Thompson, “Perpetual Returns,” 8. 80. Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street 44 (1993), 157. 81. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 3–4. 82. Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land (London: Sampson, Low, and Marston, 1868), 12. 83. My thinking through the inter-medial nature of this sculpture is informed by Deborah Silverman’s research on the “violent technical procedures” deployed in crafting Belgian ivory and metal sculptures. She suggests that in certain luxury art objects, acts of physically manipulating and joining materials evoke and reinscribe the brutality of the colonial domination of bodies within the realm of the object. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism,” West 86th 18, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2011): 146. 84. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4. 85. For a discussion of the contested image and ideology of labor in nineteenth-century Britain, see Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labor in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 86. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1995). A discussion of Arrighi’s argument in relation to the nineteenth-century British Atlantic appears in Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 34–38. 87. Elkington & Co.: International Exhibition Visitors’ Book, 1855–1878, Special Collections, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum. 88. Roach’s observation that the Atlantic world was “a vast behavioral vortex” in which “the semiosis of conspicuous consumption [recapitulated] the triangular trade in material goods and human flesh,” is relevant here. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 30–31. 89. Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 261–262; Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and Refinement, 89–90. 90. Walter Benjamin, “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” [Exposé of 1935], The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7–8. 91. George Wallis, “The Art Manufactures of Birmingham and the Midland Counties,” Midland Counties Herald, June 1862, quoted in Catalogue of Some of the Principal Pieces Exhibited by Elkington and Co.: Manufacturers of Artistic Works in Silver, Bronze, and other Metals: London International Exhibition, Class 33 (Birmingham, UK: Elkington and Co., 1862), 11. 92. On Armstrong’s career, see Henrietta Heald, William Armstrong: Magician of the North (Alnwick, UK: McNidder & Grace Limited, 2010); and Marshall Bastable, Arms and the State: Sir William Armstrong and the Remaking of British Naval Power, 1854–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

192

64433int.indd 192

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

93. Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun”; Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 254. 94. For discussions of Armstrong’s collecting, see Dianne Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 219–234, 386–387; Paul Usherwood, Pre-Raphaelites: Painters and Patrons in the North-East (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Laing Art Gallery, 1989); Oliver Garnett, “ ‘Sold Christie’s. Bought Agnew’: The Art Collection of Lord Armstrong at Cragside,” Apollo 374 (1993), 253–258. 95. Michael Hatt and Richard Barnes note that Seymour-Conway purchased the sculpture following the 1862 International Exhibition. Bell himself also mentioned the Fourth Marquess’s purchase of the work in a pamphlet published in 1890. Curiously, the work does not appear on any of the collector’s sculpture or decorative arts inventories in the Wallace Collection Archives. However, it is interesting to note that Seymour-Conway contemplated buying the first version of The Greek Slave when it was auctioned in Paris during the summer of 1859. The correspondence surrounding this episode appears in John Ingamells, ed., The Hertford Mawson Letters: The 4th Marquess of Hertford to His Agent Samuel Mawson (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1981), 43. For Seymour-Conway’s purchase of Bell’s work, see Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 253; Robert Wenley, “The Fourth Marquess of Hertford’s ‘Lost’ Collection of Sculpture,” Sculpture Journal 12 (2004), 84; Barnes, John Bell: The Sculptor’ s Life and Works, 77; Bell, St. Mary Abbotts, Kensington, Catalogue of Statuary by J. Bell (London: Farmer and Sons, 1890), 5. 96. Elkington and Company, Visitors’ books and pages from visitors’ books, 1843–1878, Vol. 1, Book: 1860–1867, p. 84, National Art Library, Manuscript, MSL/1971/708. 97. Quoted in “The Story of the House of Elkington,” Goldsmiths Journal (May 1937): 129, in Elkington and Company Records, AAD/1979/3/1/10, AAD. 98. Heald, William Armstrong: Magician of the North, 176–177. For an extended discussion of the objects in Armstrong’s home and the representation of enslaved subjects, see Beach, “John Bell’s American Slave in the Context of Production and Patronage.” 99. The column (NT Inventory 1230999) was originally in the Armstrong family collection, and was transferred to the National Trust in 1977 via the National Land Fund with A Daughter of Eve and other works of art. An image is reproduced in Beach, “John Bell’s American Slave in the Context of Production and Patronage.” 100. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 219–222. 101. A discussion of the Elswick Ordnance Company’s (Armstrong’s company) involvement in British colonial projects appears in Part II, “Making the Global Arms Market, 1863–1914” of Marshall Bastable’s study of Armstrong. Bastable, Arms and the State, 109–146. 102. William Armstrong to Margaret Armstrong, January 6, 1863, DF/A/11/18, Papers of the Lord Armstrong and Family of Cragside, Rothbury, Tyne and Wear Archives, Newcastle upon Tyne. 103. In his important essay on Charles Cordier’s ethnographic portrait busts, James Smalls observes a similar phenomenon, of the image of the enslaved being mobilized for artists’ own political or personal interests, in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French work by Cordier, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and others. See Smalls, “Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 283. 104. Cragside, Northumberland (London: National Trust, 1983), 17. 105. Richard Norman Shaw RA, Design for Cragside, Rothbury, Northumberland, 1872; watercolor, ink and graphite on paper; inv. no. 13/5, Royal Academy of Arts, London. 106. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 230.

NOTES

64433int.indd 193

193

22-05-18 10:15 AM

107. Cragside, Northumberland, 17. 108. Many scholars have discussed the sexualization of the enslaved female body in European and American art. See especially Hatt, “The American Slave, 1853,” 254; Smalls, “Exquisite Empty Shells,” 304–307; Nelson, The Color of Stone; and Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 51–55. 109. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 19. 110. William Wells Brown, “A Lecture Delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem,” 1847, in William Wells Brown: A Reader, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 108. 111. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 112. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. Roach’s understanding of surrogacy is indebted to Paul Gilroy’s understanding of the Black Atlantic as a space of cultural transmission as first articulated in Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157; and subsequently in Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–40. 113. Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana: A Play, in Four Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1859). The play premiered in New York at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1859 before traveling to London in 1861. For extended analyses of Boucicault’s play, see Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 30–47, 69; Roach, Cities of the Dead, 211–233. 114. Joseph Roach, “The Octoroon by John Bell,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/roach-on-the-octoroon-by-john-bell; Roach, Cities of the Dead, 211–233. 115. “British Sculpture: A Visit to the Studios,” The Art-Journal 16 (April 1863), 74; “The Progress of Sculpture in England,” The Art-Journal (April 1865), 124. 116. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, The One Hundredth (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1868), 43. 117. Official Catalogue: Blackburn Art and General Exhibition Held in the Building Newly Erected for the Blackburn Library and Museum (Blackburn UK: Charles Tiplady & Son, 1874), 21. 118. “List of subscriptions for purchasing and presenting the Blackburn Museum the marble statue of The Octoroon, by Mr. Bell, of London,” Object file, The Octoroon, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Blackburn. 119. “Formal Presentation of the Statue of the Octoroon to the Free Library and Museum,” Blackburn Standard and North East Lancashire Advertiser, December 2, 1876, 5. 120. Newspaper fragment, Blackburn Standard and North East Lancashire Advertiser, Object file, The Octoroon, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Blackburn. 121. On this topic, see Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “Circuits of Cotton,” in Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 29–66. 122. See, for example, “The American Blockade: Another Source of Danger,” January 15, 1862; “Shall the Southern States Be Recognised?,” January 22, 1862; “Lancashire Opinion,” February 5, 1862; “Neutrality and Intervention,” February 18, 1863; “England’s Neutrality in the American War,” April 1, 1863; “Our Neutrality and Its Consequences,” April 29, 1863. All articles are in The Blackburn Standard and North East Lancashire Advertiser. 123. Clare Hartwell and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: North (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 116. 124. Bagneris, “Miscegenation in Marble,” 85, 87. 125. This is the crux of Bagneris’s argument throughout her article, which she makes especially clear in noting, “The Octoroon offered the unique opportunity to provide the viewer with a white 194

64433int.indd 194

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

132.

133. 134.

135. 136.

marble sculpture in which the controversial connotations often linked to color—realness and sensuality—were narratively implied rather than materially explicit.” Bagneris, “Miscegenation in Marble,” 74; Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–12. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, The One Hundredth, 43. Bell, “Color on Statues, Color Round Statues, and Paintings and Sculpture Arranged Together,” Journal of the Society of Arts 9, no. 440 (April 26, 1861), 424. Condition and conservation report, Object file for The Octoroon, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. “Formal Presentation of the Statue of the Octoroon to the Free Library and Museum,” Blackburn Standard and North East Lancashire Advertiser, December 2, 1876. Examples include Eugène Delacroix, Clorinda Rescues Olindo and Sophronia, 1856, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, as well as the British illustrator Robert Seymour’s series of Jerusalem Delivered, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1822. Torquato Tasso, The Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso, translated into English Spenserian Verse with a Life of the Author, trans. J. H. Wiffen (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 12.2. An extended analysis of this passage appears in Elizabeth Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 102–106. Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 12.23. The transformation Tasso describes seems to be an inversion of another story popular in sixteenth-century Italy regarding a white woman giving birth to a Black baby. See Meghan Holmes, “ ‘How a Woman with a Strong Devotion to the Virgin Mary Gave Birth to a Very Black Child’: Imagining ‘Blackness’ in Renaissance Florence,” in Fremde in der Stadt. Ordnungen, Repräsentationen, und Praktiken (Munich: Peter Lang, 2010), 333–351. John Tenniel, “The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Counterpart to Power’s [sic] ‘Greek Slave,’ ” Punch, or the London Charivari 20 (1851), 236. Parian Figures Manufactured by Minton & Company (Stoke-on-Trent: Minton Manufacturing Company, 1852); Second Addenda to the List of Parian Figures Manufactured by Minton & Company (Stoke-on-Trent: Minton Manufacturing Company, 1864); Parian Figures Manufactured by Minton & Company (Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Minton Manufacturing Company, 1869), G271/1, Minton Archive, Stoke-on-Trent City Archives, Staffordshire City Council. Bell appears to have designed The Abyssinian Slave solely as a Minton figurine, with no larger prototype. Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun,” 227.

