The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  Her most important New England friends were slipping away. Adding to distance imposed by race, she now suffered, in their eyes, a lack of breeding and, not to be mentioned, fealty to the Pope.

  Having boldly come out as a Roman Catholic, she again sought validation on the basis of her blood. Audacious in life and dauntless in her own civil war, she created a new life-size allegory, Hagar[351] (Figure 26), her final return to “the freed woman,” which we discuss in the next chapter, and Indians in Battle (Figure 24), the last of her known marble Indian groups. It seems she borrowed money for marble again and again with no orders in hand.

  Figure 24. Indians in Battle, 1868

  Also called Indian Combat or Indians Wrestling, this group may be seen at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland OH. Photo courtesy Gabriel’s Auctioneers & Appraisers.

  Edmonia created this ambitious group at a time when she was at odds with and probably furious at Mrs. Child. Standing thirty inches high, the marble is signed and dated 1868 but bears no title. Called “Indians wrestling” by a visitor to her studio that winter, the scene is not sport but war. The sharp tools appear far more deadly than the pen-knife once visualized by Mrs. Child.

  Unlike the carved athletes of ancient Greece, the figures met Edmonia’s preference for modesty. The grim intensity of their faces seems to be an authentic portrayal of Indian custom. The composition also seems to escape neoclassical forms as it draws on the tangled violence and spiral form of earlier styles. Giambologna (Figure 25, below) and Fedi’s Rape of Polyxena (1865) were the talk of Florence before she headed for Rome.

  Figure 25. The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna, 1582

  Edmonia would have seen Giambologna’s serpentine masterpiece at the Loggia dei Lanzi soon after she arrived in Florence. The mannerist style was at first considered “anti-classical.” Photo by Ricardo André Frantz.

  19. HAGAR

  A Famous Quotation

  The Virgin Mary holds center stage among the Church’s most powerful images. She is legion in Rome’s souvenir shops, customary in and outside buildings. Her portrayal is glorious and symbolic of modern miracles of faith. The constant reverence can be hypnotic in its effect.

  Edmonia focused on her own ideas. As described by Anne Whitney and in the press, some of her Madonnas were more complex than others were: with child, at the cross, or embellished with a crown, angels, cherubs, flowers, etc.

  There was little chance of encouragement from Protestants like Anne. Protestants were “heretics” according to the Church, which tolerated their presence in Rome. They tolerated in turn, but they feared the power of the Church, its politics and teachings. Some cheerfully relieved their anxiety by sneering, for example, that the Catholic Catechism deleted the commandment against “graven images,” making up for it by splitting the last commandment to achieve an even ten. Protestant artists turned to museums honoring ancient pagans rather than the religious icons that were everywhere else in Italy.

  Edmonia could not deny her Calvinist schooling, her African connection, or the patronage of American Protestants, while she carved saints for English and other Catholics. The Protestant emphasis on personal Bible study blossomed in Edmonia’s vision of Hagar.

  Asked one day by the Revolution about her life-size Hagar in the Wilderness, she replied, “I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered. For this reason, the Virgin Mary is very dear to me.”[352]

  This particular quotation has echoed through passages about Edmonia ever since. Notice how she – or was it her interviewer? – changed the subject from Old Testament Hagar to Mary of the Gospels. At the time of the interview (1871), Edmonia reveled in the resounding success of her Hagar the prior year. Thus, the shift seems to be artful rather than arising from the moment.

  Read by suffragettes rather than a race-related niche, the Revolution sighed about Hagar, freed slave and mother of Ishmael, but it invoked the Virgin Mary, a broader, more Christian symbol. Indeed, the New Testament theology of Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and others cast Hagar as symbolic of non-Christians and of the “earthly” as opposed to the “spiritual,” thus excusing anti-Semitic racism.

  One modern scholar, Allen Dwight Callahan, considered Hagar a critical interpretation of the Bible.[353] The Revolution interviewer, Laura Curtis Bullard, admired Edmonia’s work enough to collect her Hiawatha statues, but she skirted thorny theology.

