The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  Edmonia must have been wise enough to leave forwarding addresses. James sent word, it seems, asking her to visit him in St. Louis. In America, Edmonia revised her plans, venturing into the former slave state.

  Thus, James sat for a marble bust that she produced after her return to Rome. Dated 1874, it reveals a well-dressed gent with a pleasingly round face, wavy hair, and a generous, waxed mustache (Figure 37).[499] Historians Franklin and Schweninger used the bust to point out his resemblance to Justice John Catron, who voted with the majority in the infamous Dred Scott decision – and who was his father.

  Mrs. Thomas had sought a memorial for her mother’s grave. Edmonia’s Catholic art, respected name, and shared heritage must have seemed perfect. From a clay model made at their home, the Thomases ordered a marble statue of the Virgin Mary at the cross with a base and pedestal.[500]

  No one expected a turf war at the cemetery. Monument vendors in St. Louis must have raged at such a windfall going to this colored invader of their turf. From the tone of the news coverage, it seems the trouble sprung from the notion that rich colored people were ignorant fools just waiting to be fleeced. The Thomases were undoubtedly sensitive to such slanders. They overreacted and refused to pay Edmonia’s balance due on delivery.

  Racist newspapers mocked the legal proceedings, joking that Mrs. Thomas found “[a] particular defect … in one of the wings. It lacked the graceful contour, the aerial taper of the pen [pin] feathers so essential to a successful flight through the regions of space at the witching hour of midnight…. Mrs. Thomas refused to receive the angelic visitor, and it was left at a marble-yard, where, like the wandering peri, it still waits for the gates of Bellefontaine to open.”[501]

  In court, a monument worker fumed, explaining his refusal to cooperate: “The reason [the memorial] was not put up was because he did not know how to put it up, and he had been in the business forty years; he could not put this one up, but if they could get anyone that could do it they had better get him.”[502]

  Other witnesses opened a second front – questioning the statue’s value as an original work of art – calling it “a burlesque.”

  Edmonia’s attorneys entered her sworn statement in which she claimed the work met with the daughter’s enthusiastic approval and that she executed it as agreed.[503] A further statement by an Italian sculptor and testimony of local artists backed her up.

  Edmonia won the suit, but the trial court awarded her only one dollar.

  Her lawyers appealed. The higher court likely saw danger in setting a precedent that would apply to all. It held, “where an artist has been employed to execute from design at a stipulated price the party employing cannot refuse to pay because the work does not suit the taste of manufacturers or importers of tomb-stones or because it is not the buyer’s own taste, or because he finds he can buy figures in the marble-yards of a large size at one-tenth of the cost of a work of art which he has ordered.”[504]

  The ruling must have stung for a long time. In Boston, the Transcript’s summary bore the tone of a studied sneer.[505] Black History tours in St. Louis will find no Virgin Mary at the gravesite of the fabulous Pelagie Rutgers.[506]

  Figure 37. James Peck Thomas, 1874

  On tour in Europe, James Thomas discovered there was a colored sculptor in Rome – but she had gone to visit America. In time, he sat for this bust, which she carved the next year. Photo courtesy: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.

  29. MEDIA – 1873

  The New York Times

  Edmonia had her eye on San Francisco ever since her brother headed there in 1852. He banked there, even after settling in Bozeman, Montana Territory. He likely encouraged her to head west as he had done when they met in 1870.[507] Making a sculptor’s excursion practical, a golden spike had joined east and west coasts by rail the year before.

  Touring America each year, something other expat sculptors rarely did, she had an advantage in spite of the mean traps awaiting a colored traveler. She could investigate deliberately, study timetables, discuss accommodations, and make plans. She decided to be the first woman sculptor to show on the west coast. The trip was a new adventure, never to go out of style. Assured of a hotel and a showroom, she carefully selected what marbles she thought she could ship and sell. By most accounts, she left her affordable plaster figures behind.

  By mid-spring of 1873, her plans for the Centennial must have advanced enough for her to focus on this digression. Forever Free had gained from a travel hiatus. She would let her Cleopatra cure while she made her longest sortie ever.