4. RELIEF WORK

1. William Hamilton, “An Address to the New York African Society, for Mutual Relief: Delivered in the Universalist Church, January 2, 1809,” Black Self-Publishing, https://www.americanantiquarian.org/blackpublishing/items/show/11079. 2. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” [1977], in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 19–20. 3. “John Brown,” Liberator, November 20, 1863, 186. 4. Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 54–77; Kirsten Pai Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Biography,” in Reading American Art, ed. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 190–207; Buick, “The Sentimental Education of Mary Edmonia Lewis: Identity, Culture, and Ideal Works, PhD NOTES

64433int.indd 195

195

22-05-18 10:15 AM

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

196

64433int.indd 196

dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999; Marilyn Richardson, “Taken From Life: Edward M. Bannister, Edmonia Lewis, and the Memorialization of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” in Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, ed. Martin H. Blatt et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 94–115; Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Representing the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19–20; Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 13–15; Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 157–166. Buick, Child of the Fire, 59–60; and Nelson, The Color of Stone, 56–67. This support was not without limitations. Kirsten Pai Buick and Charmaine Nelson have illuminated the complexities of the sculptor’s relationship to white abolitionist patrons—Lydia Maria Child in particular—who avidly promoted Lewis’s work while at the same time harboring condescending and racist attitudes toward an artist whom they were inclined to regard more as a curiosity than an equal. Buick, “Inventing the Artist,” Child of the Fire, 1–29; Nelson, The Color of Stone, 17–20. See especially Koritha Mitchell, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020); and Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). I draw from Martha S. Jones’s use of the term “public culture” in the context of nineteenthcentury Black women’s activism and associational life, which spanned spheres of relief, reform, politics, and education. She notes that this activism was “not a vocation but part of a life’s fabric that included work, family, and community building.” Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9. Frederick Douglass, “Miss Edmonia Lewis,” New National Era, September 25, 1873, 2. Douglass, “Miss Edmonia Lewis,” 2. Lewis’s biography has been written many times, beginning with profiles from the 1860s by the likes of Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, Henry Wreford, and others. Her persona was often the product of others’ words, leaving scholars to negotiate what Hazel Carby describes elsewhere as a double bind of both archival “absences” as well as a corpus of primary sources about Black women’s lives constructed in large part by white people and white women in particular. Carby, “White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 111–128. For further consideration of the complexities of Lewis’s biography, see Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Blackness in Formation,” Lecture, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today,” Symposium, Columbia University, November 9, 2018; Brody, “Nobody Knows My Name,” The Women’s Review of Books 28, no. 2 (March/ April 2011), 24–25; Buick, “Inventing the Artist,” in Child of the Fire, 1–30; Nelson, The Color of Stone, 15–20. Lewis’s elder brother Samuel was born in 1832 and migrated to California in the 1850s before eventually moving to Bozeman, Montana. He provided financial support to his sister throughout her life, bequeathing shares and deposits from his estate upon his death in 1898. One of the earliest mentions of Samuel Lewis comes from an interview Lewis gave to Lydia Maria Child in 1864, in which Child quoted Lewis as revealing that “He placed me at school in Oberlin” following a stint as a miner during the California Gold Rush. “Letter from Lydia Maria Child,” Liberator, February 19, 1864, 31; Samuel Lewis, will, March 26, 1896, proved January 20, 1898, District Court, Bozeman, cited in Henderson and Henderson, The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

Lewis: A Narrative Biography (Milford, CT: Esquiline Hill Press, 2012), eBook edition, unpaginated. Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis at McGrawville: The Early Education of a NineteenthCentury Black Woman Artist,” Nineteenth-Century Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 22, no. 2 (2000), 244. Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis at McGrawville,” 239–256. On the intricacies of the antislavery movement and African American activism at Oberlin College and in the town of Oberlin, see J. Brent Morris, Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, “The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin before the Civil War,” Journal of Negro Education 52, no. 2 (Spring 1983), 142–155. Buick, Child of the Fire, 8. Ibid., 7–8. Lewis’s mother is identified by most scholars as Catherine Mike, from Credit River Reserve near Lake Ontario. Her father, a man by the surname Lewis, was said to have migrated to New York from Haiti. Buick, Child of the Fire, 4; Bearden and Henderson, A History of African American Artists, 8–10. On the tourist trade in the Great Lakes region, see Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native American Art from the Northeast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). See also Buick, Child of the Fire, 120–124 and Bearden and Henderson, A History of African American Artists, 20. America Meredith, “In Focus: Edmonia Lewis’s The Old Arrow Maker,” in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, ed. Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Minneapolis and Seattle: Minneapolis Institute of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2019), 96–97. See also Buick, Child of the Fire, 120–124. In a widely published early profile of the artist, Lydia Maria Child cited Lewis, “I did as my mother’s people did. I made baskets and embroidered moccasons and I went into the cities with my mother’s people to sell them.” “Letter from Lydia Maria Child,” 31; a similar account appears in “How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist,” [ca. November 1, 1870], pamphlet, EvansTibbs Collection Archives, National Gallery of Art. On Anishinaabe women’s artistic traditions, see Cherish Parrish and Kelly Church, “Sustaining Traditions,” in Hearts of Our People, ed. Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Minneapolis and Seattle: Minneapolis Institute of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2019), 303. The events of this case have been documented in most scholarly discussions of Lewis’s work. See, for example, Nelson, The Color of Stone, 17; Buick, Child of the Fire, 9; Bearden and Henderson, A History of African American Artists, 57–59. See also Tyehimba Jess, “Alabaster Hands,” in Olio (Seattle: Wave Books, 2016), 155. Geoffrey Blodgett, “John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,” Journal of Negro History (July 1968), 201–218. Langston also recounted the case in his memoir, although he did not name Lewis specifically. John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol: or, The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1894). Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3; see also Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008), 1–14. Buick, Child of the Fire, 10. Buick, Child of the Fire, 5. NOTES

64433int.indd 197

197

22-05-18 10:15 AM

26. Ibid., 11. 27. “We saw last winter one of these, the exact likeness of Wendell Phillips. It is in the possession of Richard Greener, a colored student at Harvard College, and is highly prized as a work of art.” “The Colored Genius at Rome,” Christian Recorder, March 31, 1866. Greener’s daughter, Belle da Costa Greene, would later become well known to another generation of artists and art historians as the librarian of the Morgan in the early twentieth century. On Greener, see Katherine Chaddish, Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 28. Lewis’s connections to these individuals in the 1860s can be traced in a number of newspaper articles and other sources, in particular the detailed diary of educator Frances Rollin. Rollin’s diary entries for the year 1868 have many mentions of a “grand intellectual sphere” that included Greener, Howard, Nell, and others. On her entry for May 9, she recalls visiting Howard—who was a close friend of Lewis’s, the two having traveled to Richmond, Virginia, for a brief teaching stint in 1865—and viewing photographs that Lewis had sent back from Rome. Diary of Frances Anne Rollin, 1868, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Carole Ione Lewis Family collection, 2018.101.1. 29. It is possible that Lewis based the drawing after a plaster cast copy of the Urania, although Oberlin did not begin to amass its cast collection until later in the nineteenth century. It is more likely that she referenced an engraved reproduction of a sculpture. Lewis’s biographers Harry Henderson and Albert Henderson suggest that the drawing was modeled after an illustration of a first century CE Roman marble copy of a seated Urania figure in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. Henderson and Henderson, The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis, eBook edition, unpaginated. Discussions of the drawing also appear in Nelson, The Color of Stone, 174; Buick “The Sentimental Education of Mary Edmonia Lewis,” 28–30; Marcia Goldberg, “A Drawing by Edmonia Lewis,” American Art Journal 9, no. 2 (November 1977), 104. 30. I thank Layla Bermeo for first suggesting this detail to me. 31. Different scholars have identified different dates for Lewis’s arrival in Boston. Buick suggests she arrived in the city in early 1864, while Richardson identifies 1863. I date her arrival to sometime before November 1863, likely in the late summer or autumn, because of notices about the John Brown medallion that began to appear in the Liberator that month. John Brown,” Liberator, November 20, 1863, 186. 32. “Letter from Lydia Maria Child,” 31. 33. The Athenaeum Century: The Influence and History of the Boston Athenaeum from 1807 to 1907 (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1907), 46, quoted in Hina Hirayama, “With Éclat”: The Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: University Press of New England, 2013), 37. On sculpture at the Athenaeum, see also Pamela Born, “The Canon is Cast: Plaster Casts in American Museum and University Collections,” Art Documentation 21, no. 2 (2002), 8. 34. Lauretta Dimmick, “Edward Augustus Brackett (1818–1908),” in American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1865, ed. Thayer Tolles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 72. 35. “Medallion of John Brown,” Liberator, January 29, 1864, 19; “Miss Edmonia Lewis,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 29, 1864. 36. One apt description, from an 1869 periodical, noted, “the New ‘Studio Building,’ on the corner of Bromfield, fronting on Tremont Street,—a massive range of brick, four stories high,—the whole surmounted by a French roof; a handsome and imposing structure, in the lower story of which are six fine large stories . . . and above-stairs, by numerous artists, painters, engravers, draughtsmen, &c.” The Stranger’s New Guide through Boston and Its Vicinity. A Complete Hand198

