The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  In 1867, Rome became tense with armed skirmishes as the recently unified Italians aimed to take Rome and end papal rule. As Italy struggled with civil war, Edmonia was shocked to see foreign troops, sent to protect the Pope, meddling in the affairs of Rome. She became quite excited. When asked where they were headed, she answered with a gesture so wild she lurched and fell into a deep hole.[701]

  3. SPITE

  Rumors and Defamation

  Not all newsmen saw Edmonia as a hero. Her success drove some of them mad. Out-of-control editors trumpeted commissions of $50,000, some adding she was to be married.[702] A marriage rumor circulated among Democrats who sneered and expressed horror at racial mixing.[703] No man was ever named. Republicans fired back, chiding Southerners for suckling at colored women’s breasts and then raping them.

  Not one of the rumors can be believed. Any $50,000 commission would have produced a job of considerable size and challenge – not to mention the fuss of real publicity and the supercharged envy of her peers. Vinnie Ream’s Farragut commission, awarded in 1872 at only $20,000, stood ten feet tall and took near as many years to finish.

  Nearly all writers emphasized Edmonia’s mixed blood. To her fans, it was a myth-busting club. To others it was a code for frail, flawed, and impure: Born with the vices of both races, said the bigots, and the virtues of neither.

  After Edmonia departed the public scene, the world seemed bent on defeating her remarkable story. Harriet Hosmer suffered similar attacks. Many historians ignored all female artists.[704] Those who felt obligated to mention Edmonia’s work cherry-picked the word “repellant” from William J. Clark’s essay while rejecting his certain admiration.

  Sixty-eight years after John Mercer Langston memoired his most interesting cases, Geoffrey Blodgett revisited the events surrounding Edmonia’s trial as a piece of Oberlin history in an article for the Journal of Negro History. The “news” of scandal spawned lurid gossip that quickly upstaged her professional triumphs. She had kept the episode more secret than her subversive Centennial strategy or her childhood religion.

  New lies hammered an altered image into the public consciousness. Words like “mannish” and “masculine” skulked into nearly all modern descriptions of her. This modern delusion traces to her fleeting association with lesbian feminists Hosmer and Cushman, but we found only one contemporary description.

  The smear appeared in Boston, where friends of Maria Child had never forgiven her boldness. It seems traceable to Rome, where Edmonia called out bigots and provoked resentment by trespassing on men’s turf. The Transcript had covered her enthusiastically until her Boston gaffe. This brief note appeared in early 1873 under the heading, “From Foreign Files.” We quote in full:

  Miss Lewis, the colored American sculptress in Rome, is short, stout, and rather fine looking. Her hair, which is slightly curly, is parted on the side and cut short. She dresses in a short black skirt and roundabout jacket, and wide rolling collar. Her appearance is masculine and her voice hard and gruff.[705]

  Historians make choices, supposedly based on careful reviews of evidence. The uncommon reference to a “short” skirt should have raised their eyebrows, but they must have liked this slander because they spread the word like a modern viral video.

  Other accounts should have prevailed. About the same time, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote,

  She is of medium hight [sic] and well proportioned outline. Her eyes are black, but not of that piercing style which frightens while it charms. They seem to beam with a wild, soft radiance, which places one quite at his ease in an instant. Her hair is jet black, and very nearly straight. She wears it loose, and it falls about her head in slightly wavy lines, which invests her with a classical air.… She was dressed in a plain linen suit, and wore an unpretentious necktie. Her voice is singularly mild and pleasant; it rings in the ear like soft music, and her words are accompanied with such an air of real gentility that one could never weary of listening to her.[706]

  The necktie was, of course, a staple of fashion more prim than an open collar.