  Before she left, a New York book publisher turned up at her studio. Awash with inherited wealth and position, he frothed in bubbles of self-satisfaction. Seeing Hagar, he recognized Edmonia’s exceptional enterprise and ambition. He opined to his diary, however, it would take generations for members of her race to compete with whites in fine art. Ignorant of, or refusing to accept, the Italian judging that gave her high prizes a year earlier or the commission from the urbane Union League Club, he termed her putti “laughable.”[508]

  The uncredited writer from the New York Times was no more generous. After visiting the sunny, flat Via Margutta to see Harriet Hosmer and Randolph Rogers, he hiked up the Quirinal Hill to visit the illustrious Mr. Story. Edmonia’s shop stood nearby. His report contrasted “the grandeur of [Story’s] museum of great works with the modesty of a studio which lies not far from it ... a humble looking house, where a glass door permits you to see a couple of workmen busily chipping away at blocks of white marble.”[509] Recognizing Longfellow and multiple sizes of the Hiawatha series, he mentioned Awake and Asleep without noting her gold medal. She surely mentioned it, but he conceded only, “there are traces of genius in these sculptures, you cannot doubt, yet the execution seems so imperfect, and the expression of the fancy busts is so peculiar that you feel you are in the presence of art, but of art in the early beginnings.”

  Edmonia told him no stories of wild Indians and the “stone man.” Instead, she griped about expenses. He wrote, “This little low woman [confided] that today is pay-day, and pay-day is always an unpleasant time when [she] is troubled by many cares.” He explained her marketing tactics in terms of class: “the small statues and heads are for people with slender purses, ‘for you know we must sell our work if we want to live.’”

  His shallowness becomes more apparent as he gushed over her celebrity subjects, “touching deeply your heart as she speaks of Horace Greeley and Charlotte Cushman, and the goodness they have shown her ... makes her eyes brim over.” (Greeley had recently died; Cushman, battling breast cancer, had left Rome, never to return.) The account ended, “wishing the poor child of a suffering race Godspeed [and] liberal encouragement so as to cultivate her talent and do honor to her genius.”

  Didn’t Edmonia mention her titled patrons and her commission from New York’s Union League? Like her prizes, no such details appeared in the article. They could have seemed impossible for this “little low woman.” Or perhaps the thought of showing real respect made the writer uneasy. It did not matter. However soaked with superiority about the “poor child” and nonsensical comments about art and genius, the article would validate her for readers in America.

  Figure 38. Portrait of a Woman with a rose in her hair, 1873

  This elegant 23 inch high marble portrait of a young woman with a rose in her hair is signed “E. Lewis Roma 1873.” The date suggests Edmonia produced it in the spring, before she left for California. Note the thoughtful expression, soft features, tilt of the head, and the fine lace pattern of her bodice. Photo courtesy: Saint Louis Art Museum. Museum Minority Artists Purchase Fund and partial gift of Thurlow E. Tibbs Jr. 1:1997.

  The New York Graphic

  Kind words from Charlotte Cushman and Emma Stebbins might have yielded fruit even after they left Rome. Stebbins’ wealthy brother[510] was the head commissioner of Central Park, which had purchased Emma’s colossal Christopher Columbus in 1869 and Edmonia’s 1872 bust of Lincoln,
the “gift of a woman,”[511] in 1873. Edmonia’s price: $1,100. That year the Park dedicated Emma’s bronze Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Fountain – creating one of the most popular outdoor art scenes in America.

  Edmonia must have been sorely disappointed with Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper after Greeley imploded. Arriving in New York on the French Line’s Péreire,[512] she headed for Leslie’s new rival, the New York Daily Graphic.[513] She undoubtedly hoped it would print a picture of one of her works, as Leslie’s had in 1868.

  She would not have known, but the editor was a soft-boiled bigot. He once posed as an abolitionist advocate of racial mixing to stir up trouble for the anti-slavery movement. In this masquerade, he had coined the word “miscegenation” and published a pamphlet to “advocate” its spread in hopes of provoking a backlash.