64433int.indd 198

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

Book, Directing Visitors Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Go (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1869), 11. Edward Stanwood, Boston Illustrated (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873), 82 Buick, “The Sentimental Education of Mary Edmonia Lewis,” 51. “New England Freedmen’s Aid Society,” Freedmen’s Record 1, no. 1 (January 1865), 1. “Edmonia Lewis,” Freedmen’s Record 1, no. 1 (January 1865), 16. “Letter from Lydia Maria Child,” 31; “A Colored Female Sculptor,” Weekly Anglo African 3, no. 28 (February 13, 1864), 3; “Miss Edmonia Lewis,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 29, 1864. “John Brown.” Upon the commission of the wealthy businessman John Stearns, who had also helped fund Brown’s actual raid, Brackett visited Brown to “get the necessary sketches and measurements for a bust.” Brackett’s recounting of the episode appears in “John Brown’s Raid Fifty Years Ago,” Magazine of History, With Notes and Queries 10, no. 6 (December 1909), 323. Lydia Maria Child, “Brackett’s Bust of John Brown,” New York Tribune, February 11, 1860, 9. Ibid. The bust was likely conceived as a pendant to a bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from the same year, which is similar both in terms of its dimensions and the sitter’s appearance and garments. According to the Art Inventories Catalog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, both busts were formerly in the collection of Colonel Charles Young, a career military officer and the first African American to obtain the rank of colonel in the United States Army, during the mid-twentieth century but their whereabouts now remain unknown. “John Brown.” “A Colored Female Sculptor.” Ibid. Notices for the medallion appeared on a near-weekly basis from February to July 1864, from “Medallion of John Brown,” Weekly Anglo-African 3, no. 29 (February 20, 1864), 3, to “Medallion of John Brown,” Weekly Anglo-African 3, no. 45 (June 11, 1864), 4. Elizabeth Lorang and R. J. Weir, eds., “ “Will not these days be thy poets sung”: Poems of the Anglo African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863–1864,” Scholarly Editing 34 (2013), http:// scholarlyediting.org/2013/editions/intro.cwnewspaperpoetry.html. “Literary Notices,” Oberlin Students Monthly: A Religious, Political, and Literary Magazine 1, no. 4 (February 1859), 1. “Our Paper,” Weekly Anglo-African 1, no. 1 (July 23, 1859), 1. Ivy G. Wilson, “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine, Or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives,” in Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, ed. George Hutchinson and John K. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 24. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 14–15, 193–220. Photographs, too, were crucial aspects of this project of envisioning freedom. See Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). Lincoln first issued the Emancipation Proclamation in late September 1862, at a moment when the Union army held a military advantage over Confederate forces. The document was preliminary and provisional, stating that enslaved people in southern states would be declared free if those states did not rejoin the Union by the end of the year. Since no states rejoined the Union, the proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. For further context, see Michael Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford NOTES

64433int.indd 199

199

22-05-18 10:15 AM

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

200

64433int.indd 200

/St. Martin’s, 2010); and John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963). “Anti-Slavery Effort Still Needed,” Liberator, January 2, 1863, 3. Alfred M. Green, Letters and Discussions on the Formation of Colored Regiments, and the Duty of the Colored People in Regard to the Great Slaveholders’ Rebellion, in the United States of America (Philadelphia, PA, 1862), 13–17; “The Black Role in the Civil War,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. V: The United States, 1847–1858, ed. Peter C. Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 117–127. The 54th Massachusetts was mustered into formation in March 1863 and saw service through the war’s end in 1865. The regiment was formed in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, which made provisions for the recruitment of African American men. For further on the regiment, see Sarah Greenough and Nancy K. Anderson, Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2013); and Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yavocone, eds., Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). For a critical discussion of the framing of post-Emancipation African American masculinities within a military-industrial complex, see Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York: NYU Press, 2021); and Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775– 1905 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). “The Mass. 54th at Fort Wagner,” Liberator, August 28, 1863, 138. Albert Fearing, William Perkins, and Gardiner Howland Shaw, National Sailors’ Fair (Boston, MA: s.n., 1864). The New York Times reported, “Our Boston friends modestly suggest that it need not shrink from a comparison with our own Metropolitan Fair.” “The Sailors’ Fair at Boston,” New York Times, November 11, 1864, 5; Fearing, Perkins, and Shaw, National Sailors’ Fair, 1. “The National Sailors’ Fair,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 11, 1864, 2. Ibid. “The Bust of Col. Shaw,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 14, 1864, 2; “The Colored Sculptor,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 25, 1865, 2. “The National Sailor’s Fair,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 11, 1864, 2; “Success of Edmonia Lewis,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 1887, 2. Mention of the commission appears in Henry Wreford, “A Negro Sculptress,” Athenaeum, no. 2001 (March 3, 1866), 302. Wreford’s article was reproduced one month later under the same title in Frank Leslie’s Weekly, April 7, 1866. Tyehimba Jess, “Colonel Robert Gould Shaw,” Callaloo 38, no. 3 (2015), 435; republished in Olio (Seattle, WA: Wave Press, 2016). “The Bust of Col. Shaw”; “The National Sailors’ Fair.” Anna Quincy Waterston, “Edmonia Lewis,” Liberator, December 16, 1864, 204. See especially Buick, “Tautology as Method,” in Child of the Fire, 33–35. “Both the painter and the sculptor understood that the possibilities of memorialization and historical immortality for the black men of the Fifty-fourth were intrinsically bound up with the martyrdom of Shaw.” Richardson, “Taken from Life,” 104. On Shaw and questions of identity among white elites in Boston, see Katie Mullis Kresser, “Power and Glory: Brahmin Identity and the Shaw Memorial,” American Art 20, no. 3 (Fall 2006); 32–57. On the Saint-Gaudens memorial, see Kirk Savage, ed., The Civil War in Art and Memory (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2016); and Greenough and Anderson, Tell It with Pride.

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

74. “Success of Edmonia Lewis,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 1887, 2. 75. See “Bust of Col. Shaw,” Liberator, December 9, 1864, 199; and “Personal,” National Anti-Slavery Standard 25, no. 52 (May 6, 1865), 3. Additional articles reveal that Lewis continued her practice of selling photographs of her work alongside the works themselves later on in her career. “Statuary by Miss Edmonia Lewis,” The Elevator, June 21, 1867; “Miss Lewis, the Colored Sculptor,” The Elevator, June 12, 1868, 2. 76. G.W.P., “Affairs about Boston,” Weekly Anglo-African 4, no. 14 (November 5, 1864), 2–3. 77. “Edmonia Lewis, a Young Colored Woman,” Freedmen’s Record 1, no. 1 (January 1865), 16; Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Sturgis Shaw, November 3, 1864, in Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1877–1880, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 446. 78. Lewis was said to have conceived of Shaw’s bodily presence in a lively way when making the bust. Lydia Maria Child recounted a visit to the sculptor’s studio where “[Lewis] told me she thought and thought of Col. Shaw till it seemed as if he were in the room. ‘If I were a Spiritualist,’ said she, ‘I should believe he did help me make this bust; for while I was moulding it, I had such a strong feeling that he was near.’ ” Child to Shaw, November 3, 1864. 79. On Rogers and narrative, see Michael Leja, “Sculpture for a Mass Market,” and Leo Mazow, “Read, Look, and Listen: Literary Narratives in John Rogers’ America,” in John Rogers: American Stories, ed. Kimberly Orcutt (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2010), 11–26, 97–118; and Michael Clapper, “Imagining the Ordinary: John Rogers’ Anticlassical Genre Sculptures as Purposely Popular Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 1–39. 80. Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Image Peddling,” New-York Journal of American History 68, no. 3 (2006), 69. 81. Ibid., 69–71. 82. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors; Nelson, The Color of Stone, 15–17. 83. Mitchell, From Slave Cabins to the White House, 3–4; Jones, All Bound Up Together, 121–126. 84. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 122. 85. Jane Lancaster, “I Would Have Made Out Very Poorly Had It Not Been for Her: The Life and Work of Christiana Bannister, Hair Doctress and Philanthropist,” Rhode Island History 59, no. 4 (2001), 103–122. 86. Elizabeth Keckley, “Behind the Scenes of Black Labor,” in Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood, ed. Xiomara Santamarina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Jones, All Bound Up Together, 216–219. 87. For further on Keckley and the Contraband Relief Association, see Santamarina, Belabored Professions. 88. Francis H. Fletcher to unknown recipient, May 28, 1864, Gilder Lehrman Collection, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York. For contemporary responses to the soldiers’ protests, see “The Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission of Boston,” Weekly Anglo-African 3, no. 43 (May 28, 1864), 1; “Mass Meeting in Boston,” Weekly Anglo African 4, no. 2 (August 13, 1864), 2. 89. “An Appeal to the Public,” Liberator, May 13, 1864. 90. “Mass Meeting in Boston.” 91. On fairs, see Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of Women’s Fundraising Fairs (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998); Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Stranger, Buy . . . Lest our Mission Fail: The Complex Culture of Women’s Abolitionist Fairs,” American Nineteenth Century History 4 (Spring 2003), 1–24; Lee Chambers-Schiller, “A Good Work Among the People: The Political Culture of the Boston Antislavery Fair,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 249–274. NOTES