  In 1876, a Centennial correspondent confirmed, “She is about medium height, with a pretty and interesting face. Her soft brown eyes are an index of a pleasant, and her smiling face of a merry, disposition. Her manners are unaffected and charming, while her conversation is bright, affable and witty. She is quite an accomplished linguist, and is remarkably shrewd and intelligent.”[707] A few years later, a Boston critic capped a summary of her life and work by describing her as, “a lady of much grace and pleasing address.”[708]

  The most troubling truth is that Edmonia suffered most at the hands of fellow artists in Rome, male and female. Horace Greeley’s niece recalled them slicing and dicing with relish:

  While we were in Rome four or five years ago … I heard much talk about [Edmonia] from her brother and sister artists. I intended at one time to visit her studio and see her work, but several sculptors advised me not to do so; she was, they declared, “queer,” “unsociable,” often positively rude to her visitors, and had been heard to fervently wish that the Americans would not come to her studio, as they evidently looked upon her only as a curiosity. When, therefore, I did see her for the first time (last summer), I was much surprised to find her by no means the morose being that had been described to me, but possessed of very soft and quite winning manners. She was amused when I told her what I had heard of her.[709]

  “Amused,” but not surprised, she would likely shudder to read twentieth century claims about her as gruff and mean. She pointed out to Greeley’s niece, “How could I expect to sell my work if I did not receive visitors civilly?”

  Blood Science

  In Edmonia’s lifetime, mixed blood became a national fetish. Emotional hype of “scientific” certainty directed fears that blood shaped one’s nature and ability. It was blood, not looks, that obsessed the makers of Jim Crow laws. Who was “pure?” Who was not? They sought to exclude every drop of the African essence from white society, where light eyes, hair, and skin might mislead and excuse a pass.

  Three words – “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon,” each defining fractions of African blood – made their way into the official 1890 U. S. census form. The idea was that the survey would provide new proof of white advantage in statistical form.[710]

  There was no plan. The data defied analysis in spite of the new Hollerith system with punch cards and electric tabulation machines.

  The honest details of forebears, however, threatened a forest of family trees. The 1890 data barely endured fires in 1896 and 1921. The records finally vanished, destroyed without a blink in 1933 as “papers no longer necessary for current business.”[711]

  In a more bizarre example of blood “science,” the Phrenological Journal perverted the 1870 Art-Journal report of Cholmeley’s attempt to symbolize Edmonia’s dual heritage. Its brazen quack claimed to have met with Edmonia, the lie lending trust to his report that her hair actually differed from one side of her head to the other.

  The Christian Recorder reprinted the sham nearly verbatim, coyly remarking, “The reading, is of the usual excellence.”[712] A few other editors in America, impish, rude, and looking for sensation, noted only the unusual dualism.[713]

  4. AFTER 1878

  The Decline of Rome’s Arts Colony - 1879

  By 1879, the “strange sisterhood” had scattered like pearls on a flagstone patio. Its leader, ailing and depressed, departed Rome in 1870 with Emma Stebbins and Sallie Mercer in tow. She finally died in February 1876, having spent her last days in Boston where her School Street rooms overlooked the bronze Franklin that had set off Edmonia’s career. Emma, who published Charlotte’s letters two years later, never returned to Rome or sculpted again.

  Florence Freeman, compared by some to Hilda of The Marble Faun, also died in 1876. A good pal of Hosmer’s, Florence had taken a studio next door to Edmonia’s.

  Hosmer, though often absent, kept her Via Margutta studio until 1879.[714] She then base
d herself in England where Lady Ashburton had bought so many of her works neither could keep track of who owned what.

  Margaret Foley died in 1877 as she vacationed in the Austrian Tyrol.

  Grace Greenwood, who came to Rome with Hosmer and Cushman, had quickly returned to America, married her publisher, and bore him a daughter. By 1879, she was single again, still writing professionally in the United States.

  After her memorable year in Rome, Vinnie Ream left, never to return. In 1878, she married Richard L. Hoxie, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and blossomed in the social whirl of Washington DC.

  Edmonia’s best friend, Isabel Cholmeley, moved to Venice before 1877 where she continued to entertain and sculpt as Contessa Isabel Curtis-Cholmeley in Bermani. The Italian title came from her new husband, an official of the Venice government.[715]

  Anne Whitney returned to Boston in 1871 with Abby Manning, lightheartedly fibbing about their ages to the clerk of the new Cunard liner and posting their occupations as “voyager.”[716] Anne had never met Maria Child, but by 1877 she had approached her with an offer to do her portrait.