  Consider the story told in Genesis:

  Abraham wished for a son.

  His wife Sarah, who was barren, forced her Egyptian (i.e., African) slave, Hagar, to conceive a son with him. They called the son Ishmael.

  With divine help, Sarah later bore Abraham his second son, Isaac. She desperately regretted Hagar’s child. According to custom, a man’s first-born son inherited everything. Sarah’s child would have nothing.

  Sarah demanded Abraham banish Hagar and her child into the wilderness.

  He did. Hagar and Ishmael soon faced doom.

  And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs.

  And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bow shot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.[354]

  Who could deny the profound despair of this moment? Hagar was exploited, abused, and cast out with her child. Her tale of woe inspired artists for more than two hundred years.

  Hagar returns in the New Testament Epistle to the Galatians, a text attributed to Paul of Tarsus. American slave-owners had used portions of Galatians to command their captives to obedience. Ironically regarded on occasion as the apostle of freedom, Paul was the ‘patron saint’ of the master class before the Civil War. His biblical mandate sanctioned the return of runaway slaves.

  Literate, devout slaves in Massachusetts had challenged Paul’s interpretations before slavery ended there. Who can serve two masters, God and man?

  It is likely Edmonia encountered such discussions. Having “become” a member of the slave race as a young adult, she must have given such ideas some thought. With Hagar, she tried to understand her new identity from the point of view of a freed woman.

  In that light, read the new meanings extracted by Paul:

  Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.[355]

  Moved by a struggle for souls, Paul argued against the offspring of Ishmael hundreds of years before the birth of Islam. He seems to define the true people of God as excluding the offspring of slaves. He taught that Abraham’s legacy must be never be bound to Hagar.

  Edmonia’s Vision

  Edmonia could not accept Paul’s logic. Four million members of the African race in America were children of slaves. Yet they were accepted as Catholics and Protestant Christians. She had the blood of slaves.

  She must have prayed for inspiration.

  One day muse struck home. Hagar came anew. In her mind’s eye, Edmonia glimpsed a Genesis scene ignored by Paul:

  And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.

  Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation.[356]

  Miraculous hope rose from bleakest despair! According to interviews in the Art-Journal and the Chicago Evening Post, Edmonia froze her image squarely in this moment of deliverance.[357] Breaking again with stylish deadpan to furrow intense feeling into her subject’s brow,[358] Hagar steps up to embrace her future. As Callahan put it, “Paul’s tortured typology leaves off precisely where the implicit, lapidary exegesis of Lewis begins.”[359]

  The scene is a stunning metaphor, easily recognized, a powerful symbol of hope and a prayer for colored Americans. Slave masters fo
rced them to conceive children, then they set them adrift in an uncertain and hostile element. Praise God, the Angel is here. Fear not! He will make good His promise. Amen.

  Hagar also reflected Edmonia’s own experiences as a victim delivered by rescuers beyond her ken or control. Like the Freed Woman and Forever Free, it expressed Edmonia’s positive faith in herself and hope for the people she represented.

  Excited by her insight, she plunged into the delight of creation around the time of Peabody’s visit, her ‘coming out’ as a Catholic, and the landing of Forever Free in Boston.[360]

  Her special affection for her Hagar must have won her the admiration and sympathy of friends in Rome. She could not wait to put it into marble. Hugh Cholmeley, perhaps at the urging of Isabel, advanced the money. Sharing enthusiasms, they must have convinced themselves it would quickly find a buyer while Edmonia awaited payments from Boston and New York.

  Figure 26. Hagar, this copy 1875

  As the third and final iteration of the symbolic freed woman, the success of Hagar had a deep meaning for the artist. Not apparent in this view are the emotional furrows in her forehead. Photo courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

  20. TIMES DARK, OUTLOOK LONESOME – 1868 to 1869

  Money

  By many accounts, the art market failed its 1868-69 season. As the New Year turned and Carnival began, financial distress forced Edmonia to rethink her situation. Her growing inventory of expensive marble carvings lacked ready customers. For many visitors, her blood, her exotic story, and her potential were always more interesting than her art.[361] She urgently reached out to old friends.

