The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  The artists she met loved to discuss what they saw. They criticized towering masters as easily as they might fault a novice. To sort out their differences of opinion required more viewing on her part, more thought, and more listening. While such critical attitudes might have worried her at first, they could free her from the awe that first clouded her approach to art. All art could not be perfect. She would have to learn to make such distinctions herself.

  In Ball’s studio, she likely saw a bozzetto (small clay model) of a freed slave and President Lincoln. Conceived upon the news of the assassination, it depicted the Emancipator standing over a colored man who crouched deferentially on one knee, broken chains dangling from his wrists. Finding no acceptable model in Florence, Ball had used mirrors to cast himself as the freed slave. He found a colored model later.[150] His vision, however, was more about Lincoln the benefactor than the kneeling man and his liberation. More important, he had seized the moment and had done something that she dreamed of doing.

  As a woman, she could instinctively visualize Emancipation across lines of gender as well as color. Her Richmond memories were still fresh. She contemplated a powerful synthesis. Restlessly, she sketched, patching together clay models. Her best idea required two figures – a mother and child. The classic “Madonna” combination (in abundance in Florence) fit an American theme of personal importance.

  This was her first image of a symbolic ideal, an emotional celebration of liberty and a rebuff to defenders of slavery who needed to deny the humanity of motherhood in bondage. It was her first real work in Italy and an expression of her years listening to sermons by Revs. Finney and Keep at Oberlin. This was how she could testify as a colored artist and a woman. Freedom was especially meaningful to mothers who saw children sold and who had lived with that fear. Wasn’t selling babies the greatest evil? Anti-slavery women said so. Freed women said, No one will sell our children ever again. Amen.

  Stimulated by her new friends and enlightened by Italian art, she created another bust of Robert Gould Shaw. She mentioned it in a letter to Child, hoping for admiration and approval. The result was only consternation.[151]

  Miss Adams Denies

  In the meantime, Edmonia’s complaint reached the Fields in Boston and upset them. They wrote to sister Lissie in Florence at once. She responded directly to Edmonia, explaining that two houses shared the same number. No one had called at her door. She had sent no one away. She graciously urged, Please call again. Thanks to the agonizing slowness of transatlantic mails, the tempest took months to resolve.

  After helping to correct the misunderstanding, Mrs. Child wrote to Mrs. Fields, hedging her bets with a strong dose of bias while complaining of “American prejudice.”

  I hope the artists in general will be able to so far divest themselves of American prejudice as to give Edmonia a fair chance to make for herself such a position as she may prove herself entitled to. Of course, any attempt to force her, or any one else, above the level of their nature will prove unavailing, but assuredly all obstructions ought to be removed. Considering her antecedents, I think she has done wonderfully well, thus far, and I sympathize, as you do in her energetic efforts to rise above depressing circumstances.[152]

  Near year’s end, Edmonia was ready to move on to Rome. Earning a living had to be her first thought. With fleeting amusement, she must have noticed Hiram Powers’s shelf bearing a sign: “DELINQUENT.” Some sitters forgot to pay. Maybe they thought themselves critics. She was in no position to play that game. Florence was not for her.

  The incomparable Harriet Hosmer was in Rome. She had broken new ground for women sculptors. Everyone knew her. She had praised her work. She might help.

  Rome’s name had near-magical powers. More tourists went to Rome than to Florence. Bostonians visiting there might even know who she was. She might meet some she knew. She could tell them, Yes, I was encouraged by Mr. Powers and Mr. Ball in Florence – they saw photos of my work and gave me tools. She could modestly report commissions in marble about to go into production.

  2. ROME – 1866

  Picture Edmonia as she stood in the winter sun by the Spanish Steps, nervous at idling like a layabout, looking for a familiar face, and trying to think what else she could do. In Florence, she had learned the key to finding artists in Rome was to find the Steps. The artists must be near.