  He pounced on her mixed blood like a cat on a flopping catfish. The glint in his eye surely gave him away.

  Trapped, she rose to the challenge. She bragged about excelling in mathematics, she dropped names of celebrities,[514] she tried to shock him with the naked wild Indians of her childhood and by fuming at Vinnie Ream. She also inflated her Naples triumph by calling it an “International Exhibition.”

  When asked about her plans, she teased. “I intend to make a beautiful statue, as beautiful as I can and send it to the Philadelphia Exposition anonymously. I do this in order that it be judged fairly, and without favor or prejudice.”

  The ‘anonymous entry’ gambit was an artful bluff. Her fame had exceeded any hope of a secret entry – and she was as proud of her skin and her blood as she was of her work. Yet she revealed nothing of The Death of Cleopatra.

  She then expressed an ancient code of honor: “If it is a success, so much the better for me, when I claim my work before the world. If it is not a success, I shall bow before the public verdict.”

  She also vowed, for the record, to never live in America.

  Not well-accepted or understood, living abroad was a reasonable choice for a serious artist of any blood. America’s leading sculptor, Hiram Powers, had just passed away in Florence, having lived there since 1837.[515] Story, too, would die in Italy.

  To the editor’s patriotism, however, it may have stung – but it was not as personal as the headline, “Miscegen Sculptor,” that eventually crowned the interview. He had likely meant to use it from the moment he met her.

  Reprinting the article a few days later, the Chicago Tribune renamed it “The Colored Sculptor.”[516] The Fort Wayne Gazette cherry-picked her talk of Hiram Powers’s digs at Vinnie Ream. The Brooklyn Eagle took fresh bits and added from older stories. The Woman’s Journal summarized under the title, “Edmonia Lewis,” and the San Francisco Pacific Appeal simply reprinted an excerpt from the Boston Commonwealth with the title, “Miss Edmonia Lewis.”

  The Graphic included a portrait of her, a reversed engraving of one of her 1870 photos, probably traced cheaply with the aid of a camera obscura (an ancient optical device). In a caption, the editor came back to her mixed blood and repeated her shocking plan to conceal her name and color at the Centennial.

  If she had spoken of her new, life-size John Brown at the Union League Club, he opted to omit it while drooling over her jibes at Ream’s memorial to Lincoln. He was no fan of John Brown, the Club, or Lincoln.

  The Washington New National Era and Citizen

  Frederick Douglass kept a place for Edmonia in his heart. He wished she would bring her art to Washington, DC. A few days after the New York Times piece, he reflected, “Edmonia Lewis is very busy at her studio in Rome … instead of lobbying with Congressmen for jobs.”[517] This was also a snipe at Ream and her cronies. Perhaps he could shame colored Congressmen into backing government commissions for her. By the time he printed his thoughts, she was well on her way west.

  Later that year, he revisited the point as he noted that white celebrities purchased her work: “What she needs, however, is the assistance of her own race ... the favorable mention of colored members of Congress when appropriations for artistic purposes are on foot. She certainly could not execute worse effigies than sundry statues which are supposed to adorn our Capital and Capitol.”[518]

  30. TRAVEL CROSS-CONTINENT

  California

  Unlike Boston, which boasted generations of dour Puritan stock, most adults in San Francisco came from elsewhere. They shared the lure of gold and a common optimism that gave the fast-growing city a fresh spirit all its own. From less than one hundred pioneers in 1844, San Francisco had become the tenth largest U. S. city by population in 1870 (150,000, sixty-three percent as large as Boston at the time, or about the size of Alexandria VA in 2009). Half its inhabitants were foreign-born, largely men from the British Isles, Germany, China, Canada, and France. The largest American-born concentrations hailed from states that had opposed slavery: New York and Massachusetts.

  In 1850, thanks in part to the city’s delegates, California joined the Union as a free state. Racially, ninety-one percent of San Franciscans were white. Asians (about eight percent) outnumbered blacks tenfold. Five years after the Civil War, the city accounted for thirty-one percent of all blacks in the state. Like Edmonia’s brother, who headed there in 1852, many of the city’s men and women aspired to productivity, refinement, and citizenship.