  After a long silence between them, she sent Mrs. Child a photo of Hagar and begged her for a review.

  Child took grim satisfaction, no doubt, in learning her warnings had come true. Turned as bitter as bile by the Freed Woman and Forever Free, Child would not fall prey to her own weakness a third time. She scolded Edmonia “not to be in such a hurry to do large works, depending on subscriptions to pay for the marble.”[362] To friends like Sarah Shaw, she could say nothing good about a Hagar that lacked an ideal Greek anatomy: “[It] looked more like a stout German woman or an English woman than a slim Egyptian, emaciated by wandering in the desert.” With hardened scorn, she ruled that Edmonia could never be anything but “a very good copyist.”

  Creditors

  Edmonia’s troubles took her beyond private letters. She went to the press. The Boston weekly, Commonwealth, reported, “Edmonia Lewis, the coloured sculptress in Rome, is in straightened circumstances, and has had no orders for several months, though Rome is usually full, even with Americans. She desires to sell her Hagar, reserving the right to exhibit it, in which case she will come with it personally to the United States.”[363] Newspapers across the country relayed the urgent appeal.

  An English bank in Rome, Freeborn & Co., served English and American artists. It was located near the Spanish Steps and loaned money at a greedy twelve percent interest.[364] It was probably the Freeborn agent, Ificelo Ercole, who advanced enough cash to cover the costs of Forever Free, Indians in Battle, and the marbles consigned to New York. Multilingual and a gossip, he commented to Anne Whitney that nobody was buying art despite crowds of tourists. Such an omen of default surely spurred his panic for repayment. Piling on, Hugh Cholmeley also demanded return of his money.

  In Boston, the managers of A. A. Childs & Co. tired of hosting Forever Free after more than a year. They readied the work for auction. The $400 minimum bid they posted with Edmonia’s unhappy accord would cover Sewall’s expenses and their sales commission but not her bills for marble.[365]

  Visualize Edmonia at the age of twenty-five as the economy interrupted her crusade, her business, and her fascination with forms and ideas. She suddenly needed to learn about market cycles, legal practices, and the nature of pals who put money before friendship.

  Why would she have planned to repay her good friend, Hugh, before selling Hagar? She counted him and Isabel as best friends. The sum was not large, given the Cholmeley resources. Heart pounding, mind in turmoil, she must have feared her saints and Caesars, her casts and tools, and even her beloved Hagar would vanish for pennies like old shoes at a beggar’s auction.

  Could they, would they do that? It was a nightmare. Income was uncertain, living expenses unavoidable. She probably could not even offer a small sum or plan a schedule of payments. She apparently could not reach her brother, thousands of miles away. “Sometimes,” she later said, “times were dark and the outlook lonesome.”[366] The winter of 1869 must have been her darkest since her Oberlin beating.

  Hearing rumbles of distress, Anne headed for Edmonia’s studio, then withdrew in fear of Edmonia’s fierce temper.[367] Significantly, because it reflects a mutual distrust, Edmonia did not confide in her, despite their long history and the nearness of their studios.

  As smug as Mrs. Child, Anne spun her noblesse to her sister, claiming that it was only the prospect of offending that had restrained her from sharing her poor opinion of Hagar with Edmonia and telling her not to put it in marble. She, of course, lacked Edmonia’s sense of mission and adventure. She never carved marble without an order.

  Others did help. According to Anne’s sources, Shakspere Wood, the English sculptor who arrived in Rome in 1851, came to the rescue.[368] We found no ready confirmation of this, but Wood had helped Hosmer with business details. That he was English might have helped with Hugh if not Ercole as well. It is possible he bought the IOUs, allowing Hugh to move on and Ercole to relax. The conflict may have eased, but Edmonia was still hopelessly in debt.