  The ivy-studded, sunny cascade led down the Pincian Hill to a small piazza with a unique fountain credited to Bernini father and famous son, masters of the seventeenth century. Reassuringly, the American flag waved from a nearby building where she might seek advice, the U. S. consulate. Caffè Greco, a few doors down the narrow Via Condotti, running away from the Steps, was a famous haunt of John Gibson, dean of the English sculptors in Rome, and other artists.

  The Steps were famous as a scene of picturesque models and beggars. Hans Christian Anderson had once told a fanciful tale based on them. A guidebook, Roba di Roma, by the illustrious American artist, William Wetmore Story, described them at length.

  All day long these steps are flooded with sunshine, in which, stretched at length, or gathered in picturesque groups, models of every age and both sexes bask away the hours when they are free from employment in the studios. Here, in a rusty old coat, and long white beard and hair, is the Padre Eterno, so called from his constantly standing as model for the First Person of the Trinity in religious pictures. Here is the ferocious bandit, with his thick black beard and conical hat, now off duty, and sitting with his legs wide apart, munching in alternate bites an onion, which he holds in one hand, and a lump of bread, which he holds in the other. Here is the contadina, [Italian: peasant girl] who spends her studio life in praying at a shrine with upcast eyes, or lifting to the Virgin her little sick child,—or carrying a perpetual copper vase to the fountain,—or receiving imaginary bouquets at a Barmecide Carnival. Here is the invariable pilgrim, with his scallop-shell, who has been journeying to St. Peter's and reposing by the way near aqueducts or broken columns so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, and who is now fast asleep on his back, with his hat pulled over his eyes…. [153]

  Later, she learned the government banned the beggars and models from the Steps because they crowded the tourists. She could find them a block away.

  As luck would have it, a Boston woman recognized her and helped her find Hosmer’s studio, a few minutes’ walk away.[154] “It would have done your heart good to see what a friendly welcome I received,” she exclaimed in a letter to Child.[155] “[Hosmer] took my hand cordially, and said, ‘O Miss Lewis. I am so glad to see you here!’ and then, while she still held my hand, there flowed such a neat little speech from her true lips!”

  Connecting with Hosmer was a high point of her adventure, better than meeting Powers, Hart, and Ball. “How much I have thought about that encouraging reception!” she added. “It is a great example for the U. S. Government to follow in her treatment of a poor, wronged people struggling to rise out of the mire of degradation. Miss Hosmer has since called on me and we often meet.”

  Miss Hosmer delighted in doing what others shunned. She knew how to turn herself into a bright and merry entertainment for Rome’s staid English-speakers and her own lively circle of friends. As a girl, she had bounced like a rubber ball off New England’s sense of propriety. As an adult, she was no different. She rode her horse through dark streets at night until the police persuaded her to stop. She teased and titillated expat society, speaking the unspeakable with cliché-breaking comments about becoming fat, her worship of celibacy, and announcing, “No gentleman goes home with me at night in Rome!”[156] On a steamship with her oldest friend and her three children, she invented aliases for all of them to post on the ship’s manifest.[157] To sweeten the prank, she fibbed outrageously about her own age and name while accurately claiming the occupation of “sculptor.”

  She may have been aware of Child’s worries about Edmonia, but she had her own ideas. This new arrival would excite her social set. A darin
g protégée would spur talk. Who is the new talent Hatty was bragging about? Only Hatty Hosmer could come up with a colored lady sculptor. Was she a freed slave? What will we do with all those freed men and women?

  Audacious in life, Hatty was not so daring artistically. She followed the prevailing Greek revival to a fault, embracing classical nudity more like a male artist than like her prim sister carvers. She had apprenticed with the famous John Gibson, who recently died.

  Gibson’s extensive studios were located on Via Fontanella, a byway Hawthorne had painted as “chill, narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures.”[158] Unmentionable were period commonplaces. Outside: laundry lines, piles of horse dung, and foul-smelling puddles. Inside: spittoons, chamber pots, and privy closets. Located a block south of the immense Piazza del Popolo, the little street extended the Via Margutta, a ferment of artists’ creativity, across the Via del Babuino to the ancient, often crowded Corso (see map: Figure 16). On its shadowy south side, a rough-hewn wood door in a high wall led to a bright courtyard with orange and lemon trees, a fountain, and a shed with a dirt floor. Large arched windows lit the workspaces, which sat high enough to elude the foul flood of the Tiber should it surge through city streets.

