The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  [417] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Dec. 25, 1869, Whitney MSS.

  [418] At 45 Via San Basilio, a street intersecting Vicola di San Nicola da Tolentino, Ream’s studio neighbored Stebbins at 11A, Healy around the corner, and Edmonia, Story, etc. on the next street. Ream’s guest book (University of Iowa) recorded some five hundred visitors.

  [419] Whitney to Home, Feb. 12, 1871, Payne MSS, 864-867.

  [420] Karl Voss, who had a studio on Piazza Barberini, also appears in Payne MSS, 847 and 864.

  [421] Cooper, Vinnie Ream, 113-114; Sherwood, Labor, 125-129.

  [422] Grace Greenwood, “In re Ream,” New-York (NY) Tribune, Jan. 31, 1871, quoted in Sherwood, Labor, 175.

  [423] Vinnie Ream, diary, around June 7, 1870, quoted in Cooper, Vinnie Ream, 112.

  [424] New-York (NY) Tribune, Apr. 3, 1871, quoted in Sherwood, Labor, 187.

  [425] NYDG, July 10, 1873. Cf. New York (NY) Sun interview in San Francisco, excerpted in Boston (MA) Daily Globe, Personal, Sept. 9, 1873, in which Edmonia repeated what she had been told about Ream; BrDE, Miscellaneous Items, Sept. 30, 1873, summarized with its own cynical twists: “Miss Edmonia Lewis says Vinnie Ream hires Italian sculptors to sculp [sic] for her, and that she never has chiselled any thing herself – except Congress. Edmonia is colored, and perhaps her stories are.” See also Harriet Hosmer, quoted in Hanaford, Women of the Century, 269-270: “I honor all [women] who step boldly forward, and, in spite of ridicule and criticism, pave a broader way for the women of the next generation.”

  [426] Thomas Crawford’s Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace (1863).

  [427] Ball, My Threescore Years, 286. See also Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor (Taftsville, Vt: Countryman Press, 1974), 29. Powers had government commissions for full-length portraits of Franklin, Jefferson, Webster, and Calhoun.

  [428] George Peter Alexander Healy, Vinnie Ream, 1870. Oil on canvas. 31 3/8 x 22 1/2 in. Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City OK, has a copy of the photo.

  NOTES - continued

  NOTES FOR 25. 1870 and CHICAGO

  [429] A-J, Mar. 1870.

  [430] Wreford, “Studios of Rome.” Cf. British Museum, Marble bust of Clytie, accessed Dec. 11, 2010, http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/m/marble_bust_of_clytie.aspx.

  [431] A-J, Mar. 1870. See also Bullard, “Edmonia Lewis;” J. M. Hutchinson, “Letter from Italy,” Evangelical Repository and United Presbyterian Review (Philadelphia, PA), Mar., 1870, 576-581.

  [432] NYT, “The Dusky Race,” Mar. 2, 1869, points to the neighborhood west of Sullivan Street to Wooster Street, between Bleeker and 18th Streets, as home to about 4500 colored people.

  [433] U. S. census, 1870, dated June 24, 1870, and city directories. The building catered to colored professionals. Tenants included a doctor, a druggist, a dentist, and an engineer as well as a porter, a seaman, a hairdresser, and a waiter. Note Edmonia discounted her age by at least one year.

  [434] (Edmonia Lewis), How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist (full text), http://edmonialewis.com/how_edmonia_lewis_became_an_artist.htm

  [435] NYDG, July 10, 1873.

  [436] ChT, Aug. 23, 1870.

  [437] Pickle, On the Wing “Edmonia Lewis—An Episode.”

  [438] Der Frauen-anwalt, Dec. 1871, 472-473.

  [439] For example, Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis, 87, reproduced an 1873 SFEl ad that references “our people.” See also Figure 45.

  [440] The carte de visite [calling card] was the forerunner of the modern business card. It originally bore only the owner’s name. With the development of albumen printing, the 2.5 x 4 inch photographic card-portrait became inexpensive and fashionable. By 1863, it was “the social currency, ‘the sentimental green-backs’ of civilization,” according to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  [441] BDET, Art and Artists, Sept. 16, 1878, reprinted by Newport (RI) Daily News, Atchison (KS) Globe, DKJ, etc.’ Chicago (IL) Daily Inter-Ocean, “The Exposition,” Sept. 26, 1878, letter to the editor, Sept. 27, 1878

  [442] ChT, Sept. 25, 1870. The YMCA, which owned Farwell Hall, made it clear they would not benefit from the event.

  [443] Revolution, Nov. 24, 1870. Col. James H Bowen won the raffle, which brought $3000.