  21. CELEBRITY LOST AND FOUND

  Had she lived today, Edmonia might puzzle over Henry James lumping her into “that strange sisterhood.” She had ample occasion to curse her isolation – and her own hand in it. Yet, she chose to swim alone, as she had done in her last year at Oberlin, rather than drift into backwaters of low regard and drown in self-pity.

  In December 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had taken up quarters in Rome for the winter. He settled in the brand new hotel, the Costanzi, that rose high above Edmonia’s modest shop.[369] Naturally, he became the darling of Rome’s English-speaking high society. The bright-eyed, white-haired poet was more than a luminary in Edmonia’s eyes. He was her muse. He had inspired her most popular works and every one of the “sisterhood” knew it.

  A clear mark of the exclusion Edmonia suffered, not one of her boosters in Rome thought to introduce her to the author or to even point him to her gallery of Hiawatha figures right next to his hotel. Not Hatty, not Anne and Abby, not Abbé Liszt and Princess Carolyne, and certainly not the Storys ever paused for Edmonia’s sake as they dined him in their apartments and toured him about the city.

  A year earlier, Charlotte had roused friends to send The Wooing to Boston’s YMCA. She sent more of the Danish artist’s plaster composers to the Music Hall. For Edmonia, however, she and the rest vanished like butterflies in the wind. Their behavior suggests that word of Edmonia’s gaffe with the Sewalls must have scorched Charlotte’s ears when she visited Boston in late October – if not earlier.[370]

  Edmonia was as out of fashion as a Confederate dollar. Only Elizabeth Peabody, back in America and ever loyal, expressed concern about her financial crisis. As a reader of the Commonwealth and seemingly aware of the social gulf between Edmonia and the sisterhood, Elizabeth felt she had to relay her alarm to Charlotte in Rome!

  Alas, Charlotte had left Rome in May after finding a lump in her breast. She eventually responded from England with a remarkable sham: “I ever do all I can for her, as does Emma Stebbins.”[371]

  If the stresses of error, isolation, debt, and a sluggish season were not sufficiently maddening, there was also the conflict with Margaret Foley, the former mill worker turned sculptor whose studio sat halfway between the Piazzas Barberini and di Spagna.[372] Margaret sulked and Edmonia spit “a good deal of aboriginal venom” in a feud so bitter that
gossips called it “war.” Letters fail to give details, but events suggest ample cause beyond the ill will common between Irish and colored Americans.

  The self-taught Margaret had created a memorial portrait of Col. Shaw in Rome after his death. She must have felt thwarted to find a colored newcomer had swamped the ready market in Boston with the Shaw family blessing. In late 1865, she returned to Boston for a year and rented the very studio Edmonia had just vacated. Mr. Longfellow gave her a sitting there. Back in Rome, a critic called her profile of him “exquisite workmanship, and true to life.”[373] It was a highlight of her collection, but critics extolled Edmonia at far greater length. Now Edmonia bathed in crowds of prime retail traffic while Margaret languished in a marginal location.

  Margaret also raged against Charlotte Cushman, who had brought her to Rome in 1862. In Charlotte’s reply to Elizabeth Peabody cited above, the actress expressed anguish over “Miss Foley’s trepidations and prejudices against me.” Was it that Charlotte had favored the “colored sculptor” with her fund-raising patronage and not the Irish cameo artist?

  Her back to the wall, Edmonia dug in. She desperately needed a new sign of success. Capturing the author of her mythic lovers could ease her pain. An excellent portrait might redeem her in Boston, where Longfellow was held in the highest esteem.

  She put her low status to work. Never introduced, she could scrutinize him on the streets of Rome while remaining as anonymous as a city pigeon. She caught glimpses as he strolled, waited for a carriage, or went to lunch or dinner. She likely stalked him in front of his hotel, down the street, and as he headed for G. P. A. Healy’s studio around the corner.[374] With skills learned as a child in the woods, she evaded his notice. Longfellow was likely preoccupied with learned figures of speech – describing Rome for example, “like king Lear staggering in the storm and crowned with weeds.”[375]