  A yellowing marble plaque proclaimed that Antonio Canova (who died in 1822) once occupied the place. Canova was the sage of neoclassicism. “Study the Greeks” was the advice he passed to Gibson and other followers.[159] Edmonia must have inspected his Dancing Girl and the revered Venus de Medici in the Boston Museum. Meanwhile, jaded critics, such as J. J. Jarves, complained that art suffered “the Italian habit of looking behind instead of around or before.”[160]

  Hatty took Edmonia under her wing. Nothing could be better! Gibson’s old studio was empty and only steps away from Hatty’s new workshop across the avenue. Hatty likely pressed the landlord to let it to Edmonia. She could help Edmonia as Gibson had helped her. She could steer visitors there from her vantage point on the busy Via Margutta.

  Some who had visited Gibson and Hosmer there would be back. Finding a colored woman in Canova’s old shop would be something to tell folks back home. Hawthorne caught the romance of such places: “Bare floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls, – an old chair or two, or perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the possibility of ideal grace within it) to sit down upon.”[161]

  Bursting with possibility, Edmonia moved in. For an American, the place was cheap. As she unpacked, she must have wondered at her good fortune. Could it last? Dedicating herself to her mission, she soon began to piece together an armature. Then came the clay. If she followed Ball’s advice, she started each clay figure nude, adding clothing later. It was a question of anatomy, the necessary illusion of cloth on flesh on bone.

  She was impatient to create a group, a major challenge for a sculptor. It was a signal of the urgent nature of her ambition. Canova had pointed out to Gibson in her very workspace, “it is a very common mistake with young artists to begin with groups before they have conquered the difficulties of the figure.”[162] Taking on groups so early in her career was a mark of her gifts as well as her ambition. She was soon at work on several groups.

  She took rooms on Via Gregoriana, not far from the bronze doorway at 38 Via Gregoriana marking the famous parlor of actress Charlotte Cushman. Hatty, who once lived at Cushman’s address in her own apartment, had recently moved out.

  3. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN

  Artistic Fashion

  Like peacocks in season, the artists of Rome reveled in splendid garb. Dramatic costumes signaled their creativity and their readiness to do business. Fashion also set them apart from merchants, tourists, and the artisans and servants they employed.

  The magnificently bearded Randolph Rogers reflected the great sixteenth-century master, Albrecht Dürer. He wore a short, loose coat with drooping sleeves and low velvet berets covering long masses of curls.[163]

  William Story might don a dramatic black velvet coat and a broad red cap.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne described Harriet Hosmer in “a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth,” with “a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man’s, with a brooch of Etruscan gold,” adding, “on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet.”[164] The poor man was so shocked by her lack of prim modesty, however, he could not look or write about what she wore below her waist.

  Louisa Lander, whose sex scandal we relate later, had by now departed Rome under a cloud of disgrace. She had sported “a sort of pea-jacket buttoned across her breast, and a little foraging cap, just covering the top of her head.”[165]

  While newsmen once exaggerated Edmonia’s wardrobe as “large and elegant,”[166] the sober Yankees of Boston had never encouraged anyone to the fab extremes of Rome’s artists’ quarter. Someone, probably the flamboyant Hatty, must have taken her shopping. She soon sported her own eye-catching outfit: velvet jacket with slashed sleeves, Byronic collar, and a vivid cravat.[167] A crimson cap rose above her jet-black hair, which she kept relatively short and curled. With a bright smile and dark skin, she was vibrant and distinctive, a novel addition to the art capital of the world.

