The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  [785] Bozeman (MT) Courier, Apr. 6, 1896; See also U. S. census, 1880: Malissa Broose [sic], married to Charlie Broose, lived in Butte City, MT, with four children. Samuel W. Lewis married Melissa Bruce, Aug. 1, 1883. See also Bozeman (MT) Daily Chronicle, Apr. 12, 1927; State of Montana, Bureau of Vital Statistics, death certificate #Boz. 773, Apr. 11, 1927. Lewis, his wife, and son are buried in Sunset Hills Cemetery.

  [786] Samuel Lewis, will, dated Mar. 26, 1896, proved Jan. 20, 1898, District Court, Bozeman, MT, bequeathed shares and deposits in a savings and loan society in San Francisco to “my sister Edmonia Lewis, now residing in the city of Paris France.” After settling fees and many claims against the estate, Melissa Lewis sent $8142.75 to Edmonia on Feb. 12, 1898.

  [787] Record Group 84, Records of Foreign Service Posts, Consular Posts, Rome, Italy, Volume 261. 350/38/29/02, USNARA. See also Murray’s Handbook (1899), 7.

  [788] New York (NY) Age, reprinted in H. R. Butler, What the Negro is Doing, AtlC, Oct. 30, 1898; Passenger list, SS Umbria, Sept. 10, 1898, records an entry for “Miss E. Lewis, spinster,” no age given; Culkin, Hosmer, 136, notes Harriet arrived in New York ten years earlier on the Umbria, perhaps influencing Edmonia’s choice of liner.

  [789] Bath (ME) Daily Times, Sept. 20, 1873, which mentions earlier items in the Portland (ME) Transcript and the Bath (ME) Daily Times, was described by McBlain Books, Hamden CT, African Americana Catalog 155 (2003), Section 7, Item 693, accessed December 2, 2010, http://www.mcblainbooks.com/Cat155/cat155section7.html.

  [790] New York (NY) Age, op. cit.

  [791] Progress: For the Promotion of the Fine Arts was published monthly 1900-1902 as the magazine of the International Art Association of Chicago.

  [792] Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). The Supreme Court held that separation, not caste, was the object of public policy as it rejected the right of an octoroon who appeared to be white to sit in a “white only” railroad car.

  [793] Lizzie Isabelle, “Women of Our Race Worthy of Imitation,” ChRec, Oct. 3, 1889. See also Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 316: “Edmonia Lewis was represented by a bust at the Quaker City Exposition of 1889, and two at Allen Chapel in 1891.” Dorsey’s scrapbooks do not identify the bust; Philadelphia (PA) Weekly Standard, “The Great Exposition…at Allen AME Chapel,” Oct. 24, 1891, reported: “Miss Edmonia Lewis, sculptor, has two excellent busts of John Brown and Charles Sumner.” DSCUP 77.49.

  [794] Eva Carter Buckner, “What Constitutes a Negro!” in Negro Trail Blazers of California, edited by Delilah Leontium Beasley (Los Angeles: 1919), 269-270.

  [795] At the time she chose to call herself “Edmonia,” the name was relatively rare, found only 441 times or 0.0022 percent of all female names in the 1860 U. S. census. During the next decade, she achieved fame in Boston and Rome. By 1870, the census counted 883 Edmonias, doubling the percentage to 0.0046 percent. Her fame achieved its peak with expo showings in 1876 and 1878. In 1880, 2395 appeared in the census, over one percent of all female names. After that, the name’s popularity fell to 0.0038 percent in 1900 and a low of 0.0007 percent in 1910. Edmonia Lewis was not forgotten, however, her name appeared often in lists of African-American heroes. 1920 saw the name rise in popularity to 0.0029 percent, then doubling to 0.0058 percent in 1930. See also Epilogue, 1. ISHKOODAH’ and EDMONIA (above).

  [796] Fort Wayne (IN) Sentinel, “Work for Negro Women,” Apr. 11, 1902; House Committee on Industrial Arts and Expositions, Hearing on the Jamestown Exposition, 59th Cong., 1st sess. 1906; Frederick J. Harris, “Instances of Negro Success,” reprinted or excerpted in the Washington (DC) Herald, Jan. 21, 1907, New York (NY) Sun, and NYT;. Florence L. Bentley, “Meta Warrick, a Promising Sculptor,” Voice of the Negro, Mar. 1907, 116-118; Kelly Miller and Joseph R. Gay, Progress and Achievements of the Colored People (Washington DC: Austin Jenkins Co., 1913): 22.

