Subsistence? Edmonia likely considered Mrs. Child’s remarks well intentioned but out of touch. It was the Shaw dispute all over again – but not deserved. The Shaw bust had proven something. The priority had to be art and the artist. Income would follow or she would quit.
15. THE MORNING OF LIBERTY
Everyone prayed to end the War. To some, the sin of slavery called for mortal retribution. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln himself puzzled whether God required “every drop of blood drawn with the lash … be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
Finally came reports of colored troops singing “John Brown’s Body” in the streets of Charleston. Richmond fell soon after. The war was over! As rebel leaders fled, they robbed Confederate gold and set the city on fire. The next morning, colored men, women, and children cheered in the streets. Slaves were truly freed.
Before the warring states could adjust, the Good Friday assassination of Abraham Lincoln shook the world. Bitterness and talk of swift justice overshadowed Easter celebrations and dominated the weeks that followed. The murder focused Edmonia’s own inner fury. Working from engravings, she swiftly formed a medallion portrait of the late president while the funeral wended its way by rail to Springfield, Illinois.[126]
Survivor’s guilt must have troubled her. For more than a year, she had been dropping in at the liveliest room in the Studio Building. Number 8 was headquarters of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society. Hannah E. Stevenson, a wealthy Roxbury abolitionist, and Ednah Dow Cheney, a writer interested in art, always welcomed her. They praised her bust of Shaw “a remarkable success, both as a likeness and as an ideal work.”[127]
With great optimism for the potential of former slaves and future generations, they organized aid and education. Raising funds and sending teachers south, they aimed to “make another New England.” Their Society preached, Every freed slave could be a scholar. Most wanted to be.
Their teachers were supposed to be products of a New England education. Edmonia was not, but volunteers were scarce. The standard soon gave way, allowing colored men and women among the teachers. The committee accepted her, and she headed to Richmond accompanied by the daughter of her landlord, a colored girl about the same age.[128] They left Boston in early July and returned a few weeks later.
Scant records exist of what she did. She saw, no doubt, more African Americans than she had ever seen before. Thieves stole their trunks, leaving her and her friend with only the clothes on their backs.[129] Fortunately, her loss was limited to clothing. The irreplaceable plaster casts remained in Boston.
Beyond that, sources tell only that Edmonia, staying with a Richmond family, suggested they name their next child after a famous abolitionist. Wendell Phillips Dabney, who eventually became a distinguished newspaper publisher, later attached some irony to his name, saying, “I am the only colored person living who doesn’t think himself an orator.”[130]
16. EXIT BOSTON
Through all the uncertainties of wartime, the lure of Rome surely found a firm place in her heart. It would be her personal solution to the limits of America.
Half-mentor, half-censor, Mrs. Child must have puzzled Edmonia. No New Englander helped – or troubled – her more. Mrs. Child took two steps back after every step forward.
On the other hand, seeing a viable bust of the young Shaw in clay over her objections must have been a shock for the aging writer. Her grim vision of Lewis with a penknife, first disclosed in a private letter,[131] hinted her fury. It presaged her own use of a sharp tool. In March 1865, Mrs. Child had published an expanded version of her Liberator interview in the short-lived Detroit Broken Fetter. Repeating her figure of speech, she wrote, “[Edmonia’s] indomitable spirit of energy and perseverance … would undoubtedly cut its way through the heart of the Alps with a pen-knife.”[132]
Mrs. Child had assaulted the helpless proxy for Lewis with a saw and cut out its heart. The brutal attack and cool admission to Shaw’s mother (who must have read it with horror) showed her frustration and sense of superior entitlement.
Months later, before sailing, Edmonia traveled the twenty miles to Wayland to say goodbye. Entering Mrs. Child’s modest parlor, she looked around for her bust of Shaw. When her eyes fell upon it, her shock must have been unmistakable. It was damaged!