64433int.indd 201

201

22-05-18 10:15 AM

92. “G.W.P., “Affairs About Boston,” 1. 93. “G.W.P.,” Affairs About Boston,” 1. William Beals, according to several nineteenth-century city directories, was known as a “public decorator” who, with his wife, manufactured “a superior assortment of flag and all kinds of decorations for banquets, public celebrations, balls, etc.” Illustrated Boston: The Metropolis of New England (New York: American Publishing and Engraving Company, 1889), 269. 94. “From Boston,” New Orleans Tribune, November 1, 1864, 1. 95. “Letter from Mrs. Child,” Liberator, November 18, 1865, 185; “G.W.P., “Affairs About Boston,” 1. 96. “A life-like medallion of Wendell Phillips, with some other sculptures, attest the talents of Miss Edmonia Lewis.” “From Boston,” 4. 97. One reporter described tables “amply supplied with the fancy articles and nic-nacs that always constitute the matériel of such fairs.” “From Boston,” 1. 98. Stephen Knott, Amateur Craft: History and Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), xii. For a discussion of Knott’s concept of handcrafting in relation to the politics of craft and capital, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). I thank Emily Casey for helping me think through these ideas. 99. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 81. 100. Katherine Fein, “ ‘The Sense of Nearness’: Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands and the Materials and Bodies of Nineteenth-Century Casting,” British Art Studies 14 (2019), https://doi.org/10.17658 /issn.2058-5462/issue-14/kfein/001; Marcia Pointon, “Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things: Artifacts at the Edge,” Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (June 2014), 170–195. 101. B. Szostakowski, P. Smitham, and W. S. Khan, “Plaster of Paris: A Sort History of Casting and Injured Limb Mobilization,” Open Orthopaedics Journal 11 (2017), 291–296; Leonard F. Peltier, Fractures: A History and Iconography of Their Treatment (San Francisco: Norman, 1990), 69. 102. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches [1863] (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1922), 173. 103. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 119–121. 104. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 22. 105. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35. 106. G.W.P., “Affairs about Boston.” 107. Richardson, “Taken from Life,” 114. 108. Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001), 26–39. 109. “A Flag from the Ladies for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” Weekly Anglo-African 2, no. 36 (April 4, 1863), 2. Lewis and Howard traveled to teach in Virginia in the summer of 1865. One newspaper reported, “Miss Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor, who so beautifully executed the busts of Col. Shaw, 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, and John Brown, has been in Richmond the past month teaching school.” “A Colored Sculptor,” New-York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1865. 110. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted, third edition (Boston: James H. Earle, 1892), 146. 111. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 172–173. 112. Ibid. 113. For extended analyses of the centrality of photographs, including those depicting Civil War soldiers, to constructions of Black selfhood in the nineteenth-century United States, see Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier; Willis and Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation; and Maurice O. Wallace, “Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures,” in Pictures 202

64433int.indd 202

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

114. 115. 116.

117.

118.

119.

and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 244–266. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 16. Buick, Child of the Fire, 52. I thank Elyse Nelson and Wendy Walters for inviting me to view Lewis’s work during its conservation and gallery staging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the preparation for its installation in the 2022 exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. Buick attributes this observation to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody of the Christian Register, as is cited in Phebe Hanaford, Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (Augusta, ME: True and Company, 1882), 316–318; Buick, Child of the Fire, 60, 229–230. See, for example, the wood engraving by Winslow Homer, “Expulsion of Negroes and Abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1860,” Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1860. Much has been written on Forever Free, especially regarding how Lewis chose to signify race and gender across the bodies of both figures. The more recent interpretations of the sculpture by Buick, Savage, and Wilson revises what critics in the mid-twentieth century took to be a seemingly retrograde depiction of gender roles with a passive woman and active, muscular man. Buick, Child of the Fire, 52–67; Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 63–64; Judith Wilson, “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 112–122.

5. BETWEEN LIBERTY AND EMANCIPATION

1. Aristotle, “Physics,” 194.b.25–26, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Johnathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 20. 2. “Questa figura isolata . . . è tutta una storia.” “Lo scoltore Pezzikar e l’abolizione della schiavitù,” Il Cittadino [Trieste], September 11, 1873. All translations are my own unless indicated. 3. On the Centennial Exhibition, see Kimberly Orcutt, Power & Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017); and Bruno Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). 4. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue—‘The Emancipated Slave,’ ” Boston Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1876, 2. 5. For further, see Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010); and John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). 6. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 48. 7. Just across the border of present-day Slovenia, Trieste remained part of the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian empire until its 1918 annexation to Italy. It officially became part of the Italian nation in 1954. For further, see Dominique Kircher Reill, Nationalists who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Maura Elise Hametz, Making Trieste Italian, 1918–1954 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer Press, 2005). 8. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 52–88; Bindman and Gates, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, part 1, 255–257; Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). NOTES

64433int.indd 203

203

22-05-18 10:15 AM

9. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 52–88. 10. Bell to Elkington, May 13, 1852, Elkington and Company Records. 11. On the sculpture’s relationship to the politics of Italian unification and the Risorgimento, see Caitlin Meehye Beach, “Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiaviù across Empires,” in Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970, ed. Melissa Dabakis and Paul Kaplan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021), 154–170. 12. Pezzicar’s enrollment appears in the following records (the spelling of his name sometimes also appears as “Pezzikar”): Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1857–1858,” 1857 novembre 5—1858 aprile 28, Serie 4, Registro 6; “Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1858–1859,” 158 novembre 5—1859 maggio 17, Serie 4, Registro 7; “Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1859–1860,” 1859 novembre 8—1860 maggio 23, Serie 4, Registro 8; Archivio Storico, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Venice. 13. “Guidizi delle Commissioni e del consiglio Accademico sui lavori eseguiti degli alunni durante l’anno scolastico 1860–1861,” 40, 52, in “Discorsi della Regia Accademia Belle-Arti in Venezia,” 1857–1862, Serie 16.2, Archivio Storico, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. On the Alunnato di Roma, see Anno scolastico 1862–1863. Posizione del concorso all’alunnato di Roma per la scultura [relativo ai concorrenti Antonio Dal Zotto e Francesco Pezzikar, 1862–1865],” Box 166, Classificazione 1.4.1.10, Archivio Storico, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, 1806-XX. See also Emiliano Covre, “Alunnato di Roma,” in Nico Stringa, ed., L’Accademia di Belle arti a Venezia: l’Ottocento (Crocetta del Montello, Treviso: Antiga, 2016), 477–519. 14. On Pezzicar’s funerary sculpture, see entries in Luca Bellocchi, Le Sculture dei Cimiteri Triestini (Trieste, Italy: Società di Minerva, 2001), 18, 47–48, 91–92, 96, 102. The main biographical source for Pezzicar comes from his son, Amerino, who in 1911 recounted his father’s life in a letter. A full excerpt of this letter, which is housed in the Trieste city archives, is reproduced in Massimo De Grassi’s comprehensive essay in the artist. Amerino Pezzicar to Attilo Gentile, June 16, 1911, in Massimo De Grassi, “Francesco Pezzicar e L’Abolizione della schiavitù,” Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste 31 (2012), 285–288. 15. For thorough discussions of American sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, see Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); and Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Representing the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 45–55. On sculptural commemorations of emancipation specifically, see Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” A Sisterhood of Sculptors, 149–180. 16. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors, 152–153. 17. Hosmer’s Freedman’s Memorial and Lewis’s Freedwoman are no longer extant. For an early report on the progress of the latter, see “Photographs,” Freedmen’s Record, April 1, 1866, 69. 18. Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue—The Emancipated Slave.” 19. On the African diaspora and histories of enslavement in Venice, see Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 412–452; and Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Local Color: The Black African Presence in Venetian Art and History,” in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me As I Am, ed. Fred Wilson, Kathleen Goncharov, Reiko Tomii, and Kathleen Friello (Cambridge, MA: List Center for the Visual Arts/ MIT, 2003), 8–19. 20. See also Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Monuments to Tyranny: Issues of Race and Power in NineteenthCentury American Responses to Early Modern Italian Public Sculpture,” in Republics and Empires, 69–85.

204

64433int.indd 204

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

21. Karl Marx, “The Maritime Commerce of Austria,” New-York Daily Tribune, January 9, 1857, 3. See also Marx, “The Maritime Commerce of Austria [second article],” New-York Daily Tribune, August 4, 1857, 3–4. 22. Aldo Colleoni, Il Ruolo geopolitico dei consoli a Trieste: Il Consolato degli stati uniti dei Nord America e l’Opera di Alexander Wheelock Thayer (Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Italo Svevo, 2006); Marco Stock, Trieste e l’America Nascente (Trieste, Italy: Fachin, 1985); Oscar de Incontrera, Trieste e l’America (1782–1830) (Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Dello Zibaldone, 1961). 23. Atti della esposizione agricola, industriale, e di belle arti tenuta in Trieste (Trieste, Italy: Tiopgrafia Appolonia & Caprin, 1872), 9; “Weltaustellung 1873 in Wien. Mitglieder der k. Austellungscommission,” Allgemeine illustrirte Weltausstellungs-Zeitung 1, no. 6 (March 20, 1872); “Austellungscomission in Küstenland,” Wiener Zeitung, February 16, 1872, 3. 24. The Wiener Salonblatt reported the statue—“die für die Ausstellung in Philadelphia bestimmt ist”—was “of particular interest” (ein besonderes Interesse) to Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I during his visit to the imperial foundry. “Der Kaißer in der kunstergießerei,” Wiener Salonblatt, February 19, 1876, 6. See also “Osterreiches Museum,” Neue Freie Presse Wien, November 28, 1875, 6. 25. The marker of “liberty,” as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has discussed, paradoxically overlapped European colonial ambitions in Africa. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Liberty’s Surface,” in Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and United States during the Long Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope Press, 2012), 70–94. See also Yasmine Khan, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); and Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Described by the Sculptor Bartholdi (New York: North American Review, 1885). 26. Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 43–59. 27. “Quando l’Abolizione della schiavitù prese la via d’America, tutti eredevano fermamente che vi sarebbe rimasta.” “La Statua di Pezzicar,” L’Adria, May 15, 1877. 28. “La Statua di Pezzicar.” The third version of the statue, now in the collections of the Newark Museum (gift of Franklin Murphy, Jr., 1926, 26.2755), was the one previously exhibited by Miner Kellogg at the State House in New Orleans. A notice of Stewart’s purchase of the work appears in “Editorial Etchings,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 3 (June 1859), 9. Stewart displayed the statue in his home from 1869 to 1886. For further, see also “Mapping the Greek Slave,” Yale Center for British Art, http://interactive.britishart.yale.edu/mapping-the-greek-slave/map. 29. Jones, The Global Work of Art, 66–70. 30. De Grassi, “Francesco Pezzicar e L’Abolizione della schiavitù,” 272; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 87. For further on the Davis medallion and the Rippingille print, which was engraved by David Lucas, see Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 49. 31. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 87. 32. Anne Lafont, “Mobilités théoriques et géographiques,” Une Africaine au Louvre en 1800 (Paris: Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, 2019), 12–16. 33. Photographs and engravings of the statue from the Centennial Exhibition reveal it to have been installed on a large round pedestal. A similar pedestal appears in early twentieth-century images from Trieste. Installation view from Rassegna di Pittura e Scultura dell’800 a Trieste, 1922, Biblioteca d’arte Sergio Molesi, Museo Revoltella. 34. I thank Thayer Tolles for first suggesting this observation to me.

