The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (20 page)

One spring day in 1867, Anne appeared in Rome. She and her life companion, Abby Manning, took an apartment and a hillside studio not far from Edmonia’s rooms on the Via Gregoriana.
[266]
Edmonia promptly invited them to visit her in the studio once graced by Hatty, Gibson, and, most notably, Canova.

Anne would barely rate mention by Tuckerman – not even a full sentence.
[267]
When she read the animated praise of Edmonia in the
Athenæum
and the
Art-Journal
the year before, she must have burned with envy. Visiting Edmonia’s celebrated studio, she smoldered with emotion that seethed between the lines of her letter home.
[268]
The place was beneath her standards. By her own account, she barely looked at Edmonia’s work, even when their conversation was interrupted. The best she could report was that she thought Edmonia’s work had improved and that Edmonia considered herself a success.

Edmonia’s critical and commercial triumphs continued to distance them. Six months later, Anne reported Edmonia’s studio moves with barbs of sarcasm and jokingly imagined Edmonia, as she gave her servants orders, an African princess
.
[269]

Seeking a place in society was not Anne’s problem. She and Abby enjoyed afternoons and evenings with Charlotte, Hatty, art historian James Jackson Jarves, the Alcotts and many others. She could afford to idealize Art and take her time. She earned little money from her art, would never speculate in marble without a customer, and, like Story, felt artists who earned their living with sculpture were unable let time prove their value.
[270]
In her letters, she referred to Edmonia by demeaning phrases and terms. No matter her politics of equality, she likely considered such language just compensation. The unschooled talent rated above her so unfairly.

She also griped that Edmonia would not follow her suggestion to make the rounds of sculptors’ studios to see what others were doing. Although she preferred to visit Story’s studio while Story was absent, she did not accept the same timidity in Edmonia. Not a word in her letters hints that she offered to explore the galleries together. Anne eventually decided that uninvited advice was not welcome.
[271]

For her part, Edmonia did not explain her strategy to an old mentor who now writhed in envy. Disclosing little, she skirted needless confrontations. Hardened at boarding schools and Boston, Edmonia did not seek close companionship from Anne and her peers. She repaid Anne’s
noblesse oblige
by tacitly forgiving insensitivity and maintaining her dignity. To this end, she endured rudeness and fostered good will where she could.

Shaking off the long nights of the 1867 winter, Charlotte rebounded with new ideas. She was inspired by the lonely bronze
Beethoven
that decorated the Music Hall in her native Boston. Done in 1855 by Thomas Crawford, it needed company.

With this in mind, she approached a struggling Dane who subsisted on the banks of the Tiber. She had admired his heroic busts of famous composers. She planned to supply plaster casts of the busts mounted on elaborate brackets. All she needed was the approval of the Music Hall and the ready participation of good friends in Rome.
[272]
The effort would help make the artist’s name.

She saw that Edmonia, too, needed help. The problems of
The Freed Woman
were omens of a dim future. In contrast, the romantic
Wooing of Hiawatha
had quickly won orders while still in clay. Contemporary admirers praised its authenticity.
[273]

Edmonia’s Indians, however, seem to conflict with independent observations. Not seated on the ground, their positions differ from customs reported by anthropologists.
[274]
Measurements and photos of full-blooded Chippewa in Minnesota found their faces were broader than Europeans, heads larger, jaws stronger, and foreheads all low with no loss of hair.
[275]

Yet, hadn’t the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Indians of her childhood interbred with Europeans for many generations?
[276]

To modern critics interested in the neoclassical style, Edmonia styled Minnehaha deliberately to look more like a Greek goddess in exotic costume than any Chippewa.
[277]

While her wealthy audience must have enjoyed seeing themselves in Indian costumes, we have no evidence that she was guided by anything but instinct and memory.

In Longfellow’s poem, the arrow maker was a member of the fierce Dacotah tribe and the father of Minnehaha. The presence of the carcass at their feet indicates Hiawatha’s offstage presence and honorable intent. The familiar words guided her vision. Minnehaha, “plaiting mats of flags and rushes,” and her father “making arrowheads of jasper” look up to see Hiawatha standing before them.

No one familiar with her childhood tales could doubt Edmonia herself once spent hours sitting with others, making souvenirs for sale, chatting and daydreaming, hoping the work would be interrupted.

She was thinking of a hunter,

From another tribe and country,

Young and tall and very handsome,

Who one morning, in the Spring-time,

Came to buy her father's arrows,

Sat and rested in the wigwam,

Lingered long about the doorway,

Looking back as he departed.

She had heard her father praise him,

Praise his courage and his wisdom;

Would he come again for arrows

To the Falls of Minnehaha?

On the mat her hands lay idle,

And her eyes were very dreamy.

Through their thoughts they heard a footstep,

Heard a rustling in the branches,

And with glowing cheek and forehead,

With the deer upon his shoulders,

Suddenly from out the woodlands

Hiawatha stood before them.