  [797] Scannell O’Neill, Catholic Who’s Who, Rosary Magazine, Mar., 1909, 322-23, was digested at once in the Washington (DC) Evening Star; Detroit Informer, and later cited in Notable American Women 1607-1950 (1971), II, 399; Bearden and Henderson, A History, 489; Haverstock, et al., Artists in Ohio 1787-1900, 526; Nelson, The Color of Stone, 226; Buick, Child of the Fire, 27; etc.

  [798] Pauline E. Hopkins, Famous Women of the Negro Race: “Artists,” Colored American Magazine, Sept. 1902, 362-367.

  [799] Paul W. L. Jones, “Negro Biography,” Journal of Negro History 8 (1923): 128-133.

  [800] Russell Lynes, The Art-Makers of Nineteenth-Century America (New York, Atheneum, 1970), 136.

  [801] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).

  [802] Sampson, “Doing the Centennial.”

  [803] Her address was 37 Store St, London WC1.

  [804] Culkin, Hosmer, 156-162.

  [805] Mary Edmonia Lewis, will dated Nov. 2, 1905, proved Nov. 12, 1907, HM Courts Service, Manchester, GB. Her gross estate was valued at £489. An equivalent 2005 value would be near £40,000 (over $60,000). According to the diocesan archivist, Fr. Nicholas Schofield, Dec. 13, 2010, the priest, Charles Austin Cox [1853-1916], was an accomplished musician. After 1910, he became Rector of Brook Green. In the will, Edmonia also left “the sum of one hundred pounds and all my wearing apparel, jewelry, furniture and personal effects” to Miss Virginia Lucy Gerres [1883-1957] of 20 Earls Court Road Kensington. No inventory could be found in the diocesan archives. If she ever possessed Edmonia’s gold medal, she sold or gave it away. For many years, Gerres assisted in the family baking business in London. She died a spinster in Surrey in 1957. Her estate, which included considerable real estate holdings, was valued at ₤20,063 (about ₤320,000 in 2005 values).

  [806] U. K. census, 1901, found Putnam boarding at 31 Ladbroke Sq, Kensington, London, “living on her own means” with the note, born “United States America naturalized British subject.” She died in 1908.

  [807] Hammersmith Board of Guardians, Du Cane Road Hospital, Register of Deaths 1906-1926. London Metropolitan Archives. HHBG/067 microfilm ref. X114/523; Fulham in the County of London, England. Register of Deaths: “No. 76. Seventeenth September 1907, Hammersmith Infirmary, Ducane Road. Mary Lewis. Female. Age 42 years. Occupation: Spinster, Sculptural Artist of 154 Blythe Road, Hammersmith. Cause of Death: Chronic Bright’s, Cerebral Œdema, Coma P.M.”

  NOTES FOR 5. THE GAMBLER, HIS HORSE, AND THE FIREMAN

  [808] ChT, “‘Blind John’ Condon is Dead; Once Leader on Racetracks,” Aug. 10, 1915.

  [809] Ron Grossman, “2 Saviors vie for ‘Cleopatra,’” ChT, June 20, 1988. Cf. Richard Lindberg, The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 240. Condon was a partner in a gambling house at 119 Clark St., Chicago.

  [810] Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis, 106-107.

  [811] Harold Adams, quoted in Grossman, op. cit.

  [812] Frank J. Orland, Aug. 10, 1993, to author, identified Robert Ritner, professor of Egyptology, University of Chicago, as the scholar.

  [813] Stephen May, “Cleopatra Lives!” Art News, Aug. 1996, 32.

  [814] Raymond Wolters, The New Negro on Campus. Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 321-324.

  [815] Oberlin College. Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. http://new.oberlin.edu/student-life/diversity/edmonia-lewis-center.dot

  [816] Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, Andrea D. Barnwell, ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 129-131 (plates 61-63), 151, 159-160. See also Ebony, “Black Collectors,” Jan. 1995, 52-60.

  [817] David C. Driskell, The Other Side of Color: African American Art in the Collection of Camille Olivia Cosby and Bill Cosby (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2001), 23-25.

  [818] Barbara Chase-Riboud, review of Bearden and Henderson, A History, in African American Review 30 (Spring, 1996), 115-116.
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  [819] bell hooks, Black Looks. Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 190.