Child had a ready excuse: “Wishing to make it look more military, I sawed off a large portion of the long, awkward-looking chest, and set the head on the pedestal again, in a way that made it look much more erect and alert.”[133]
Edmonia, known to have a sharp temper, must have called on the most stoic of her ancestors to keep a cool reserve. With studied reserve, she whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me that before I finished? How much you have improved it!”
Mrs. Child was no artist. Certainly a proper “master,” mentor, or critic would just make suggestions or ask questions. Who would ever take a carpenter’s tool to a cast made by Powers, Hosmer, or Story?
But why shouldn’t Child be angry? She had unselfishly publicized Edmonia’s work and even offered up grandmotherly wisdom. The young ingrate had ignored her pleas to leave Shaw’s memory alone. In a silent, emotional impulse, Child assaulted the helpless plaster in the privacy of her home. Having a proxy for Edmonia, she cut out its heart.
Now, on the eve of separation, she used her crime to test Edmonia’s character. To her credit, Edmonia sustained her poise. She had, after all, begged for criticism. If Child had reservations when she saw the statue in Edmonia’s studio, she could certainly keep a secret. She, as well as Chapman, Hosmer, Bannister, Whitney, and others had all seen the bust before Edmonia put it into plaster. Any of them might have assessed the length of the torso.
Edmonia then spied a small album with four photos of Col. Shaw. Looking through it, she could no longer contain herself. She exploded. Oh, how you could have helped me with these pictures! How I could have made such a better likeness!
Relating the episode to Shaw’s mother a few months later, Child played down the outburst with a sniff. “She was a little fâchée [French: “angry”] with me, because I did not send her any of the photographs of Robert.”[134] The French embellishment seems to assert the superior class she shared with her reader.
In a mood of appeasement, Mrs. Child gave Edmonia a beautiful silk gown before she left. It eased the tension. Both women were the same petite size. Someone had stolen Edmonia’s wardrobe in Richmond.
By mending hurt feelings, the gift renewed Child’s license to set harsh limits. Satisfied with the visit, she wished Edmonia well and cautioned once again not to put anything into marble unless she had an order for it. Known for plain dress, Mrs. Child made little sacrifice by clearing her closet of idle clothing.
Edmonia could assure her she had orders for several busts of various people. One was for a marble copy of Col. Shaw from his sister. When she executed it a year or so later, she embraced Child’s savage critique. A comparison of photos reveals a reduction in the length of the chest. Good marble is, of course, far more expensive than plaster. Shortening the chest should have made a practical step toward profitability.
She also claimed commissions for marble busts of her heroes, Abraham Lincoln and John Brown.[135] Another was for the late Horace Mann, Miss Peabody’s brother-in-law. As an educator, he had reformed schools all over the country.
Merchant Martin Parry Kennard often went abroad to stock his store with fine furniture and other expensive goods. He volunteered to help Edmonia with travel arrangements. When he helped her to apply for a passport, he wrote in the margin, “M. Edmonia Lewis is a Black girl sent by subscription[136] to Italy having displayed great talent as a Sculptor.”
She planned to pick up her papers in New York.
Figure 8. Edmonia’s passport application, 1865
The passport application sworn by “M. Edmonia Lewis” on August 21, 1865, gives her height as four feet, birth as “on or about” July 4, 1844, at Greenbush (now part of Rensselaer), NY, and her age as twenty.
The inconsistency of age and date suggests she filled out the form before her birthday and signed it, in the presence of witnesses, later. A larger image may be found at http://edmonialewis.com/passport.htm.
According to Edmonia’s proud brother, Secretary of State William H. Seward provided letters of introduction to ministers in Paris and Florence. Mrs. Chapman probably wrote to European friends as well. Many new challenges, such as foreign languages and customs, faced her. She had studied French in school (and likely spoke it as a child in Canada) – but not Italian.
Leaving America was a terrifying prospect. She might never return. She worried about her last unsold copy of Shaw, on display at a newspaper’s offices. To Wendell Phillips, she had the air of one settling her estate as she begged a favor of him. Phillips showed his amusement as he wrote to the wife of Rev. J. T. Sargent on Edmonia’s behalf:
Dear Madam: You know my benevolence. Well, it is therefore I hasten to inform you of your great fortune.
