The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  English Catholics meant a great deal to Edmonia, no matter the reasons why. They inundated her with orders (possibly the 1867 bust of an unidentified woman; Figure 52), kept her company, and gave editors benign bits of gossip.[260]

  Most important among them were Isabel and Hugh Cholmeley. Hugh, a banker whose blood traced back to Edward III,[261] spent much of his adult life in Italy. During his childhood in North Yorkshire, the Cholmeleys had often welcomed John Sell Cotman, the watercolorist of austere landscapes and one of England’s greatest artists.

  Hugh’s father’s absorption with art was probably a factor in his marriage to the sophisticated Isabel Curtis. She was talented in the arts: a sculptor, a poet, a painter, a singer, and later a published translator. It was possible for her to pursue the arts as a pastime thanks to Hugh’s wealth and good nature. A year before Edmonia arrived, Isabel had arranged a concert for Franz Liszt. She “kindly sang a few of my compositions,” Liszt recalled.[262] She also sculpted a bronze portrait of the spectacular musician that appeared in the 1864 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition.

  The Cholmeleys must have found Edmonia fascinating. Isabel modeled clay in Edmonia’s studio,[263] providing ample time for chatter and mutual admiration. Hugh also loaned Edmonia money for marble.

  Tuckerman’s Review

  Edmonia would have blushed like a young girl in love to read she was “unquestionably the most interesting representative of our country in Europe,”[264] according to Henry T. Tuckerman. He was the leading American art historian and critic of the day whose six-hundred-page survey came out in 1867 and remains an essential source. Edmonia’s success in Boston and The Freed Woman (as praised in Wreford’s Athenæum article) had animated what the Book of the Artists described as “curious and speculative interest.”

  The force of his excitement was overwhelming. He devoted a full page of text to her – as much as he gave to Hosmer! Most important, he rejected any notion that Edmonia was of interest only because she belonged to “a hitherto oppressed race, which labors under the imputation of artistic incapacity.” He praised “[her] grasping in her tiny hand the chisel which she does not disdain – perhaps with which she is obliged to work.”

  The populist phrases jabbed at rich sculptors who hired artisans to build their armatures, mass their clay, and do their carving. Hoping, perhaps, to encourage her growth, and noticing her conflict with Greek-revival rules, he asserted she had already succeeded in “naturalistic” sculpture. He added, “It may be reserved for the youthful Indian girl ... to indicate to her countrymen, working in the same field, a distinctive if not entirely original style in sculpture, which may ultimately take high rank as the ‘American school.’ Has sculpture no new domains to occupy, no new worlds to conquer?” Then, citing Edmonia’s “great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and a simple, genuine taste,” he appreciated that she cleverly adapted the mannerisms of the day to her own themes.

  He dismissed, however, her Hiawatha groups as “girlish sentimentality.” Showing off his ease with exotic native heroes, he hoped, “[she would abandon] the prettinesses of poems and give us Pocahontas, Logan, Tecumseh, Red Jacket and, it may be, Black Hawk and Osceola. Or if these may seem too near and real, and admitting less of effective accessories, there lie behind them all the great dramatic characters, Montezuma, Guatimozin, Huascar, and Atahualpa, to say nothing of the Malinche, that lost her country that she might save her love.” [265]

  Tuckerman’s parade of ideas would have made little sense to an artist with her eye on the market. People bought her Hiawatha groups because the poem had presold them and because she made them authentic as “the Indian girl.”

  Male sculptors took advantage of primal innocence to sell eye-catching nudity. Joseph Mozier succeeded with Pocahontas and his Indian Maiden’s Lament. Powers had some success with a nubile young Indian woman fleeing her captors, the sentimental Last of Her Tribe. Erastus Dow Palmer had sold several renderings of his Indian Girl, topless but pondering a cross, by this time.

  But who would buy a memorial to old Montezuma? Or Tecumseh? Not the English, the Germans, or the American abolitionists. Not the poor Indians who lost their lands to Europeans or the emigrants who pressed the natives to go west.