  San Francisco’s mayor, William Alvord, was born and bred in Albany, NY. Wealthy from importing railroad hardware, he became a patron of the arts.[519] He hoped to put his city on the nation’s cultural map. The Bay area was home to a number of artists, but hosting a famous sculptor from Rome twenty-five years after the discovery of gold was almost as important as the new cable cars climbing the Clay Street hill. It meant that the young metropolis was rising above its rough Barbary Coast reputation for gambling, lewd women, and crime.

  If New England had tired of Edmonia Lewis, San Francisco was more than glad to receive her. For more than a year before her arrival, one of its main newspapers radiated keen zeal if not good journalism. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin started with exaggerated reports of her success (two commissions of $50,000) that echoed across the country.[520] The following spring, it announced she planned to marry.[521]

  Two African-American weeklies followed her career more soberly, as part of a larger agenda. One was the San Francisco Pacific Appeal, which circulated down the coast. It had reported the sale of Hagar in Chicago.[522] The other, the San Francisco Elevator, had displayed photographs of her Hiawatha groups since 1867. It commented on her work, “[as] strong evidence of the capacity of our race for the higher branches of art, and a refutation of the slanders … of our natural inferiority.”[523]

  In the lobby of the International Hotel,[524] she recited her life story. In addition to naming her most famous patrons and plugging her coming show, the San Francisco Chronicle asked, “How is it you come to the Far West instead of remaining in New York, as most artists do?”[525] She replied:

  Well, one reason is that I love to travel. I have Indian blood in me, you know, and I love the grand scenery of the mountains. Why, do you know, I almost envied the freedom of the Indians which I saw on the plains! But then they were so dirty. I didn’t like that in them. Then, another reason for coming here is, that in New York, the artists never thoroughly welcome a brother or sister. They seem to be anxious to get you out of the way, fearing that you will take something from their pockets. Here they are more liberal, and as I want to dispose of some of my works, I thought it best to come West.

  The San Francisco Art Association, upon meeting her, provided its gallery free of charge for eight days from Sept. 1.[526] As she took ads,[527] the Pacific Appeal called her “distinguished” and found her “very intelligent.”[528] It especially liked “[her] straight forward way and a business-like manner.”

  A few days later, a well-prepared Evening Bulletin critic asserted, “Her statue of Hagar is acknowledged to be a work of genius, so much so that even those not versed in art are struck with surprise at the soulful expression giv
en to the marble,”[529] His report of her memorial to Harriot K. Hunt is unique and historic, with details found nowhere else. He added praise for the Freed Woman.

  The San Francisco Daily Morning Call summarized impressions, “In appearance, Miss Lewis is a vivacious, bright little creature, with quick lustrous eyes, and very agreeable, intellectual features. In conversation, she is animated and engaging.”[530]

  Over one hundred and fifty San Franciscans attended the opening. She showed five pieces, all white marble, none more than two feet high: a bust of Abraham Lincoln, the popular Marriage of Hiawatha, and three charming images of cherubs:[531] Asleep, which had won a gold medal in Naples the year before, its companion group Awake, and Cupid Caught – a cute sprite trapped while stealing a rose – that also won a national award in Naples.

  The Chronicle critic griped there were too few examples, adding, “[with] so much labored finish to them that very little expression is left .…”[532] He sniped, “only lovers of art who desire to see the creations of a lady of color, whose education as a figurista in marble was obtained in Italy, are likely to derive any pleasure from inspecting her works.” Admitting she had “a certain excellence in the art,” and citing the prizes won in Naples, he felt her work did not match that of Powers and other eminent sculptors.

  The editor of the Elevator hotly disagreed. The statues, he wrote, “all exhibit originality of conception and of beautiful finish. There are no rough or neglected points ...”[533] He particularly praised the realism of the costumes and setting of the Marriage of Hiawatha. He also met the comparison with Powers: “Her efforts make a good show. Powers had been nearly 20 years at work before he produced his chef d’oeuvre, the Greek Slave, and that is almost a plagiarism on Canova’s Venus.”