  [820] Denise Ward Brown, “Mary Edmonia Lewis – Female Sculptor,” Americans in Focus (Farmers Insurance Group, 2009), 1 min. 29 sec., accessed Dec. 10, 2010, http://multimedia.foxsports.com/m/video/21830964/mary-edmonia-lewis-female-sculptor.htm.

  NOTES FOR 6. THE HAITIAN CONNECTION

  [821] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Dec. 12, 1869, Whitney MSS, referred to “Sunrise” in a way that suggests her reader would understand.

  [822] Boston (MA) Post: “she shows the busts of three of her ancestors in terra cotta, the line of which well suits their copper-colored skins. They are natural in expression and, though not of high rank as works of art, yet are perfect types of the Indian character and lineaments. She speaks of them with a frankness and naïveté that is quite amusing, and, as she pointed out the face of ‘my uncle, Sunrise….’”

  [823] Eileen Tenney, telephone conversation with Harry Henderson Sept. 4, 1997; Mary Pickett, “House of History,” Billings (MT) Gazette, Mar. 2, 2002. See also Leeson, History of Montana, 254, for illustrations of Samuel Lewis’s real estate, including his residence. http://cdm15018.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15018coll38/id/1475/rec/1.

  [824] State of Illinois, Cook County, Certificate of Death 14265, May 11, 1916.

  [825] Samuel Lewis House at 308 S. Bozeman Ave, Bozeman MT. National Register of Historic Places building 99000342. See also U. S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Samuel Lewis House, accessed Dec. 22, 2010, http://www.his.state.mt.us/research/AfricanAmerican/MT_GallatinCounty_SamuelLewisHouse.pdf. See also Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis, 85-86.

  NOTES FOR WORKS

  [826] Gerdts, “Edmonia Lewis,” in Ten Afro-American Artists of the Nineteenth Century, ed. by James A. Porter (Washington DC: Howard University Gallery of Art, 1967), 18-19. “[a copy] came to a tragic end in the fire that burned the Blake Memorial Library in East Corinth, Vermont, in 1945.” See also Perigrene Pickle [pseud. George Putnam Upton], World of Amusement, Art. “The Lewis Art Gallery at Coldwater,” ChT, Oct. 30, 1870; Martin L. D’Ooge, Catalogue of the Gallery of Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University, 1906), 125.

  [827] Boston (MA) Post: “[title of] which I do not at this moment recall.” Cf. the variant description of The Wooing of Hiawatha in Bullard, “Edmonia Lewis,” quoted above. See also State of Florida’s Task Force on Afro-American History, Edmonia Lewis (1845-1890?) Pioneer Woman Sculptor, accessed June 12, 2010, http://www.afroamfl.com/Lists/Artists/DispForm.aspx?ID=9 which cites the Departure of Hiawatha.

  [828] Carleton, Mar. 1867.

  [829] NYDG, July 10, 1873: “I was making a model of a soldier. Miss Hosmer came to see it. She said, ‘The legs of that are not long enough.’ I saw it the moment she pointed it out.”

  [830] Huidekoper, Glimpses, 184: “Her statue of Mr. Lincoln does not properly show his height.”

  [831] Hy Duke & Son, Dorchester, UK, auction (1999) Lot 724.

  [832] Lee B. Anderson, Author visit, Feb. 1, 1980, identified the subject as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Offered at auction September 19, 2012, at Doyle New York, as this book goes into production.

  [833] Identified as Edmonia’s work by Lee B. Anderson, author visit Feb. 1, 1980, but not verified. Cf. Doyle New York, Sept. 2012. Emerson traveled to Europe, passing through Rome with his daughter Ellen around December 1872 and again for ten days in March 1873. Judging from Ellen Tucker Emerson’s Letters, this portrait was probably unknown to the Emerson family.

  [834] note eliminated

  [835] NYT, May 17, 1873.

  [836] Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 214: “Lewis crafted the bust of Bishop Daniel Payne of the AME church for the 1876 American Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, and when the bust was officially unveiled and dedicated to his memory, Harper read her poem, ‘To Bishop Payne.’” NB: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote “To Bishop Payne” in 1892. Daniel A. Payne (1811-1893) was a founder and the first African-American president of Wilberforce University. ChRec, Nov. 9, 1876, noted Mrs. Harper read at the unveiling of the Allen Monument.