Most people leave legacies when they die.
But you know … when good Yankees die, they go to Paris. Well, one of your friends, starting for Paris, seems to have imagined that she was dying. At any rate, she acted as if dying and left you a legacy. This is it: “When you come to Boston go down with a strong porter to the Commonwealth rooms and you’ll find there the bust of Colonel Shaw.”
Edmonia Lewis, starting for Europe, said to me: “That dear, good woman, I do love her. I want her to have it. Give it to her as my legacy.”[137]
Years later Edmonia reflected, “I was practically driven to Rome.”[139]
BOOK TWO – The World
“My first thought was for my poor father’s people, how I could do them good in a very small way.” – Edmonia Lewis, 1866
1. STOPPING IN FLORENCE, 1865
Paradox
Bold phrases might well describe the young woman who sailed for Europe on August 26, 1865.[140] None bore the power that “colored sculptor” had at the time. Outrageous or transformative, it was an oxymoron. It defied common wisdom, bringing either a scowl or a smile. To some, it offered new hope – to others, only trouble. For white supremacists, who girded their ideals of the “evident design of the Creator”[141] with patriotism and bolstered them with quack science, it overrode the laws of nature: a dangerous precedent. It flatly contradicted their arch-theorist, who emphasized on the eve of Lincoln’s reelection, “No one ever heard of a negro sculptor or painter.”[142] To reporters, it meant news and a break with the cliché link between “colored” and crime.
Edmonia’s budding celebrity gained a life of its own. Squibs that announced her sailing and reported her commissions escaped the niche of the Boston Liberator, the Freedmen’s Record, and the New York National Anti-Slavery Standard. Fresh-laid rails carried the news, some printed by steam-driven rotary presses, to greatly expanded readerships. Syndication served national news to rural weeklies. From the Boston Evening Transcript and the New York Times all the way to the white readers of the Stephens Point Wisconsin Lumberman and the colored readers of the Petersburg (VA) Index, newsmen spread the word.[143]
Edmonia had never enjoyed such wide support as she did at that moment. “My enthusiasm increased day by day, and I began to feel that I was going to enter the sphere for which I was designed,” she recalled.[144] The atmosphere of Europe, where her race was neutral, must have magnified the effect.
The journey to Italy was daunting, even by standards of the day. Following good advice, she took time out to sample London and Paris before heading to Italy. The record indicates no patience for slow boats and sightseeing. The most direct route, and the most arduous leg of her trip, crossed the Alps. Trains terminated in the foothills. Beyond, two horses and eight mules dragged a carriage (similar to a stage-coach but larger), poetically named a “diligence,” for a grumbling ten hours to an altitude of 6,354 feet. The high passes and hairpin turns were once traveled by the armies of Julius Caesar. At the change from rail, one might discover carriages were overbooked, leading to an unexpected layover. A crowded economy class flight from New York to Rome today is quicker and arguably more comfortable. The railroad tunnel did not open for another six years.
Miss Adams
The crooked old flagstone streets of Florence likely reminded her of wandering, lost, in Boston. Florence was otherwise strikingly different. Much older and sunnier than any New England city, its day turned on a custom alien to Yankee ways. Italians worked no afternoons. They closed shop and napped while the sun baked away – even in cooler months. More important, she found no “nigger hill.”
She signed in at the fine hotel recommended to her and then hurried to the United States legation. Florence was the seat of the government of the newly united kingdom of Italy.
She carried a note of introduction from Annie Adams Fields, the wife of the Atlantic Monthly editor, to her sister, Lissie Adams, who lived and studied painting in Florence.[145] Miss Adams should have some good advice.
The U. S. minister concurred. A New England intellectual who owed his appointment to Lincoln, George Perkins Marsh was an advocate of voting rights for colored Americans. He and Edmonia likely spoke of Boston and people they knew in common.
She discovered that Mr. Marsh and his wife lived at her hotel. Aha! Another example of equality to share with her brother. Finally, she asked for directions to Miss Adams.