  [444] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Jan. 14, 1871, Whitney MSS; [Nicholas Francis Cooke], Satan in Society, by a Physician (Cincinnati: Vent, 1871), 354- 355.

  [445] Francis DeCurtis, Chicago History Museum, email May 30, 2008: the Bowen copy of Hagar, except for the hands, was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The surviving fragment could not be located.

  [446] Revolution, June 4, 1868.

  [447] Revolution, June 4, 1869.

  [448] Revolution, Nov. 24, 1870.

  [449] Abraham Lincoln, by Henry Kirke Brown.

  [450] Revolution, Dec. 22, 1870, was followed by notes in WoJ, NYT, Dubuque (IA) Herald, LCN, HDH, BrDE, etc.

  [451] Davenport (IA) Daily Gazette, Personal, Oct. 12, 1872; repeated by SFDEB, ChRec, Waikato Times (Hamilton, NZ), NNEra, etc. Yale has no record of Edmonia’s Longfellow bust.

  [452] Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899: Her Life and its Environment (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1914), II, 37-38; Alfred C. Barnes, European travel account. Rare books and manuscripts. Penn State University Libraries. (#2001-0118R/A-S Mss. Book)1, May 5, 1873, p. 2.33-2.34; NYT, May 17, 1873.

  [453] Roger Friedman, librarian, Union League Club of New York, aided the author’s examination of its records, Oct. 23, 1995; See also Roger Friedman, “Where Lies John Brown? Or, What the Escaped Statue Said about the Union League Club,” Bulletin of the Union League Club, Feb. 1996.

  [454] NYT, “Club-House Burned; The Union League Rooms Destroyed,” Apr. 26, 1875.

  [455] Sherwood, Hosmer, 318-319; Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 74; Louisa May Alcott, Dec. 29, 1870, in Selected Letters, ed. by J. Myerson and D. Shealy (Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1995), 153-158.

  [456] Victor Emmanuel II, who had assumed the title King of Italy in 1861, had taken Rome in late 1870 on the date commemorated by Via Venti Settembre.

  [457] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Mar. 19, 1870, Whitney MSS.

  [458] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Jan. 14, 1871, Whitney MSS. Cf. HDH, Jan. 18, 1871, reported, “the young colored sculptress and sister of Sammy Lewis,” had returned to Rome. See also Payne MSS 864.

  [459] SIRIS attributes the 36 in. white marble, Rebecca at the Well, to Edmonia Lewis. See also Appletons’ Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888), III, 702; Craven, Sculpture, 334. Christopher Busta-Peck, email Mar. 16, 2011, photographed a statue titled “Rebekah,” (marble, 59 in. per data from A. N. Abell Auction, 2001) and dated 1880, in 2007. Cf. Flickr, by Christopher Busta-Peck, Rebekah, accessed July 27, 2011, http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbustapeck/1405348147/in/set-72157602074243366/.

  NOTES FOR 26. STANDING OVATIONS – 1871 to 1872

  [460] Bullard, “Edmonia Lewis.”

  [461] The phrase, “first copy,” suggests Edmonia carved more copies.

  [462] This appears to be a misreading of The Wooing.

  [463] Faithfull, Three Visits, 293-94; NYT, Sept. 25, 1879; Boston (MA) Daily Traveller, Nov. 17, 1880.

  [464] Was the term “stone man” an adaptation of Chippewa or Mohawk language? Richard Rhodes, University of California - Berkeley, Dec. 23, 2010, and Carole Ross, St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Tribe, Jan. 11, 2011, say no.

  [465] Bullard, “Edmonia Lewis,” was reprinted with comments NNEra, May 4, 1871, and excerpted or adapted by AtlC, Janesville (WI) Gazette, Madison Wisconsin State Journal, Little Rock (AR) Morning Republican, George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), II, 450-451; William Wells Brown, Rising Son (Boston: A. G. Brown, 1874), 465-468, etc.

  [466] NYDG, July 10, 1873. The prize was also mentioned in BrDE, WoJ, SFC, SFC, SFEl, and NYT.

  [467] Der Frauen-anwalt
, Chronik, Italien, III, No. 2/3, 1872, 111.

  NOTES FOR 27. 1872 – WHY CLEOPATRA?

  [468] Lev. 25:10.

  [469] Whitney to Home, June 23, 1867, Payne MSS, 658; Whitney to Home, Feb. 7, 1869, Payne MSS: 758-761. See also Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 77; Craven, Sculpture, 224-225; Tuckerman, Book, 290; BDET, Nov. 22, 30; Dec. 2-5,11, 16, 1867; AtM, “Sculpture in the United States,” Nov. 1868, 560; NYT, May 17, 1873.