  Anne Whitney

  One spring day in 1867, Anne appeared in Rome. She and her life companion, Abby Manning, took an apartment and a hillside studio not far from Edmonia’s rooms on the Via Gregoriana.[266] Edmonia promptly invited them to visit her in the studio once graced by Hatty, Gibson, and, most notably, Canova.

  Anne would barely rate mention by Tuckerman – not even a full sentence.[267] When she read the animated praise of Edmonia in the Athenæum and the Art-Journal the year before, she must have burned with envy. Visiting Edmonia’s celebrated studio, she smoldered with emotion that seethed between the lines of her letter home.[268] The place was beneath her standards. By her own account, she barely looked at Edmonia’s work, even when their conversation was interrupted. The best she could report was that she thought Edmonia’s work had improved and that Edmonia considered herself a success.

  Edmonia’s critical and commercial triumphs continued to distance them. Six months later, Anne reported Edmonia’s studio moves with barbs of sarcasm and jokingly imagined Edmonia, as she gave her servants orders, an African princess.[269]

  Seeking a place in society was not Anne’s problem. She and Abby enjoyed afternoons and evenings with Charlotte, Hatty, art historian James Jackson Jarves, the Alcotts and many others. She could afford to idealize Art and take her time. She earned little money from her art, would never speculate in marble without a customer, and, like Story, felt artists who earned their living with sculpture were unable let time prove their value.[270] In her letters, she referred to Edmonia by demeaning phrases and terms. No matter her politics of equality, she likely considered such language just compensation. The unschooled talent rated above her so unfairly.

  She also griped that Edmonia would not follow her suggestion to make the rounds of sculptors’ studios to see what others were doing. Although she preferred to visit Story’s studio while Story was absent, she did not accept the same timidity in Edmonia. Not a word in her letters hints that she offered to explore the galleries together. Anne eventually decided that uninvited advice was not welcome.[271]

  For her part, Edmonia did not explain her strategy to an old mentor who now writhed in envy. Disclosing little, she skirted needless confrontations. Hardened at boarding schools and Boston, Edmonia did not seek close companionship from Anne and her peers. She repaid Anne’s noblesse oblige by tacitly forgiving insensitivity and maintaining her dignity. To this end, she endured rudeness and fostered good will where she could.

  13. CUSHMAN AND THE OLD ARROW MAKER

  Shaking off the long nights of the 1867 winter, Charlotte rebounded with new ideas. She was inspired by the lonely bronze Beethoven that decorated the Music Hall in her native Boston. Done in 1855 by Thomas Crawford, it needed company.

  With this in mind, she approached a struggling Dane who subsisted on the banks of the Tiber. She had admired his heroic busts of famous composers. She planned to supply plaster casts of the busts mounted on elaborate brackets. All she needed was the approval of the Music Hall and the ready participation of good friends in Rome.[272] The effort would help make the artist’s name.

  She saw that Edmonia, too, needed help. The problems of The Freed Woman were omens of a dim future. In contrast, the romantic Wooing of Hiawatha had quickly won orders while still in clay. Contemporary admirers praised its authenticity.[273]

  Edmonia’s Indians, however, seem to conflict with independent observations. Not seated on the ground, their positions differ from customs reported by anthropologists.[274] Measurements and photos of full-blooded Chippewa in Minnesota found their faces were broader than Europeans, heads larger, jaws stronger, and foreheads all low with no loss of hair.[275]

  Yet, hadn’t the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Indians of her childhood interbred
with Europeans for many generations?[276]

  To modern critics interested in the neoclassical style, Edmonia styled Minnehaha deliberately to look more like a Greek goddess in exotic costume than any Chippewa.[277]

  While her wealthy audience must have enjoyed seeing themselves in Indian costumes, we have no evidence that she was guided by anything but instinct and memory.

  In Longfellow’s poem, the arrow maker was a member of the fierce Dacotah tribe and the father of Minnehaha. The presence of the carcass at their feet indicates Hiawatha’s offstage presence and honorable intent. The familiar words guided her vision. Minnehaha, “plaiting mats of flags and rushes,” and her father “making arrowheads of jasper” look up to see Hiawatha standing before them.