The minister countered by asking his aide to guide her.
At the door, Edmonia handed her note to a maid who said something in Italian: please wait, according to her guide. Minutes later, the maid returned, handed back the paper, and shut the door without a word. It was a clear dismissal, a rejection: You are not welcome here.
Surprised and humiliated in front of Marsh’s aide, Edmonia fumed. Her new sense of acceptance evaporated in the face of American bigotry. Consumed with emotion, she fired off bitter letters accusing Miss Adams of refusing to see her because she was colored.
Marsh was equally shocked. He fretted over Edmonia’s distress. “Never mind! You will find good friends here,” he told her.[146] He brought her to sculptors Thomas Ball and Hiram Powers (who was a friend of his from childhood), assuring her of good rooms and work space. Going beyond normal diplomatic hospitality, he quietly paid her hotel bill.
Sculptors
Thomas Ball made her feel welcome. A bearded, folksy giant of a man – a genial, humming sort – he had just returned from Boston where she had made history with her portrait of Shaw. He knew Brackett, and surely something of her story. He, too, was self-taught. On the passing of his father, he had supported himself by singing in churches and copying portraits. When his first busts won acclaim, he turned to sculpture in earnest.
The Vermont-bred Hiram Powers, who wore a dressing gown under his apron, a Turkish cap, and slippers even in the street, often smoked a cheap cigar. In 1854, Powers’ original sponsor had introduced him to Robert Scott Duncanson, an African-American landscape painter, with high praise.
Like kindly uncles, they blessed the young artist with useful gifts and advice. Powers sent her a molding block. He also advised her about the arrangement of her studio. Later, he instructed her on the use of wires to keep the clay from collapsing. Ball made her some tools and likely gave her practical pointers. In modeling, he liked to advise, “The firm touch is the only right one…. The thumb should press the clay with an uncompromising gouge, to carry out what the eyes have first determined upon, – no niggling or trembling!”[147] It was not as easy as Ball made it seem. But his use of simple terms and homespun rules could be provocative: “Always remember that every bit of clay added is a step forward, every bit removed is a step backward.”[148]
Although from slave-holding Kentucky, Joel Hart was also very friendly. Starting as a tombstone carver, he taught himself portraiture. When he needed money, he made another copy of his famous life-size portrait of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay and sold it to some American group for ten thousand dollars. The original took thirteen years. His Woman T
riumphant took thirty.
Edmonia knew making copies was how sculptors prospered. She had done it with plaster in Boston. But how, she asked, should she make copies in marble? Several orders from Boston needed attention. Her new friends likely discouraged her from trying to carve them without help. Marble is different, much heavier and more difficult to form, than wet clay or plaster of Paris. She could hire skilled artisans rather cheaply and study their methods.
She could hardly believe what was happening. America’s leading sculptors were helping her! Not only that! More than the bright sun or local customs, legions of public carvings made a blinding contrast to the cold cityscape of Boston. Images were bigger, better, and far more expressive than the lonely bronze Franklin that had set her resolve.
Speaking of Franklin, works by the Florentine giants – Michelangelo, Donatello, Cellini and others – must have confirmed all she had felt at that magical encounter in Boston two years before. She saw marvels such as the 18-foot tall Perseus; the bas-reliefs on the bell tower of the Duomo; and the great bronze doors of the Baptistery.
At the time, local art lovers were excited about the Rape of Polyxena, by Pio Fedi, the “last Italian naturalist” of the Romantic school of sculpture. When unveiled in Dec. 1865, his colossal reflection on an earlier style quickly upstaged Giambologna’s equally striking Rape of the Sabine Women (Figure 25) and other masterpieces in the Loggia die Lanzi.[149] The complexity of multiple figures, spiral composition, and modeling of fine details must have aroused her intense interest. It proved what vitality was achievable. Sketching would have helped her understand the conception. Touching would inform her about execution. Insights would simmer until her skills were ready.
The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis Page 9