  [470] Hawthorne, Feb. 14, 1858, Passages.

  [471] James, William Wetmore Story, I, 343; Joy F. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives. Women in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990), 215.

  [472] Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Chap. 14. Cf. J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 289-290. “[In 1858] Cleopatra was substantially finished, but Story was unwilling to let her go, and had no end of doubts as to the handling of minor details.”

  [473] Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Chap. 41.

  [474] Adolf Stahr, Winter in Rome, quoted in Putnam’s Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and National Interests, vol. 5, Jan.-June 1870, p. 260.

  [475] William Wetmore Story, “Cleopatra,” in Graffiti d’Italia (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1868), 147-154, dwells on emotion rather than on race. Cf. Nelson, The Color of Stone, 152-154.

  [476] Child, letter to the editor, New York (NY) Independent, Apr. 5, 1866; J. P. Sampson, “Doing the Centennial” (1876). See also BDET, Nov. 11, 1864: “She … undertook to make this likeness of [Col. Shaw] out of grateful feeling ‘for what he had done for her race.’”

  [477] Jarves, “What American Women Are Doing in Sculpture.”

  [478] George Gurney, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Oct. 19, 2007, author visit.

  [479] Plutarch's Lives, transl. by J. and W. Langhorne (Philadelphia: Hickman and Hazzard, 1822), IV, 137.

  [480] NYT, Dec. 29, 1878: “The brown little thing paused in front of the State house and gazed long and silently at one of Story’s masterpieces. From that day the passion for art and the resolve to execute something like that took possession of the girl.” We could find no record of a statue by Story at the State House.

  NOTES FOR 28. BUSINESS – 1872 to 1873

  [481] Henry Robertson Sandbach, Diary, Feb. 8, 1872, (Powys County Archives, M/D/SAND/1/19) quoted in National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, accessed Mar. 22, 2010, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/foreign/longfellow_edmonia_lewis.asp

  [482] Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer, Aug. 19, 1872, reported, “Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor of Boston, is for Greeley because he is a handsome man;” the bust is mentioned in NYT, May 17, 1873; NYT, Sept. 25, 1879; Boston (MA) Daily Traveller, Nov. 17, 1880.

  [483] NYT, Marine Intelligence, June 7, 1872, lists “Miss Lewis” arriving on the French Line SS St. Laurent from le Havre.

  [484] Eric Foner, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1868-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 503-510.

  [485] Peter S. Porter (1820?-1884). Cf. NYT, “Funeral of Peter S. Porter,” July 28, 1884; New York City directory (1874), 1033. “Porter, Peter S., [boarding house], 252 W. 26th.”

  [486] Edmonia to E. G. Squier, Oct. 24, 1872, Microfilm reel 5, E. G. Squier Papers, Library of Congress. See also Madeleine B. Stern, Purple Passage: the Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 55-66. Leslie and Squier suffered their own distraction. Having divorced his wife on July 18, Frank Leslie embarked on an affair with Mrs. Squier who then divorced her husband, accusing him of adultery.

  [487] Cleveland, Story, 109-110, put the visit at June 30, 1873. Cecilia Cleveland, a Catholic, was the daughter of Horace Greeley’s sister, Esther.

  [488] Bryan (OH) Times, General News, July 17, 1873.

  [489] Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899: Her Life and its Environment (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1914), II, 37-38. Chace was a third-generation abolitionist, a Quaker, and a leader in the women’s movement. See also Smithsonian American Art Museum, Young Octavian. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=14633 (last visited Mar. 22, 2010). Other sculptors who copied the bust included Horatio Greenough, Hosmer, Saint-Gaudens, and Thomas Crawford.

  [490] Wayman and Wayman, op. cit., 42-43: “Sarah Remond … is winning a fine position in Florence as a physician, and also socially; although she says Americans have used their influence to prevent her, by bringing their hateful prejudices over here.” Sarah and her brother Charles Lenox Remond were skilled anti-slavery speakers. Sarah left London for Florence, where she entered medical school, in 1866, the year Edmonia moved on to Rome.

  [491] Indianapolis (IN) News, Nov. 18, 1878.

  [492] Ibid. Cf. New Bedford (MA) Daily Mercury, “The bust of Dio Lewis,” Feb. 20, 1868.

  [493] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Sept. 20, 1872, Whitney MSS. Payne MSS, 766, noted the visit of Miss Minns to Rome March 8, 1869. (Edmonia visited Boston a few months later.) Meg L. Winslow, Mount Auburn Cemetery, to author July 23, 2008, re plot 4009 on Indian Ridge Path: Frances A[ntoinette] Minns and Constant F. Minns, who died earlier, were both buried Dec. 23, 1870. Whitney had moved back to Boston in 1871 and opened a studio in Louisburg Square.