NOTES

64433int.indd 205

205

22-05-18 10:15 AM

35. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Register of the Centennial (Philadelphia: Frank Leslie, 1876), 167. 36. The sculpture was catalogued as entry number 163 for the Austrian selection. Katalog der österreichischen Abtheilung. Herausgegeben von der Österreichischen Commision für die Weltaustellung in Philadelphia (Vienna: Die Commission, 1876), 129; United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition, 1876. Official Catalogue: Complete in One Volume (Philadelphia: J. R. Nagle and Co., 1876), 91. 37. E.E.G. [Eleanor Elizabeth Greatorex], “The Exposition: Among the Pictures,” New Century for Woman, May 20, 1876, 1. 38. James McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1876), 532. 39. On the Amistad revolt, see Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2013); Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 40. The portrait entered the collections of the New Haven Museum in the late nineteenth century as a gift of the Purvis family (gift of Charles B. Purvis, 1898, 1971.205). 41. Purvis founded the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee in 1837 and presided over the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society from 1845 to 1850. Richard Powell, “Cinqué: Anti-Slavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11 (Fall 1997), 48–73. 42. Powell, “Cinqué: Anti-Slavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” 65; Ross Barrett, “Painting That ‘Might Prove Injurious’: Cinque and the Representation of African American Political Violence,” Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) 67–69. 43. Barrett, “Painting That ‘Might Prove Injurious,’ ” 68–69. The mezzotint of Cinqué bears continued resonance across the African diaspora; an adaptation appears on the 5000 Leone note in Sierra Leone as well as in murals around Freetown. 44. R. D. Dove, “The Centennial Exhibition,” Christian Recorder, October 12, 1876. 45. Dove, “The Centennial Exhibition.” 46. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755),” in Art in Theory, 1648–1815, 456. See also Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 47. See especially Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art [1764], vol. 2: 77. 48. For a compelling comparative analysis of Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra and Pezzicar’s Abolition of Slavery, see Richard J. Powell, “Resurrection and Respiration: Sculptures by Edmonia Lewis and Francesco Pezzicar,” Lecture, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, May 7, 2019. 49. One critic observed that Lewis gave the figure “an aquiline nose and a prominent chin of the Roman type.” William Clark Jr., Great American Sculptures (Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1878), 141. See also Susanna W. Gold, “The Death of Cleopatra/The Birth of Freedom: Edmonia Lewis at the New World’s Fair,” Biography 35, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 318–341; Kirsten Pai Buick Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 181–207. 50. Buick, Child of the Fire, 167; Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra: Myth and Identity,” International Review of African American Art 12, no. 2 (1995), 36–52. 51. Nelson, The Color of Stone, 178. Kirsten Pai Buick also observes a similar distancing at work in Lewis’s turn to neoclassicism in her 1875 statue of the biblical Hagar, Child of the Fire, 65–67. 206

64433int.indd 206

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

52. Howells’s comments expose a deep-seated racial prejudice enraged by his encounter with the sculpture, an active figure that appears as an agent (he describes the figure as one “who has broken his chain”) rather than a recipient of liberation. It is worth noting that a decade prior he had extensive praise for John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze Freedman of 1863, a sculpture that contrasts starkly with The Abolition of Slavery as a seated and contained figure that was never cast at full scale (the statuette measures about one-and-a-half feet high). William Dean Howells, “A Sennight of the Centennial,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (July 1876), 96. The discussion of Ward’s Freedman appears in Howells, “A Question of Monuments,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1, 1866, 647–648. 53. Amerino Pezzicar to Attilo Gentile, June 16, 1911, cited in De Grassi, “Francesco Pezzicar e L’Abolizione della schiavitù,” Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste 31 (2012), 285–328. 54. In the late nineteenth century, Pezzicar sculpted a bust of his friend Thayer, which is in the collections of the Beethoven Haus in Bonn (gift of Alexander Wheelock Thayer, 18923, no. 286) 55. Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue—The Emancipated Slave.” 56. John Clark Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States of America, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers & Co., 1877), 625. 57. Ibid. 58. Rinaldo Walcott identifies “the long emancipation” as both a colonial construction and a durational condition, noting, “since 1834 (the British colonies), 1865 (United States), and so on (Portugal, Spain, etc.), the various and multiple colonial emancipations that have followed have put in place juridical conditions of ‘white civil society’ that have continually preempted ‘black freedom.’ ” Rinaldo Walcott, “Fanon’s Heirs,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 59, no. 3 (2014), 437. See also Walcott, The Long Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). On what Saidiya Hartman terms “the burdened individuality of freedom” and what Lisa Lowe terms “the ruses of liberty,” see Saidiya Hartman, “The Subject of Freedom,” Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 155–206. 59. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 45, 73, 107. See also Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), 206. 60. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 116. 61. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 30. 62. Copeland evokes the work of Cedric Robinson in his use of this phrase; as Robinson writes in Black Marxism, “the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of European society no matter the structures upon which they were formed.” Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11. 63. Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue.” 64. Whereas the previous models mentioned here were deemed “not truly African,” the North Carolinian sailor who eventually models for the sculpture becomes what the performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson terms an arbiter of authenticity, or a figure who helps “secure particular attributes of Blackness in an essentializing way.” E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 65. Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue.” 66. The New York Times reported the departure of both vessels from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Trieste in March 1873. “Loading the Government Transports—American Arrangements at Vienna,” New York Times, March 1, 1873, 2. Roswell D. Hitchcock was the acting commander for NOTES

64433int.indd 207

207

22-05-18 10:15 AM

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

the Guard during the Vienna Exposition shipment and is likely the lieutenant to which Thayer refers in his account. Lewis Randolph Hamersly, The Records of Living Officers of the Navy and Marine Corps (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly & Co., 1890), 151. Denise Murrell, “Olympia in Context: Manet, The Impressionists, and Black Paris,” in Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 7. Daryle Williams, “ ‘Peculiar Circumstances of the Land’: Artists and Models in NineteenthCentury Brazilian Slave Society,” Art History 35, no. 4 (September 2012), 702–727; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 89–90; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 90–93. Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, Presidential Proclamations, 1791–1991, Record Group 11, General Records of the United States Government, National Archives Catalog, https:// catalog.archives.gov/id/299998. Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York: NYU Press, 2021); Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine, 53–81; Michael Hatt, “Making a Man of Him,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 1 (1992), 21–35. On the modernity of bronze, see David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 61–77; Krauss, “Narrative Time: The Question of the Gates of Hell,” Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 7–37. David J. Getsy, “Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture. Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality,” in The Enduring Instant: Time and Space in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2003), 297–300. “L’opera del Pezzikar segna un grande progresso in statuaria: l’autore si staccò completamente dal classicismo, uniformandosi alla moderna aspirazione che vuole il vero in tutto e per tutto.” “Lo scoltore Pezzikar e l’abolizione della schiavitù,” Il Cittadino, September 11, 1873. A comprehensive account of this process appears in Michael Shapiro, Bronze Casting and American Sculpture, 1850–1900 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). See also “Bronze Casting: The Lost Wax Process,” Amon Carter Museum of American Art, November 25, 2015, Video, 4:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2LTsD8IE_s. Jennifer Roberts, “Reversal” (Lecture, The 70th Annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., April 18, 2021). See also Roberts, Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2012). See, for example, Christopher Wood’s discussion of the “uberlebensgroß” bronze figures—the first cast north of the Alps since antiquity—of the tomb of Emperor Maximilian I for the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, Austria. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 255–331. Thayer, “Pezzicar’s Bronze Statue.” “La statua di Pezzicar.” Sarah Lewis, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” October 165 (Summer 2018), 97–98.

CODA

1. A detailed account and analysis of the statue’s construction appears in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and United States during the Long Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: 208

64433int.indd 208

NOTES

22-05-18 10:15 AM

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

Periscope Press, 2012), 70–93; and Grigsby, “Geometry/Labor = Volume/Mass?,” October 106 (Autumn 2003), 3–34. On the statue’s creation and relationship to France and the United States, see Edward Berenson, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2012); Yasmin Sabina Khan, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Described by the Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (New York: North American Review, 1885). “The French Statue,” New York Times, September 29, 1876, 4. Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, 25. The National Park Service for the Department of the Interior, the institutional steward of the sculpture, continues to tout this moment of origin in official narratives of the sculpture’s making, calling de Laboulaye the “father of the Statue of Liberty.” See “Edouard Rene de Laboulaye,” U.S. National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/edouard-rene-de-laboulaye.htm. For further, see also Berenson, “The Idea,” The Statue of Liberty, 8–29 John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Bartholdi Statue,” in Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World: By the President of the United States, on Bedlow’s Island, New York, Thursday, October 28, 1886 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1887), 61. “Our Countrymen in Chains! By J. G. Whittier. Sold at the Anti-Slavery Office. 144 Nassau Street. [1837],” Portfolio 118, Folder 32a, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1180320a; Whittier, “The Bartholdi Statue,” 61. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638– 1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896). W. E. B. Du Bois, Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100–101. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 [1935] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30.