  No one familiar with her childhood tales could doubt Edmonia herself once spent hours sitting with others, making souvenirs for sale, chatting and daydreaming, hoping the work would be interrupted.

  She was thinking of a hunter,

  From another tribe and country,

  Young and tall and very handsome,

  Who one morning, in the Spring-time,

  Came to buy her father's arrows,

  Sat and rested in the wigwam,

  Lingered long about the doorway,

  Looking back as he departed.

  She had heard her father praise him,

  Praise his courage and his wisdom;

  Would he come again for arrows

  To the Falls of Minnehaha?

  On the mat her hands lay idle,

  And her eyes were very dreamy.

  Through their thoughts they heard a footstep,

  Heard a rustling in the branches,

  And with glowing cheek and forehead,

  With the deer upon his shoulders,

  Suddenly from out the woodlands

  Hiawatha stood before them.

  Straight the ancient Arrow-maker

  Looked up gravely from his labor,

  Laid aside the unfinished arrow,

  Bade him enter at the doorway,

  Saying, as he rose to meet him,

  “Hiawatha, you are welcome!”

  At the feet of Laughing Water

  Hiawatha laid his burden,

  Threw the red deer from his shoulders;

  And the maiden looked up at him,

  Looked up from her mat of rushes,

  Said with gentle look and accent,

  “You are welcome, Hiawatha!”

  Charlotte was so enthused she offered to give it to America’s first YMCA, which was housed in Boston’s Tremont Temple.[278] She argued it would serve as an acknowledgement of talent in Edmonia’s race as much as a celebration of her progress.

  To the modern reader, the generous offer would have seemed to languish. Even in Longfellow’s home territory – in the city where Edmonia first gained fame as an artist, where she could name many admirers and patrons – there was no prompt response. Beyond the slowness of sea-borne mails, part of the reason was red tape. Charlotte had addressed her offer to an executive of the Association no longer in office. Surely, discussions by volunteer leaders and committees caused further delay. They did not reply until the end of July.

  Welcoming the offer, they promised, “we shall upon the arrival of your gift take more formal action in acceptance of the same and present the matter for the public attention.”[279]

  The Music Hall project went no more quickly.

  By the time the acceptance reached Rome, the international set had fled to northern Italy and beyond. Charlotte and Emma had retreated to England. Anne and Abby were in Switzerland. Hatty had gone to Paris, thereafter to England where she encountered the beautiful, fabulously wealthy and widowed Louisa, Lady Ashburton, soon to become her greatest patron.

  Mutually attracted and equally impulsive, Hatty and Louisa began a long and steamy love affair. One called the other “sposa” and herself “wedded wife.” Today, much of their correspondence appears to be sexual.

  At some point, Louisa visited Edmonia’s studio in Rome where she, too, fell for The Wooing and promptly bought a copy.[280]

  14. THE GARDENS OF SALLUST

  Moving Days

  Lost in the sprawl and echo of Canova’s old studios, Edmonia could not fill spaces extensive enough to accommodate a famous master, students, their production histories, and supplies of plaster, marble, and wet clay. Without a living celebrity, the location also lacked sizzle.

  If Hatty had not taken her festive personality across the Via del Babuino, it would have been different. But she and Randolph Rogers held court a block away in a beehive of artists’ workshops, many up a flight or two.

  The major retail foot traffic was there, hard by the steep rise of the Pincian Hill. Wealthy tourists parked their carriages on the “Street of Baboons” and strolled through Via Margutta, a sunny jug handle of studios, stables, and small apartments that graced the street with laundry strung like nautical banners.

  Edmonia was in the other direction, lost in shadows behind a craggy old door on one of those little cross streets that Hawthorne had described as “an ugly and dirty little lane.”

  Some time after May 1867, Edmonia opened shop at 57 Via della Frezza,[281] a similar street a few blocks south, where Murray’s Handbook (1867) and other writers found her. Around the corner from another Canova landmark[282] that Hawthorne had cited in the preface to The Marble Faun, it was further from the art hub of Via Margutta than her first studio.