  [494] St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch, Jan. 23, 1879; St. Louis (MO) Times-Journal, Jan. 24, 1879, reprinted NYT, Marion (OH) Daily Star, Lowell (MA) Sun, Springfield (MA) Daily Republican, and SFPaA, which credited “a Chicago paper.”

  [495] Calvary Cemetery graves include those of General Sherman, Missouri Governor Alexander McNair, and Dred Scott.

  [496] See also Julie Winch, introduction to Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 13, 26; Loren Schweninger, introduction to James Peck Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur. The Autobiography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 11-12. Thomas mentioned his wife only in reference to his courtship; he gave no hint of his history with Edmonia.

  [497] James Peck Thomas, op. cit., 179-195. Thomas sailed for Liverpool in early June 1873.

  [498] Francis Silas Chatard was rector from 1868 to 1878.

  [499] Oberlin College purchased the Thomas bust in 2002. See also Flotte, “Edmonia Lewis,” which described restoring it. See also John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land. Slave Family in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19, 240-241. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that all people of African descent could never be U.S. citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment overruled it in 1868.

  [500] St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat, “Suit About the Blessed Virgin,” Jan. 25, 1879, reported James Thomas testified, “Edmonia Lewis made the model of clay at his house.”

  [501] St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat, Jan. 23, 1879. For more serious coverage of the work and the dispute, see St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch, Jan. 23, 1879:

  the crown of thorns was not on the statue but was lying around. There is only one kind of stone in the statue and a different kind in the pedestal….; took the dimensions of the figure; it is four feet eight inches from the foot to the head; from the foot to the top of the cross it is five feet two inches; the cross and the figure of the same kind of marble but of two pieces. They were joined together by an even joint… one arm of the Virgin was a little shorter than the other;

  See also St. Louis (MO) Republican, “Colored Sculptress,” Jan. 24, 1879: “the Virgin standing beside the cross, the whole mounted on an octagonal pedestal;” St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat, “Suit About the Blessed Virgin,” Jan. 25, 1879: “the crown of jewels was made of metal instead of marble, and detached from the cross … the cross had no roses on it.”

  [502] St. Louis (MO) Times-Journal, Jan. 24, 1879, excerpted by NYT and SFPaA, citing a Chicago paper.

  [503] St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch, Jan. 23, 1879, reported Edmonia’s deposition specified Mrs. T
homas’s approval of the clay model.

  [504] NYT, “Miss Edmonia Lewis Gains a Suit,” Apr. 25, 1880, attributed to the St. Louis Times.

  [505] BDET, Nov. 15, 1881:

  The litigation concerning a statue of the Virgin made by Edmonia Lewis, the negro sculptress for James P. Thompson [sic Thomas] of St. Louis, has ended in a victory for Miss Lewis; but it is rather a barren one, for the judge decided that from the $635 due for the work must be deducted $228 overcharge for packing and the remainder will no more than pay her lawyers. When the statue arrived in St. Lewis, Mrs. Thompson [sic Thomas] paid an accompanying bill of $650, supposing that it covered everything, but it was only for freightage and packing, and the charge of $635 for the carving was separate. For wining [sic] the marble in wood fibre and boxing it, in the usual manner, Miss Lewis’s price was $235, and it was this item that the judge reduced to $7.

  [506] Mrs. Jeanne Besselsen, associate director, Catholic Cemeteries, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Jan. 24, 2006.

  NOTES FOR 29. MEDIA – 1873

  [507] Anne Whitney to Sarah Whitney. Jan. 14, 1871, Wellesley College Archives.

  [508] Alfred C. Barnes, European travel account. Rare books and manuscripts. Penn State University Libraries. (#2001-0118R/A-S Mss. Book)1, May 5, 1873, p. 2.33-2.34. Not to be confused with the founder of the Barnes Foundation, Alfred Cutler Barnes became president of his father’s firm, A. S. Barnes, publishers, in 1868.

  [509] NYT, May 17, 1873. In Montana, Iowa and possibly elsewhere, the portion on Edmonia was excerpted as “A Colored Sculptress.”

  [510] Henry G. Stebbins visited Rome in 1868.

  [511] The Lincoln bust is described and illustrated in Buick, Child of the Fire, 22-24, plate 3-4. See also NYT, “Destruction in the Park,” Jan. 3, 1881: “The historical buildings at Mount St. Vincent, in the Central Park, at East One Hundred and Third-street, were totally destroyed by fire …. The marble bust of Lincoln, by Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptress, was saved.”