NOTES

64433int.indd 209

209

22-05-18 10:15 AM

64433int.indd 210

22-05-18 10:15 AM

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, modeled 1841–1843, carved 1846.  /  2 0.2 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Antislavery medallion, 1787.  /  3 0.3 After Fernando Miranda, The Statue of the “Freed Slave” in Memorial Hall, 1876.  /  6 0.4 John Bell, Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1848.  /  11 0.5 Francesco Pezzicar, The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863, 1873.  /  12 0.6 John Bell, A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic, 1853.  /  15 0.7 Augustus Marshall, Edmonia Lewis’ Bust of Robert Gould Shaw, 1864.  /  17 0.8 “Colossal hand and torch” at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876.  /  18 0.9 Toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, Bristol, June 2020.  /  19 1.1 James Phillips (printer and publisher), Description of a Slave Ship, 1789.  /  23 1.2 Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of a Woman and an Enslaved Servant, 1696.  /  27 1.3 Josiah Wedgwood, Cameo with portrait of Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1775–1799.  /  28 1.4 Token money manufactured by Worcester Porcelain Factory, ca. 1780.  /  28 1.5 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Block mold for antislavery medallion, 1787.  /  29

211

64433int.indd 211

22-05-18 10:15 AM

1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.24 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11

212

64433int.indd 212

Minute book, Quaker Committee on the Slave Trade, 1783.  /  30 Josiah Wedgwood, Hercules Pushing a Rock, late eighteenth century.  /  31 Plaster cast of the Belvedere Torso (after Apollonius), early nineteenth century.  /  32 Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by Lamplight, 1769.  /  34 Model of the slave ship Brooks, ca. 1790–1791.  /  37 William Hackwood and Henry Webber for Josiah Wedgwood, Antislavery medallion, 1787.  /  39 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, 1866.  /  42 “Atelier du sculpteur américain Powers, à Florence,” in L’Illustration, 1853.  /  45 Banknote, Bank of the State of South Carolina, issued 1862.  /  45 Hiram Powers, Proserpine, 1839–1873.  /  46 Hiram Powers, Eve Tempted, modeled 1842, carved 1873–1877.  /  46 Hiram Powers, Fisher Boy, modeled 1841–1844, carved 1857.  /  47 Hiram Powers, John C. Calhoun, modeled 1836.  /  48 “Slave market of America,” 1836.  /  52 Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859.  /  53 Sketch of The Greek Slave in Miner Kellogg, Sketchbook (Italian Travels), 1841.  /  54 Hiram Powers, Model of The Greek Slave, 1841–1843.  /  55 H. C. White, “The Venus de Medici, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy,” 1902.  /  56 Pietro Tacca, Monument to Ferdinand I, 1626.  /  57 Eugène Delacroix, Massacres at Chios, 1825.  /  58 Interior rotating wheel for the pedestal of Randolph Rogers, The Lost Pleiad, ca. 1874–1875.  /  67 Attributed to Southworth and Hawes, “The Greek Slave,” by Hiram Powers, 1848.  /  68 Hiram Powers, plan, elevation, and brass grooves for rotating pedestal, 1847.  /  69 Hiram Powers, pulley and block for rotating pedestal, 1847.  /  69 Hiram Powers, windlass for rotating pedestal, 1847.  /  69 Miner Kellogg, hand crank for rotating pedestal, 1847.  /  70 “Hiram Power’s Greek Slave,” in Yankee Doodle, 1847.  /  73 George Cruikshank, “Emmeline about to be Sold to the Highest Bidder,” illustration for Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.  /  73 Henry Vizetelly, “America,” in Dickinson’s’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854.  /  74 John Tenniel, “The Virginian Slave, intended as a companion to Power’s Greek Slave,” in Punch, 1851.  /  75 John Bell for Minton, Clorinda, 1848.  /  80 Frederick Thrupp, Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1848.  /  83 Richard Westmacott, Monument to Charles James Fox, 1822.  /  83 Auguste François Laby and Jonathan Needham, Freetown, Sierra Leone, ca. 1850.  /  86 Interior and churchyard bell, St. John’s Maroon Church, Freetown.  /  88 Luigi Tosi, Reverend James Johnson, late nineteenth century.  /  89 “ ‘Andromeda’—A Statue in Bronze by John Bell of London (cast by the Coalbrookdale company),” in M. Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, 1852.  /  91 William Grainger after Thomas Stothard, Voyage of the Sable Venus, 1794.  /  93 “Messrs. Elkington & Co.’s Electro-Plate Works,” in Cassell’s Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art, 1852.  /  94 John Bell for Elkington and Company, Eve’s Hesitation, 1852.  /  94 Installation view of Fred Wilson, “Metalwork, 1793–1880,” Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society and The Contemporary, 1992–1993.  /  97

Illustrations

22-05-18 10:15 AM

3.12 Elkington and Company Stand, Exhibition of Local Manufactures and Natural History, Birmingham, 1886.  /  99 3.13 John Boyne, A Meeting of Connoisseurs, ca. 1790–1807.  /  100 3.14 John Bell, The Octoroon, 1868.  /  105 3.15 C. W. Seale, Cotton Manufacturing, ca. 1870.  /  107 3.16 John Bell for Minton, The Octoroon, 1868.  /  108 3.17 John Bell for Minton, The American Slave (1863) in Minton and Company, Catalogue of Shapes, nineteenth century.  /  109 3.18 John Bell for Minton, The Octoroon (1868) and The Abyssinian Slave in Minton and Company, Catalogue of Shapes, nineteenth century.  /  110 4.1 Edmonia Lewis, Robert Gould Shaw, 1867.  /  114 4.2 Edmonia Lewis, Wendell Phillips, 1871.  /  115 4.3 Edmonia Lewis, The Old Arrow Maker, 1866–1872.  /  118 4.4 Edmonia Lewis, Drawing after Urania, 1862.  /  120 4.5 Edward Augustus Brackett, John Brown, 1860.  /  123 4.6 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, 1884.  /  127 4.7 John Adams Whipple, Edmonia Lewis’s bust of Robert Gould Shaw, between 1864 and 1865.  /  128 4.8 Currier and Ives, The Gallant Charge of the 54th Massachusetts, 1863.  /  129 4.9 Photographer unknown, Edmonia Lewis’s bust of Robert Gould Shaw, before 1883.  /  130 4.10 Edmonia Lewis, Young Octavian, 1870.  /  131 4.11 John Adams Whipple, Robert Gould Shaw, between 1861 and 1863.  /  131 4.12 Edward Mitchell Bannister, Christiana Carteaux Bannister, ca. 1860.  /  133 4.13 Sojourner Truth in collaboration with S. C. Wright, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” 1864–1865.  /  135 4.14 James Little, illustration for On the Use of Plaster Splints in Military Surgery, 1864.  /  137 4.15 John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, modeled 1863.  /  138 4.16 Photographer unknown, William H. Carney, 1864.  /  139 4.17 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867.  /  141 5.1 William Wetmore Story, The Libyan Sibyl, modeled 1860, carved 1861.  /  146 5.2 Baldassare Longhena and Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1665–1669.  /  148 5.3 Joseph Davis, medal commemorating the abolition of slavery, 1834.  /  150 5.4 Stephen Gimber after Alexander Rippingille, Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies, 1838.  /  150 5.5 Thomas Ball, Freedman’s Memorial, 1876.  /  151 5.6 John Sartain after Nathaniel Jocelyn, Cinque, The Chief of the Amistad Captives, 1840.  /  153 5.7 Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876.  /  155 5.8 Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1876.  /  159 6.1 Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, presentation drawing of “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” 1875.  /  164

Illustrations

64433int.indd 213

213

22-05-18 10:15 AM

64433int.indd 214

22-05-18 10:15 AM

INDEX

abolition, 4–5, 10–13, 14–16, 19–20, 39–40, 50, 81–82, 161, 172n7 abolitionist movement, 22–27, 35–38, 73–76, 78, 88–89, 115–16, 121–25, 149–51 Abolition of Slavery in the United States (Pezzicar), 6fig., 12fig., 13, 16–18, 143–45; and emancipation, 149–52; and global art market, 145–49; production of, 156–58, 160; reception of, 152–56, 158–61, 207n52 Abyssinian Slave (Bell for Minton), 110fig., 111, 195n135 Academy by Lamplight (Wright of Derby), 33, 34fig. African American regiments (US Civil War), 16, 113, 120, 125–28, 129fig., 131–34, 136–38, 145, 158, 200n59 African American soldiers’ relief fairs, 5, 16, 125, 131–32, 132–40, 142 African diaspora, 84, 124, 147 Age of Bronze (Rodin), 159fig., 159–60 allegory, 163, 165 America. See United States American Anti-Slavery Society, 51, 113, 124, 152, 165

American Slave (Bell for Minton), 90, 109fig., 110–11 Amistad revolt, 152–54 Andromeda (Bell), 91fig. animacy, 5–10, 66–73 antislavery medallion (Hackwood and Webber for Wedgwood), 3fig., 4, 8, 10, 13, 22–24, 38, 39fig., 102, 124, 175n60; making of, 28–33, 29fig.; and Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 24–28 Armstrong, William, 101–3, 106 art market, 7, 43, 50, 51, 66, 149 “Atelier du sculpteur américain Powers, à Florence,” 44, 45fig. Austrian Empire, 152; Trieste, 143, 144, 145, 147, 160, 203n7 Ball, Thomas, 39, 149, 151fig., 160 banknote, Bank of the State of South Carolina, 44, 45fig., 49 Bannister, Edward Mitchell, 122, 132, 133fig., 134 Barthel, Melchior, 147, 148fig. Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste, 16–18, 18fig., 145, 147, 163–65, 164fig. 215