  Charlotte and Hatty should have continued to send tourists, but many probably lost their way. Other artists vented gloom at the mere mention of Edmonia’s name, as we describe in a later chapter.

  Randolph Rogers took over the Canova space to create his colossal statue of Lincoln[283] while keeping his showcase on Via Margutta.

  Edmonia soon moved again.

  Figure 16. Via Margutta art district, including the Spanish Steps

  Art buyers headed for Via Margutta, off Via del Babuino between Piazzas del Popolo and di Spagna. Hosmer’s showplace dominated the south side of the northern corner of Via Margutta. Edmonia got no nearer this center stage than Via della Fontanella, coded “6” on the map above. To the west of Corso, and four blocks south, is Via della Frezza. This detail, which comes from a map published in 1876 by Libreria di Spithöver, may also be found online at http://www.edmonialewis.com/via_margutta_art_district.htm.

  A Better Place

  Flourishing and fabulous, William Story had moved his large studio to the ancient Gardens of Sallust.[284] Located east of the Spanish Steps and less than a mile from Via Margutta, the site offered a rich classical history. It was where Aurelian and Nero feasted and where the head priest of ancient Rome buried vestal virgins alive.

  Murray’s Handbook (1867) hailed the spot for its “interesting objects” – ruins laid waste by the Goths, an ancient circus, and hints of history awaiting discovery beneath centuries of fertile soil. It was the source of fine archaeological treasures: a Dying Gladiator and a Dying Niobid, both of Greek marble, a pair of bronze ducks, three pink Aswan statues, the Ludovisi Throne, and the red granite Obelisk of the Trinità die Monte.

  Hawthorne had once hunted for the Gardens in vain. The very next year, a German bookseller-turned-art collector turned up a torso of Venus. After that, the Gardens were easily found. What better setting for sculptors aspiring to the ancient essence?

  The site also offered a robust but untapped retail traffic. It was the route favored by visitors heading from the railroad terminal to the studios of Via Margutta. The narrow Via di San Nicola da Tolentino descends steeply from the Gardens to the Piazza Barberini where Via Sistina leads directly to the Spanish Steps and the heart of the Via Margutta art district.

  Flanked by green landscapes, artists’ studios began to stud the Via di San Nicola like gems on a Coronation crown. Foremost among them, at no. 14, Story’s sublimely large ‘museum,’ was open on Saturdays. Its receptions attracted European notables as well as rich Americans – even though the grea
t artist might not be on hand to greet them. He soon moved to no. 2 at the top of the street, first in line to greet incoming crowds. Sculptor G. B. Simonds worked at no. 6. Across the street, the eminent German painter, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, and other artists had shops. Anne Whitney’s studio was also there, up one flight.

  One day, painter Elihu Vedder would live there. By 1868, American portraitist G. P. A. Healy – who painted royalty, celebrities, and even Pope Pius IX – and English sculptor Albert Bruce-Joy worked in the narrow vicolo [lane] that crossed the Via di San Nicola at right angles and connected it with the unpaved Via di San Basilio where Stebbins and others had their studios. Leading British and Roman artists reigned in great showrooms near the Piazza Barberini below.

  In 1870, Louisa May Alcott and her sister would lodge at 2 Piazza Barberini, corner of Via Sistina, an easy walk to both art districts. San Nicola competed with Margutta for art buyers. It had advantages beyond proximity to the railroad terminal and Story’s celebrity. Behind the old Armenian church (for which the street was named) the Capuchin monks lived above famous ossuary crypts. Prosperous visitors roosted in a large new first class hotel, the Costanzi, which boasted a lift and dominated the street at no. 10. In 1873, the New York Times declared it “the grandest hotel of the Eternal City.”[285]

  Just above the hotel, at no. 8, then at no. 9, Edmonia flourished from fall 1867 through the 1870s.[286] Beyond the bevy of art-seekers, her new studio had an edge over the forbidding gate of her old Canova space and the up-stairs studios of so many rivals. An expensive glass door invited passing tourists to peer inside, perhaps to enter. For rivals and keepers of old biases, it was one more cinder in their resentful eyes.