The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (17 page)

Reading
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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would have been no preparation for this. Meeting freed slaves must have answered her hunger for a connection to the father she hardly knew. Accented with echoes of West Africa, each tale expressed a heritage as well as a memory. She could only look and listen with respect. She had gone to teach. But she came away fortified with knowledge and a fresh link to her forebears.

How would she share her wonder? Struggling with the limits of the Greek-revival style, she took a great risk. Her theme and treatment could not be in any way fashionable on the terms that embraced Hiram Powers’s
Greek Slave
as a polite reference to America’s abusive regime. Hers would be original, creative, and a claim to creativity in art. It would be a more realistic truth and not very “Greek.” By the time she reached Rome, her vision had settled and she had adopted Emancipation as her second great task.

She employed photography to share her clay model with fans in America. The photos are gone, but those who saw them expressed sympathy and understanding of the feelings they brought forth. In the
Daily Evening Transcript,
a letter observed the freed woman “trampling a broken chain under foot.”
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The
Freedmen’s Record
was more subjective: “The head of the woman is very strong in character and expression – the brave daughter of toil, the child is sweet and lovely in infantile unconsciousness.”
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The
Athenæum
interview gave more detail: “[The Freed Woman] has thrown herself on her knees, and, with clasped hands and uplifted eyes, she blesses God for her redemption. Her child, ignorant of the cause of her agitation, hangs over her knees and clings to her waist. She wears the turban which was used when at work. Around her wrists are the half-broken manacles, and the chain lies on the ground attached to a large ball.”
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The image was emotional, lifelike, and, as we shall see, a test. Alongside the staid Longfellow groups that followed, it reflected more of her intent. Only crude concessions to symbolism – the chains and the child – bowed to fashion. The chains stood for enduring obstacles. The oblivious child implied the latent potential of the future, a question very much on the minds of everyone she met, white and black, as well as a token of mothers’ concerns.

Seeking support, Edmonia offered to dedicate the group to Miss Stevenson and Mrs. Cheney for their labors to educate her father’s people. She also sent a photo to Mrs. Child. Immediately supportive, Child gave an account to the
New York Independent.
Noting the group was the popular two and a half foot high format, she quoted Edmonia’s letter, “She writes very touchingly, ‘the subject is a humble one, but my first thought was for my father’s people, how I could do them good in a very small way.’”
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Shortly after her praise appeared in print, Child recoiled with the rage of a scorned lover.

Figure 11. Abolitionist symbol

The colored person kneeling in prayer, often graced by the motto, “Am I not a man (woman) and a brother (sister)?” was emblematic of the abolitionist movement. This engraving appeared in Mrs. Child’s tract,
An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans
(1833). Similar images appeared on tokens as well as in print. Photo courtesy: New York Public Library.

Anna Quincy’s family nurtured her with care befitting her pedigree. Raised in the town of Quincy (named for her famous family), she was the youngest daughter of the eminent Josiah Quincy and cousin to President John Quincy Adams.
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She turned to writing while her brother followed their father into politics. In 1840, she married Rev. Robert C. Waterston, the bookish son of a wealthy merchant, and settled in Boston. A year later, she gave him a lovely daughter. They named her Helen Ruthven.

Helen grew up as an only child, her parents’ darling. No less an author and poet than William Cullen Bryant
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described her as “uncommonly beautiful in person, with a dignity of presence and manner much beyond her years, and a sweetness no less remarkable than the dignity.” Before her sixteenth birthday, Anna and Robert decided to take her abroad where they found good company among the abolitionists of Europe. In July 1858, Helen died of a baffling malady in the best hotel Naples could provide. They laid her to rest nearby in the Protestant Cemetery. She was only seventeen.

Helen’s grieving parents returned to Boston. They drowned their sorrows in work, beginning with a verse-laden memorial that they printed in 1860. He wrote prolifically and fully engaged the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society where, by 1865, he was its vice president. She wrote verses, articles, eventually even a biography.
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More to the point, she focused her attention on working women of her daughter’s generation, such as the magnetic contralto Adelaide Phillips and journalist Kate Field. Her 1864 poem about Edmonia (quoted above) seems one more effort to connect with the spirit of her lost child.

Impressed with news of
The Freed Woman,
and no doubt pleasing his wife, Robert offered to be the person to whom members could send funds for its carving in marble. A note to this effect appeared in the
Freedmen’s Record
in April, 1866.

Edmonia also received an order for a medallion of the son of another Boston family.
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Coming on top of the London articles, the news must have sent her spirits soaring. She bragged that several Boston gentlemen had ordered
The Freed Woman.

Filled with gratitude, she produced a tiny bust of Helen, the lost daughter, according to an interviewer:
“A beautiful bust of a beautiful young lady now deceased, daughter of Rev. Mr. Waterston of Boston, is indicative that her genius is of no ordinary kind.”
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Much smaller than typical portrait busts, its size suggests the small chunk of marble was a scrap not to be wasted.
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That it is signed to: “M. F. Me Waterston” on the back suggests she meant to repay his advocacy with a gift. French being the language of stylish refinement, we guess Edmonia’s abbreviated inscription meant
“Mon Frère, Maître
[my brother, master] Waterston.” (Figure 12)

Figure 12.
Helen Ruthven Waterston,
1866

Edmonia’s delicate marble portrait was once identified as Anna Quincy Waterston, Helen’s mother. An interview from 1866 and a crayon portrait helped identify it. Photo courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Dr. Richard Frates.