64433int.indd 215

22-05-18 10:15 AM

Bell, John, 4, 8, 14–16, 77–111, 116, 126, 145, 147, 188n19. See also Abyssinian Slave; American Slave; Andromeda; Clorinda; Daughter of Eve; Eve’s Hesitation; Octoroon; Thomas Fowell Buxton Belvedere torso, 31, 32fig. Birmingham, 25, 90, 95–98, 100, 147 Birmingham Industrial Exhibition, 98, 99fig. Black activism, 74–76, 78, 116, 117, 124, 131–32, 132–38, 142, 196n8 Black Atlantic, 8, 10, 14, 168n10, 194n112 Black Marxism (Robinson), 5, 207n62 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 165 Black subjects, depiction of, 8, 78, 92, 154–56, 157–58, 160 Blackburn, 106–7, 147 Blackburn Museum, 106, 107fig. blackness, 26, 65, 90, 104–6, 107, 109, 149, 155, 157, 158, 160 Blackstone’s Commentaries, 7, 169n28 Boston, 5, 60–61, 113, 115, 121–27; Athenaeum, 121; Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair, 131, 132–40, 142; National Sailors’ Fair, 125, 131; Studio Building, 121–22, 132, 198n36; Tremont Temple, 140–42 Boyne, John, 100fig. Brackett, Edward Augustus, 121, 122, 123fig., 199n43 Bristol, 18–19 Britain, 5, 10, 16, 21–40, 77–111; Birmingham, 25, 90, 95–98, 100, 147; Blackburn, 106–7, 147; Bristol, 18–19. See also London British Empire, 3, 13, 16, 35, 77–111, 149, 154 bronze, 4, 9, 13, 17–18, 78, 91–92, 95–101, 144, 159–60; electrotype, 14, 77, 94fig., 94–95, 96, 101, 104 Brooks (slave ship), model of, 37fig., 37–38 Brown, John, 16, 113, 122–25, 123fig., 199n46 Brown, William Wells, 74–76, 78, 103–4, 186n155 Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell, 11fig., 12, 14–16, 79, 80–89, 83fig., 102, 103 Calhoun, John, 44, 47–48, 48fig., 49, 51 cameo with portrait of Benjamin Franklin (Wedgwood), 26, 28fig. Canova, Antonio, 33, 44, 61, 79, 160 Capital (Marx), 9, 140 Carney, William H., 16, 113, 116, 125, 127–132, 134, 136, 138–40, 139fig. Carteaux Bannister, Christiana, 132–33, 133fig., 134 cartes-de-visite, 122, 126, 127, 129, 134, 139 Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia), 5–6, 13, 16–17, 18fig., 143–44, 145, 147, 152, 154, 157, 163–64 Chen, Mel Y., 9, 71 Christiana Carteaux Bannister (Bannister), 133fig. Church, Frederic, 62

216

64433int.indd 216

Cinque, Joseph, 152–54, 153fig., 155 Cinque, The Chief of the Amistad Captives (Sartain after Jocelyn), 152–54, 153fig., 155, 206n43 Civil War (US), 10, 16, 101, 102, 104, 106, 115–16, 125–40 Clarkson, Thomas, 25, 35, 37, 38, 84, 85 classical antiquity, 31–33, 56, 190n57 clay, 4, 28, 121, 157 Clorinda (Bell for Minton), 80fig., 80–81, 107–11 colonialism, 26, 81, 82, 84–87, 102, 158 Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair (Boston), 131–32, 132–40, 142 Colston, Edward, statue of, 18–19, 19fig. commerce, 4–5, 16, 41, 43, 44, 59–66, 72, 81, 97–101, 106, 140, 147 commodification, 4, 7, 9, 16, 43, 65, 71, 76, 90, 95, 98, 100–101 connoisseurship, 100 cotton, 5, 50, 62, 63, 64, 106, 147 Cotton Manufacturing (Seale), 106, 107fig. Craft, Ellen, 74–76, 78 Craft, William, 74–76, 78 Cragside, 101–3, 106 Cruikshank, George, 72, 73fig. Crystal Palace, 74fig., 74–76, 78, 140. See also Great Exhibition Currier and Ives, 128–29, 129fig. Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic (Bell), 14–16, 15fig., 77–79, 81, 88, 89–95, 104–6, 145; display of, 98–103, 99fig.; and US slavery, 92–94, 98–101, 111. See also American Slave Davis, Joseph, 149, 150fig., 151 Death of Cleopatra (Lewis), 155fig., 155–56 Delacroix, Eugène, 58fig., 59 Description of a Slave Ship (Phillips), 13, 22–24, 23fig., 36–38, 39 Douglass, Frederick, 74, 78, 116–17, 119, 124 Drawing after Urania (Lewis), 120fig., 121, 130, 198n29 Du Bois, W.E.B., 5, 165 electrotype, 14, 77, 94fig., 94–95, 96, 101, 104 Elkington, Mason, and Company, 77, 90, 94fig., 94–95, 95–101, 99fig., 191n76 emancipation, 10–13, 16, 78, 79, 140–42, 144, 149–52, 156–57, 158, 161, 207n58 Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Murray), 14, 22, 39–40 Emancipation Proclamation, 124, 144, 146, 149, 151, 156, 161, 199n56, 200n59 “Emmeline about to be Sold to the Highest Bidder” (Cruikshank), 72, 73fig.

INDEX

22-05-18 10:15 AM

Equiano, Olaudah, 35–36, 74 Eve’s Hesitation (Bell for Elkington), 94fig., 95 Eve Tempted (Powers), 44–46, 46fig., 51

Hercules Pushing a Rock (Wedgwood), 31fig. Herder, Johann Gottfried, 13, 33, 34–35, 36–37, 136 Hosmer, Harriet, 145, 146

Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 22, 33 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 9, 19, 85, 86 54th Massachusetts Infantry, 113, 120, 125–28, 129fig., 131–34, 136–38, 145, 158, 200n59 Fisher Boy (Powers), 44–46, 47fig. Florence, 1, 5, 14, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54–56, 67, 76 Forever Free (Lewis), 16, 115, 140–42, 141fig., 146, 151, 161 France, 147, 163–65; Paris, 5, 35, 58, 143, 155, 163 Franklin, Benjamin, 13, 25, 26, 28fig. Freedman (Ward), 136, 138fig., 207n52 Freedman’s Memorial (Ball), 149, 151fig., 156, 160, 175n61 Freetown, Sierra Leone, 12, 79, 189n32, 206n43; St. George’s Cathedral, 81–89; St. John’s Maroon Church, 86–87 Freetown, Sierra Leone (Laby and Needham), 84, 85, 86–87fig. Fugitive Slave Act, 10, 74

Immediate Emancipation in the West Indies (Gimber after Rippingille), 149, 150fig., 151 industrial exhibitions, 90, 98, 99fig., 106, 140 industry, 78–79, 81, 90, 94–95, 95–101, 102 “I sell the shadow to support the substance” (Truth in collaboration with Wright), 134, 135fig. Italy, 5, 49, 127; Florence, 1, 5, 14, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54–56, 67, 76; Rome, 5, 33, 114, 126, 131, 140, 145–46, 147; Trieste, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 156–58, 160–61, 203n7; Venice, 145, 147

Gallant Charge of the 54th Massachusetts (Currier and Ives), 128–29, 129fig. Garrison, William Lloyd, 115, 119 Gibson, John, 33, 44 Grant, John, 54, 59 Great Exhibition, 74fig., 74–76, 78, 140 Greek Slave (Powers), 1–3, 2fig., 4, 14, 40, 41–43, 42fig., 44, 45fig., 51, 74fig., 77–78, 149; animacy of, 5, 7, 66–73; mediated nature of, 53–59; multiple versions of, 61–63, 175n3; pedestal, 9–10, 33, 64, 66–73, 69fig., 70fig., 185; plaster model, 54–56, 55fig.; touring exhibition of, 59–61, 61–63, 68, 70; and US slavery, 63–66, 66–73, 73–76 “Greek Slave“ (Yankee Doodle), 72, 73fig. “Greek Slave,” by Hiram Powers (Southworth and Hawes), 67, 68fig. Greek Slave, sketch of (unknown artist), 53–54, 54fig., 179n51 Greek Wars of Independence, 41, 57, 59 Greener, Richard T., 120, 198n27 Grimes, Octavia, 142 Grimes, Rev. Leonard, 115, 142 Hackwood, William, 13, 26, 28–33. See also antislavery medallion Hamilton, Robert, 124 hapticity. See touch Hartman, Saidiya, 10, 12, 26, 95, 103, 104, 119, 156

jasperware, 3, 8, 9, 10, 25, 26, 31, 38, 102, 152 Jocelyn, Nathaniel, 152–54, 153fig., 155, 206n43 John Brown (Brackett), 122, 123fig. John Brown, medallion of (Lewis), 122–25, 199n46 John C. Calhoun (Powers), 44, 47–48, 48fig., 49, 51 Johnson, Eastman, 51, 53fig., 179n49 Johnson, Rev. James, 88, 89fig. Kellogg, Miner, 60–61, 62, 65, 68–70, 70fig., 179n51; 180n69 Kisuule, Vanessa, 18–19 labor, 14, 26–28, 31, 50, 85, 98, 134, 142, 158; enslaved, 5, 43, 44, 49–50, 75, 85, 96–97, 106, 191n76 Laby, Auguste François, 84, 85, 86–87fig. Largillière, Nicolas de, 27fig. Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 4, 14, 16, 39, 113–42, 145, 146, 155, 196nn6,10,11, 198nn28,31. See also Death of Cleopatra; Drawing after Urania; Forever Free; Old Arrow Maker; Robert Gould Shaw; Wendell Phillips; William H. Carney; Young Octavian liberty, 13, 17, 82, 145, 157, 163–65, 205n25, 207n58 Liberty Enlightening the World (Bartholdi). See Statue of Liberty Libyan Sibyl (Story), 145–46, 146fig. Lincoln, Abraham, 113, 144, 145–46, 149, 151, 161, 199n56 Locke, John, 13, 33–34, 35 London, 24, 50, 59, 61, 65, 79, 82, 84, 95; Crystal Palace, 74fig., 74–76, 78, 140; Royal Academy, 31, 32, 77, 79, 80–81, 90–91, 92, 104, 106, 190n57; Westminster Abbey, 82 London Committee. See Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade Longhena, Baldassare, 147, 148fig. Lost Pleiad (Rogers), rotating pedestal of, 66, 67fig.