  Child declined, but she made Anne “her last adopted daughter.”[717] They became close, visiting overnight, and writing – Maria addressing Anne as “Saucebox” and signing as “Bird o’ Freedom.”[718]

  In 1884, Anne carved a marble bust of Samuel E. Sewall, the man at the center of Edmonia’s 1868 disaster. Inevitably, she and Maria must have minced Edmonia’s fame as they took time “to settle the affairs of the universe”[719] off the record.

  The “Veiled” Bride of Spring

  More than ever, reflections on her orphan past set Edmonia’s agenda. She arranged for The Death of Cleopatra to appear at a bazaar for Chicago’s Home for the Friendless, a gigantic orphanage founded around 1850.[720] She also promised to help the Sisters of Charity, an order that looked after homeless children and invalids in Cincinnati.[721]

  To that end, she returned to America in mid-1879, wealthy enough to take a cabin on the most modern ship available, her work presumably in its hold. She was vain enough to claim an age of twenty-nine (at the age of thirty-five) and to list her occupation as “Lady.”[722]

  In the aftershocks of the Civil War, the tsunami of Reconstruction swamped Southern society and the media. Now its energy was spent. Newspapers and politics twisted in the rip tides of political retrenchment. News of colored talent was no longer welcome.

  It is likely the New York Times editors saw the change coming when they spotlighted her reception a few months earlier. They covered her with an untitled interview, the last first-hand report in that august journal. In it, they unleashed as much additional detail as they could muster.[723]

  Other news services noted her life-size marble only briefly, some accepting her ever-bolder claims to be only twenty-four years old. Seeing a tour de force in which a face of stone seemingly appears behind a gauzy membrane, someone decided to call it the Veiled Bride of Spring (Figure 48-49).[724]

  She stopped to show it in Syracuse, New York – an interesting turn. On her way to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, she paused in the town that once forced her to find shelter with a good samaritan.

  Figure 48. The “Veiled” Bride of Spring, 1879

  This exceptional gift to a Catholic orphanage was discovered in a Kentucky library and returned to Cincinnati for auction in the fall of 2007. Photo courtesy Cowan’s Auctions.

  Figure 49. The “Veiled” Bride of Spring, detail

  This detail of the veiled face focuses on a gray streak that appears to be from tears. It is natural veining in the marble that the artist incorporated in her design. Weather dulled the original highly polished finish.[725] Photo courtesy Cowan’s Auctions.

  The next year, she produced a smaller and similarly “veiled” Spring. We found no hint she intended it to benefit a religious group – it is more sensuous, with wraps that cling to hips and thighs. A scion of a wealthy Boston family showed Spring in Boston the following year.[726]

  A New York Mystery Bust - 1879

  Unlabeled portraits test the archivist of history as well as the historian of art. For some of Edmonia’s portraits, there is little hope of recovering a name. The man in Edmonia’s sensitive 1879 bust (Figure 50) may be an exception. His garb indicates a church leader.

  Comparisons with hundreds of engravings and photos yield few possibilities. One was Bishop Christopher Rush, recently deceased at the time. He helped found the New York-based AME Zion Church in 1821[727] Until blindness forced his retirement in the 1850s, he served as its second bishop. He wielded a huge influence in his time, and he was highly revered.[728] When he died in 1873, he had lived nearly a full century.

  A memorial portrait could have been planned in 1877, the centenary of his birth, and ordered during Edmonia’s 1878 tour. That year she visited New York and Indianapolis, the former city being where the Church was founded, the latter host to the Jones Tabernacle AME Zion Church and the largest congregation in the city.[729]

  While not certain, he seems recognizable by his robust hairline, his strong cheekbones, his eyebrows and nose, the symmetry of features, and the stylized garb favored by his cofounders.[730] Edmonia did not depict the elderly blind man she might have met. Idealized in her hands, the image reflects vigorous youth, a visionary squint, and a Lincolnesque beard not seen in engravings. Her use of painted plaster suggests that she aimed for a reasonable price, as she did with her portrait of Bishop Arnett (Figure 46).