  [837] Indianapolis (IN) News, Nov. 18, 1878: “I have … a monument to Lyman Blair at the Graceland cemetery at Chicago, and another monument to Dr. H. K. Hunt, in Mt. Auburn, at Boston. I am the only woman who has monuments in either cemeteries.” Al Walavich of Graceland Cemetery, telephone, Mar. 31, 2006: the grave has a granite monument, a large column with fleur de lys that a monument company – not a sculptor – would make.

  [838] BDET, Sept. 16, 1878: “St. James’ Church, of Chicago, has ordered from her a Madonna and child and a St. Joseph.”

  [839] Ibid.

  [840] Ibid. “and she is to chisel a Madonna for an Episcopalian church in Baltimore.”

  [841] Wolfe, Edmonia Lewis, 108, 120: “The Philadelphia League ordered a bust of John Brown,” giving the date as 1878. James Mundy, Union League Club of Philadelphia, Feb. 12, 2007, states that the League did not commission a statue of John Brown by Edmonia Lewis.

  [842] WoJ, Concerning Women, Oct. 12, 1878; later mentioned in DKJ, Boston (MA) Daily Traveller.

  [843] Private Collection. Photos by Christopher Busta-Peck. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbustapeck/1406191594/in/set-72157602074243366/

  [844] See also Edmonia Lewis, Adoration of the Magi, accessed September 1, 2011, http://edmonialewis.com/adoration_of_the_magi.htm. Researcher Holly Solano discovered a photo of it, reproduced online.

  [845] WoJ, Concerning Women, Mar. 10, 1883. Excerpted or reprinted Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales); Bristol Mercury and Daily Post (Bristol, England); NYT, Fort Wayne (IN) Daily Gazette; Newark (OH) Advocate, Cleveland (OH) Gazette; Red Dragon, The National Magazine of Wales; and other newspapers. See also ChRec. Personal, Mar. 20, 1884: “Lord Bute, whose castle we had the pleasure of visiting when in Cardiff, Wales, has given an order to Miss Edmonia A. Lewis, the American negro sculptress, to execute a marble statue of the Virgin Mary for one of his chapels.”

  [846] Buick, “Sentimental Education,” 91: “To commemorate their meeting, Lewis made of bust of the elder statesman.”

  [847] BrDE, Oct. 23, 1888: “the property of Mr. Richard Dixon” of Brooklyn.”

  [848] Ibid. “A larger copy of the statue … is to be ordered by Father Ward, rector of the Church of St. Charles Borromeo, of Brooklyn.” Father Edward Doran, Pastor, Dec. 6, 2010, “The only statue of Saint Charles Borromeo we have was placed in the steeple of the Church in 1867 when the Church was built… we have no records.”

  [849] Zweiseler Auktionhaus Claus Ölschläger, Zwielsel, Germany, Mar. 11, 2000, lot. 875. sold for DEM 190 (US$93). Artprice, accessed July 30, 2011, http://web.artprice.com.

  [850] Viola Vernon, “Some Artists in Rome,” Syracuse (NY) Post, Feb. 2, 1895: “Her studio was filled with statues of heroes in our civil war. Chief among these were Stanton, Lincoln, with his proclamation, and last, but not least, rugged old John Brown, her soul, with his marching on.” Written in the past tense, the article mentioned Hosmer “twenty years ago,” and spoke of Edmonia’s studio “tucked away in a corner of Piazza Barberini.” Vernon, daughter of a missionary, was born in 1873 in Italy.

  [851] Ibid.

  [852] David Bahssin, Post Road Gallery, email, Oct. 15, 2008;” SIRIS. Cf. Buick, Child of the Fire, 239, note 112.

  [853] Rubenstein, American Women Sculptors, 56, reported that Edmonia made a portrait of “the Pope.” Monsignor Charles Burns, Vatican archivist, to author, Dec. 13, 1997, advised the Vatican would have documented a sitting, but no such documentation exists. She may have worked from memory, engravings, or photos. Pope Pius IX died in Rome, Feb. 7, 1878, and was succeeded by Pope Leo XIII, who served 1878-1903.

  [854] Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin, Ireland), Latest News, London Correspondence, Jan. 2
9, 1880, reported the auction sale of “a marble bust of Christ, by Edmonia Lewis £3,” as part of the estate of Monsignor Capel of Kensington.

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