INDEX

64433int.indd 217

217

22-05-18 10:15 AM

marble, 4, 9, 18, 44, 50, 66, 72, 76, 90, 104, 155–56, 159–60; and whiteness, 8, 40, 46, 48, 65, 82, 107 Marshall, Augustus, 17fig., 122, 126, 127 Marx, Karl, 9, 140, 147 Massacres at Chios (Delacroix), 58fig., 59 medal commemorating the abolition of slavery (Davis), 149, 150fig., 151 Medici Venus, 56fig. Meeting of Connoisseurs (Boyne), 100fig. Middle Passage, 35, 36, 92 Mining the Museum (Wilson), 96–98, 97fig. Minton and Company, 80, 81, 90, 107, 110–11, 188n19 minute book, Quaker Committee on the Slave Trade, 29, 30fig. Monument to Charles James Fox (Westmacott), 82, 83fig. Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro (Longhena and Barthel), 147, 148fig. Monument to Ferdinand I (Tacca), 56–57, 57fig. Morning of Liberty (Lewis). See Forever Free Movement for Black Lives, 18–19 Murray, Freeman Henry Morris, 8, 14, 22, 39–40 National Academy of Design (New York), 41, 60, 65, 136 National Gallery of Paintings (New Orleans), 63–66, 181–82n91 National Sailors’ Fair (Boston), 125, 131 Needham, Jonathan, 84, 85, 86–87fig. Negro Life at the South (Johnson), 51, 53fig., 179n49 Nelson, Charmaine, 8, 114, 155–56, 176n4, 196n6 neoclassicism, 8, 18, 32–33, 44, 46–48, 59, 61, 79–80, 94, 121, 154–56, 183n107 New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, 122 New Orleans, 1, 14, 43, 50, 59–61, 70, 76, 99, 183n107; National Gallery of Paintings, 63–66, 181–82n91 New York, 1, 5, 59, 60, 70, 122–24, 125, 149, 164–65; National Academy of Design, 41, 60, 65, 136 New York Central College, 117 Oberlin College, 116–21, 124, 198n29 Octoroon (Bell), 14–16, 78–79, 103–11, 105fig., 194n125 Octoroon (Bell for Minton), 108fig., 110fig. Old Arrow Maker (Lewis), 118fig., 119, 130 On the Use of Plaster Splints in Military Surgery (Little), 136, 137fig. Orientalism, 58, 107

218

64433int.indd 218

paragone, 21–22, 33, 172n3 Parian ware, 9, 80, 81, 110, 116 Paris, 5, 35, 58, 143, 155, 163 Pa Tham (Temne regent), 84, 189n32 patronage, 14, 16, 43, 44, 49–51, 61, 90, 113, 115–16, 131, 196n6 Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. See Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 3, 13, 25, 152–54 Pezzicar, Francesco, 4, 16–18, 143–61. See also Abolition of Slavery in the United States Philadelphia, 1, 60, 144, 152–54; Centennial Exhibition, 5–6, 13, 16–17, 18fig., 143–44, 145, 147, 152, 154, 157, 163–64 Phillips, James, 13, 22–24, 23fig., 36–38, 39 Phillips, Wendell, 113, 114, 115fig., 120, 134 photography, 67, 116, 126, 127, 129, 138–40, 154, 199n55, 201n75. See also cartes-de-visite plaster, 16, 28, 54–56, 113–15, 116, 121–22, 125–26, 128–29, 132–40, 160 Portrait of a Woman and an Enslaved Servant (Largillière), 26, 27fig. Powers, Hiram, 1, 4, 8, 14, 39, 41–76, 45fig., 78, 134. See also Eve Tempted; Fisher Boy; Greek Slave; John C. Calhoun; Proserpine Pratt, Daniel, 63, 182–83n91 Preston, John S., 49–50, 51, 178n32 Preston, William C., 49 Proserpine (Powers), 44–46, 46fig., 51 race, 4, 7–9, 28, 38, 40, 64–65, 72, 78, 95, 104–7, 127 racial capitalism, 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 79 racial stereotypes, 25–26, 51, 82, 92, 147, 149, 155–56, 160 Reconstruction (US), 17, 138, 157 Reid, Philip, 44 Reverend James Johnson (Tosi), 88, 89fig. Reynolds, Joshua, 32 Rippingille, Alexander, 149, 150fig., 151 Roach, Joseph, 65–66, 104, 192n88, 194n112 Robb, James, 61–63, 65, 70, 72 Robert Gould Shaw (Lewis), 114fig., 125, 128–31 Robert Gould Shaw (Marshall after Lewis), 17fig., 126, 127 Robert Gould Shaw (unknown photographer after Lewis), 129, 130fig. Robert Gould Shaw (Whipple), 129, 131fig. Robert Gould Shaw (Whipple after Lewis), 127, 128fig.

INDEX

22-05-18 10:15 AM

Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (Saint-Gaudens), 126, 127fig. Robinson, Cedric, 5, 207n62 Rodin, Auguste, 159fig., 159–60 Rome, 5, 33, 114, 126, 131, 140, 145–46, 147 Royal Academy (London), 32, 79, 80, 81, 90, 92, 106, 190n57 Royal African Company, 18–19, 84 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 39–40, 126, 127fig. Scott, Dredd, 10 Scott, Harriet Robinson, 10 Seale, C. W., 106, 107fig. Sengbe Pieh. See Cinque, Joseph sentiment, 78–79, 81, 101, 111, 124, 130 Sharp, Granville, 84, 85 Shaw, Robert Gould, 16, 17fig., 113, 114fig., 125–31, 127fig., 128fig., 130fig., 131fig., 134 Sierra Leone, 5, 16, 81–89, 152, 206n43. See also Freetown silver, 78, 91–92, 94, 96–98, 103, 191n76 slave market, 1–3, 9, 41, 58, 64–66, 72, 73, 100, 104, 183n107 “Slave market of America,” 51, 52fig. slave trade, 16, 26, 35–36, 60, 63, 65, 84, 94, 96–98, 102 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 13, 22–24, 24–25, 36, 38, 39, 40 spectacle, 20, 33, 43, 65–68, 71–72, 100, 103, 119, 145, 164, 184n117 spectatorship, 13, 22–24, 33, 36–37, 39, 71–72, 99–100 Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi), 16–18, 18fig., 145, 147, 163–65 “Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” presentation drawing, 164fig. St. George’s Cathedral (Freetown), 81–89 St. John’s Maroon Church (Freetown), 86–87, 88fig. St. Louis, 1–3, 9, 14, 73, 76 Story, William Wetmore, 121, 145–46, 146fig., 155 Stothard, Thomas, 92–93, 93fig. Studio Building (Boston), 121–22, 132, 198n36 sugar, 49, 50, 147 surveillance, 13, 14, 24, 36–38, 43, 96, 100, 158 Tacca, Pietro, 56–57, 57fig. Tenniel, John, 74–75, 75fig., 76, 110 Thirteenth Amendment, 10, 142, 144, 156, 165 Thomas Fowell Buxton (Bell), 11fig., 12, 14–16, 79, 80–89, 102, 103 Thomas Fowell Buxton (Thrupp), 82, 83fig.

Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 44, 61 Thrupp, Frederick, 82, 83fig., 188n25 token money (Worcester Porcelain Factory), 26, 28fig. Tosi, Luigi, 88, 89fig. touch, 13, 24, 28, 33–35, 37–38, 135–36, 174n36 touring exhibitions, 5, 9, 59–61, 61–63, 68, 70 Tremont Temple (Boston), 140–42 Trieste, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 156–58, 160–61, 203n7 Truth, Sojourner, 134, 135fig. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 72, 73fig. United Kingdom, 5, 10, 16, 21–40, 77–111; Birmingham, 25, 90, 95–98, 100, 147; Blackburn, 106–7, 147; Bristol, 18–19. See also London United States, 5, 14, 41–76, 113–42, 163–65; Civil War, 10, 16, 101, 102, 104, 106, 115–16, 125–40; Reconstruction, 17, 138, 157; St. Louis, 1–3, 9, 14, 73, 76; Washington, DC, 44, 47, 49, 51, 60, 132, 149, 160. See also Boston; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia US Capitol, 44, 47, 49 Varchi, Benedetto, 21–22 Venice, 145, 147 Venus of Knidos, 56 Venus, 56fig., 56–57, 92, 93fig. Vinci, Leonardo da, 21 “Virginian Slave” (Tenniel), 74–75, 75fig., 76, 110 Voyage of the Sable Venus (Grainger after Stothard), 92, 93fig. Ward, John Quincy Adams, 136, 138fig., 149, 207n52 Ward, Lord William, 61, 62, 65 Washington, DC, 44, 47, 49, 51, 60, 132, 149, 160 wax, 44, 67, 71, 95, 160 Webber, Henry, 13, 26, 28–33. See also antislavery medallion Wedgwood, Josiah, 3, 8, 13, 24–28, 28–33, 152, 172–73n16. See also antislavery medallion; cameo with portrait of Benjamin Franklin; Hercules Pushing a Rock Wendell Phillips (Lewis), 114, 115fig., 120, 134 West Africa, 78, 84, 152 Westmacott, Richard, 80, 82, 83fig., 91, 190n57 Westminster Abbey, 82 Whipple, John Adams, 127, 128fig., 129, 131fig. whiteness, 8, 40, 46, 48, 64–65, 82, 107 Wilberforce, William, 37–38, 82, 84 William H. Carney (Lewis), 16, 113, 116, 125, 127–132, 134, 136, 138–40

INDEX

64433int.indd 219

219

22-05-18 10:15 AM

William H. Carney (unknown photographer), 138–40, 139fig. Wilson, Fred, 96–98, 97fig. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 8, 44–46, 154 Woods, Joseph, 29 Worcester Porcelain Factory, 26, 28fig.

220

64433int.indd 220

world’s fairs, 5, 13, 90, 100, 140, 143, 147–49, 158. See also Great Exhibition; Centennial Exhibition Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 85 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 33, 34fig. Young Octavian (Lewis), 129, 131fig.

INDEX

22-05-18 10:15 AM

Founded in 1893,

University of California Press publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide. The UC Press Foundation raises funds to uphold the press’s vital role as an independent, nonprofit publisher, and receives philanthropic support from a wide range of individuals and institutions—and from committed readers like you. To learn more, visit ucpress.edu/supportus.

64433int.indd 221

22-05-18 10:16 AM