  Other possibilities exist, such as Willis Nazery, fifth bishop of the AME Church.[731] He was active in an Underground Railroad destination in Canada at the western tip of Lake Erie. In a portrait engraving, he also bears a resemblance in features and attire. The logistics of a commission seem less likely. Christopher Busta-Peck suggested it portrays the African-American abolitionist Robert Purvis.[732]

  Figure 50. African-American clergyman, 1879

  This 24-inch high plaster bust was patinated (covered with metallic paint) to resemble bronze. Photo courtesy: American Museum of Natural History Library.[733]

  “An Unplaced Artist” – 1880

  As Reconstruction wound down, Congress ended the Federal protection of former slaves. Soon, Jim Crow partitions, along with poll taxes, literacy tests, and cruel injustice, ruled in the South – de facto segregation in the North. In northern cities with a southern trade, once-warm welcomes for colored patrons vanished.

  By 1880, Edmonia and her American campaign were equally done. Curiosity had given way to boredom with her biracial talent. Moreover, the style she had mastered was in rigor mortis. Excitement about Rodin and realism in Paris made Rome and the Greek revival passé.

  Aging and facing the ebbs of social reform and artistic interest, she must have rethought her life and her marathon touring. She had won credit for her talent on behalf of all colored people. Was that not enough? Was it not irreversible? She once expressed her code to the Daily Graphic: “when I claim my work before the world, if it is not a success, I shall bow before the public verdict.” At the end of her 1879 tour, she sailed away with little fanfare.[734]

  An important interview published in 1880 belittled her while trying to disguise the writer’s frustration with her success. Oddly, Edmonia had given it before she sailed, but it was not released for a year.

  It opened with a recall of her arrival in Boston and her association with Brackett (misspelled “Becket”). While sniffing at her gifts and her important works, it dwelled on her unusual blood, religion, and rebel personality as it overstated her age:

  The life of Edmonia Lewis is a curious story. She is of mixed African and Indian blood, her father being a negro, her mother an Indian squaw of the Chippewa tribe in New York, in which state she was born near Albany, somewhere about 1840. Of her parents she remembers very little. They died in her childhood and she lived and roamed [with] the tribe until she was fifteen when, by the assistance of her brother, she went to Oberlin, Ohio, to attend school. Before t
his, by one of those strange idiosyncrasies that made up her character, she had become a Catholic, and the religious atmosphere was not congenial to her.

  Miss Lewis is by nature very strongly imitative, with a veining of artistic perceptions and strongly tinctured with art feeling. It is not in a marked degree an intellectual nature, although her natural abilities are good. [735]

  Here and there, to disarm the reader, the writer mentioned famous patrons and mentors, or added faint praise such as, “There is a pleasing lack of self-consciousness about her, and her manner is very amiable and pleasing.” Conceding her gifts required the author to make excuses about how underclass origins and blood tarnished her character and work.

  It is easy to see how, with just this combination of mental qualities, she would not take kindly to the rather stern intellectual atmosphere that characterizes Oberlin. The freedom of the Indian nature rebelled against the right angled methods of discipline; the imitative and color-loving African tastes demanded somewhat more of activity of form and outline….

  Without a master she commenced work. From childhood she always had wonderful power with her hands, in shaping anything she touched. It began with beads and wampum, and her modeling was therefore instinctive, an inner force that wrought outward. There is not that finish and rare delicacy about her work that characterizes genius, but it is a high order of talent….

  While Miss Lewis is yet to a marked degree an unplaced sculptor, it is sure that she will take creditable rank. The higher meanings of art do not appear to be interpreted by her, for particularly to the creations in marble, must the place in art be determined by ideal excellence. Sculpture can not depend upon accessories. The limitation of its material isolates it from all other arts. Its true place is to immortalize for us types of humanity and the epochs of life….