The Waterstons had actually marooned themselves on a frail strand of good intent. How sad they must have been to find themselves alone in support of Edmonia’s Emancipation salute.

Child must have learned of Waterston’s offer by April 5 and her own embrace of
The Freed Woman
(quoted above) appeared in the pages of the
New York Independent
. How she must have boiled. Edmonia had ignored her parting injunctions! It could surely come to no good. A failure would reflect badly on her as mentor and promoter. In short, her heart froze at the risk taken by her protégée. Loyalty suddenly dissolved.

She schemed to head off the fund-raising. A master at finding fault, she distanced herself from the potential failure. If she once hid her criticisms of Edmonia’s work, she now lost no time in sharing. Trading her saw for a pen dipped in venom, she plunged into a denunciation (dated April 8) that she forwarded to one of her oldest friends, the mother of Robert Gould Shaw.

Sarah Shaw, living hundreds of miles away on Staten Island, continued to ache over the lack of a proper memorial for her only son. Edmonia’s plaster bust had deflected the public urgency for this.

Child sought to engage her by condemning the young woman and the bust, stopping short of contrition for being Edmonia’s able publicist. She excused Edmonia’s youth and origins as she wrote, “Brought up among the Chippewa, how
can
she know anything of the delicate proprieties of refined life.”
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She then lingered on the Shaw bust, which she knew troubled her reader, and her own unpublished history of opposition to it. Having laid an introduction that could revive Sarah’s pain, she zeroed in on Waterston’s fund raising. Deftly, she drew the strokes she hoped her reader might relay to wealthy abolitionists on Staten Island’s north shore – including her reader’s daughter who had ordered a marble copy of the bust of her fallen brother – who might otherwise support Edmonia’s folly.

She called the feet “monstrous” and stressed that
The Freed Woman
was “shockingly disproportioned.”
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She decried everything Edmonia had produced, and then she scowled that Waterston “had better not” help put it into marble.
Satisfied with her mortal stab, she suddenly turned to bow like a matador whose kill vomits blood and stumbles blindly away.

Would she not have reiterated her critique to every abolitionist she met in the days that followed?

Waterston’s collections soon fell apart.

In post-mortem, we recall Edmonia studying the foot under Brackett. To what extent had she strayed from Greek physiques to portray the diversity that impressed her in Richmond? The
Freedmen’s Record
later recalled
The Freed Woman’s
body type as, “original and characteristic.”
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It was not described again.

In terms of how Child’s arguments hid irrational fears, consider that the anatomical errors she complained of could be corrected. Realism could not. Other militant defenders of the style abhorred realistic African features no matter their views on rights.
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For them, symbolic sculpture was meant to romanticize time-honored ideas with traditional Greek archetypes – not the views of outsiders modeled on average people. Child, it seems, assumed she knew more about fine art than Edmonia, who had seen more during a few months in Italy than Child had seen in a lifetime. There was another element to the conflict, however, and we shall come to that in due time.

Except for the imagery quoted above, the statue appears to be lost. Even the photos cited have not survived. By 1916, the work (not seen after 1866) reached legendary status as the first emancipation statue by a colored sculptor. One historian quoted another (neither had seen it) with a kindly summary: “The ‘Freedwoman’ who was represented as overcome by a conflict of emotions on receiving tidings of her liberation, and the pathos of the situation was interpreted in a sympathetic spirit.”
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Small and lean, gifted and rich with inherited wealth, William Wetmore Story started modeling clay at Harvard where he studied law. Later, he decided an artist’s life in Rome outclassed sober lawyering in New England. He packed up his family and relocated. His mother called him a fool.

He and his family occupied forty rooms on an upper floor of the Palazzo Barberini, Rome’s largest Baroque mansion (now home to an art museum). His neighbors included a cardinal, a prince, and a duke – each in his own apartment – as well as a magnificent library. From his windows on the Quirinal Hill, he could look down over much of Rome with its clusters of art studios below and across the Tiber to St. Peter’s dome.

Conspicuously well off and a Protestant cheered by the Pope, he was famous for more than his carvings. He wrote a popular guide to Rome, poetry, essays on American politics, and a treatise on the mystical geometry of the human figure. Celebrated guests found him to be a delightful raconteur and a skillful social lion. He shimmered in an exclusive fizz of literati, pols, and noblemen. His distinguished visitors included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived in Italy, and touring Americans such as Henry Adams, Julia Ward Howe, Senator Sumner, the Hawthornes, etc. Contemporary admirers called him “unsurpassed genius,” “gentle scholar,” and
“facile princeps”
[Latin: “easily the first.”] among his brethren.” His huge studio on a nearby city street attracted every VIP, luminary, and other grandee touring Europe. Admirers called it, “a museum” and “an enchanted world.”
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