  The Hub

  Fourteen years earlier, Boston-born actress Charlotte Cushman had settled in Rome. Her parlor soon became a social center for rich tourists and lively celebrities. Tall and full-figured, she spoke in a deep contralto that could fill a great hall. She was America’s first great dramatic star and an attraction anywhere she went. As an actress, she developed sharp insight into people. She played Lady Macbeth as well as Hamlet and Romeo. She was also a writer, a manager, and instinctively a tireless promoter. On stage or off, she radiated an intelligence some felt surpassed her dramatic skills. Now retired, she favored severe looking black silk moiré suits with white collars and cuffs. Her forehead, broad and deep, rose proudly above wide-set, large-lidded eyes.

  More feminist than suffragette, she took visitors on walking tours of Rome, stopping at the studios of artistic dames[168] to prove women could create as well as any man. The writers and artists she gathered around her were free thinkers and idealists – men as well as women. Her friendships ranged from Secretary of State Seward to literary lights such as Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson – in whose choir she once sang – and the dynamic publishing duo of James T. and Annie Adams Fields. She also helped her nephew win a post as U.S. consul in Rome in 1865. He moved into Hatty’s former quarters with his wife and new child.

  Charlotte’s Evenings

  Many years earlier, Charlotte had recruited a fourteen-year-old free colored girl from Philadelphia as her housekeeper and dresser. The girl, Sallie Mercer, developed into a first-rate manager who could deal with markets, household servants, and stable grooms. Sallie helped organize gala suppers and who knew who was who in Charlotte’s eyes. She could have been the only other American colored woman living in Rome at the time.

  The year Edmonia arrived, Charlotte had paused to complain, “I feel suddenly and unnaturally old.... I am a broken, winded hunter and have no longer any spring in me.”[169] She soon shook her depression. Meeting Edmonia, Charlotte recognized the potential and her chance to intervene. Edmonia was working on The Freed Woman and Her Child on First Hearing of Her Liberty,[170] her first tribute to Emancipation. That Edmonia chose a challenging subject and wasted no time getting started would have impressed the earnest actress.

  Charlotte had revived her ‘evenings.’ At these great festivities, gossip, debates, namedropping, and backbiting were as basic as the hors d'œuvre passed ‘round in the marble hall among palms, flowers, and the singing of caged birds. The swirl of artists mixing with art buyers made her a central character in proceedings that benefited her friends and protégées. As the main course of the evening, Charlotte allowed herself to be served up, called to read famous poems, to declaim speeches from her most celebrated roles, to sing in her sometimes-hoarse contralto. Few knew she started her career in opera.

  Her g
uests, as many as one hundred fifty, included prominent nobility as well as eminent Americans. Visiting merchants and Rome-based painters such as Elihu Vedder might appear. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poets who lived in Florence but wintered in Rome, might attend along with journalists from London and New York. Emma Stebbins, the shy sculptor who had recently skipped the Boston unveiling of her larger-than-life bronze of Horace Mann, also lived there as the other half of a Boston marriage.

  Visualize Edmonia at such a gathering, welcomed by Miss Cushman and introduced to other guests. Eventually the actress clapped her hands and said that friends asked her to read, but first she wanted everyone to know an important newcomer to Rome. She summoned Edmonia to her side with a dazzling smile and a grand beckoning hand, put an arm around her, and began her introduction:

  The talented young sculptor who portrayed heroic Col. Shaw in a bust so marvelously that one hundred copies were sold; the child of the forest who came to Florence and was helped by Hiram Powers, Thomas Ball, and Harriet Hosmer; the colored sculptor who chose to depict the day of Emancipation as her first work in Italy, The Freed Woman and Her Child on Hearing of Her Freedom; an orphan who had to survive on what she sold, who was starting out in the very studio Canova occupied and indeed where Miss Hosmer studied with John Gibson. I wish to present Miss Edmonia Lewis!

  The sentimental tale told by a dramatic master mesmerized the adoring audience. Now, I’ll read a poem by Anna Quincy Waterston in honor of Miss Edmonia Lewis.

  At the ovation, a blush and a broad smile broke through Edmonia’s wariness. So many people introduced themselves she could not keep track. At the end of the evening, Edmonia sincerely thanked Miss Cushman, who was beaming. She was a protégée again and the hit of the evening. People shook her hand and surely complimented her outfit. Did she wear Mrs. Child’s silk gown? We will never know.