Straight the ancient Arrow-maker

Looked up gravely from his labor,

Laid aside the unfinished arrow,

Bade him enter at the doorway,

Saying, as he rose to meet him,

“Hiawatha, you are welcome!”

At the feet of Laughing Water

Hiawatha laid his burden,

Threw the red deer from his shoulders;

And the maiden looked up at him,

Looked up from her mat of rushes,

Said with gentle look and accent,

“You are welcome, Hiawatha!”

Charlotte was so enthused she offered to give it to America’s first YMCA, which was housed in Boston’s Tremont Temple.
[278]
She argued it would serve as an acknowledgement of talent in Edmonia’s race as much as a celebration of her progress.

To the modern reader, the generous offer would have seemed to languish. Even in Longfellow’s home territory – in the city where Edmonia first gained fame as an artist, where she could name many admirers and patrons – there was no prompt response. Beyond the slowness of sea-borne mails, part of the reason was red tape. Charlotte had addressed her offer to an executive of the Association no longer in office. Surely, discussions by volunteer leaders and committees caused further delay. They did not reply until the end of July.

Welcoming the offer, they promised, “we shall upon the arrival of your gift take more formal action in acceptance of the same and present the matter for the public attention.”
[279]

The Music Hall project went no more quickly.

By the time the acceptance reached Rome, the international set had fled to northern Italy and beyond. Charlotte and Emma had retreated to England. Anne and Abby were in Switzerland. Hatty had gone to Paris, thereafter to England where she encountered the beautiful, fabulously wealthy and widowed Louisa, Lady Ashburton, soon to become her greatest patron.

Mutually attracted and equally impulsive, Hatty and Louisa began a long and steamy love affair. One called the other “
sposa
” and herself “wedded wife.” Today, much of their correspondence appears to be sexual.

At some point, Louisa visited Edmonia’s studio in Rome where she, too, fell for
The Wooing
and promptly bought a copy.
[280]

Lost in the sprawl and echo of Canova’s old studios, Edmonia could not fill spaces extensive enough to accommodate a famous master, students, their production histories, and supplies of plaster, marble, and wet clay. Without a living celebrity, the location also lacked sizzle.

If Hatty had not taken her festive personality across the Via del Babuino, it would have been different. But she and Randolph Rogers held court a block away in a beehive of artists’ workshops, many up a flight or two.

The major retail foot traffic was there, hard by the steep rise of the Pincian Hill. Wealthy tourists parked their carriages on the “Street of Baboons” and strolled through Via Margutta, a sunny jug handle of studios, stables, and small apartments that graced the street with laundry strung like nautical banners.

Edmonia was in the other direction, lost in shadows behind a craggy old door on one of those little cross streets that Hawthorne had described as “an ugly and dirty little lane.”

Some time after May 1867, Edmonia opened shop at 57 Via della Frezza,
[281]
a similar street a few blocks south, where
Murray’s Handbook
(1867) and other writers found her. Around the corner from another Canova landmark
[282]
that Hawthorne had cited in the preface to
The Marble Faun,
it was further from the art hub of Via Margutta than her first studio.

Charlotte and Hatty should have continued to send tourists, but many probably lost their way. Other artists vented gloom at the mere mention of Edmonia’s name, as we describe in a later chapter.

Randolph Rogers took over the Canova space to create his colossal statue of Lincoln
[283]
while keeping his showcase on Via Margutta.

Edmonia soon moved again.

Figure 16. Via Margutta art district, including the Spanish Steps

Art buyers headed for Via Margutta, off Via del Babuino between Piazzas del Popolo and di Spagna. Hosmer’s showplace dominated the south side of the northern corner of Via Margutta. Edmonia got no nearer this center stage than Via della Fontanella, coded “6” on the map above. To the west of Corso, and four blocks south, is Via della Frezza. This detail, which comes from a map published in 1876 by Libreria di Spithöver, may also be found online at http://www.edmonialewis.com/via_margutta_art_district.htm.

Flourishing and fabulous, William Story had moved his large studio to the ancient Gardens of Sallust.
[284]
Located east of the Spanish Steps and less than a mile from Via Margutta, the site offered a rich classical history. It was where Aurelian and Nero feasted and where the head priest of ancient Rome buried vestal virgins alive.

Murray’s Handbook
(1867) hailed the spot for its “interesting objects” – ruins laid waste by the Goths, an ancient circus, and hints of history awaiting discovery beneath centuries of fertile soil. It was the source of fine archaeological treasures: a
Dying Gladiator
and a
Dying Niobid,
both of Greek marble, a pair of bronze ducks, three pink Aswan statues, the
Ludovisi Throne,
and the red granite Obelisk of the Trinità die Monte.

Hawthorne had once hunted for the Gardens in vain. The very next year, a German bookseller-turned-art collector turned up a torso of Venus. After that, the Gardens were easily found. What better setting for sculptors aspiring to the ancient essence?

The site also offered a robust but untapped retail traffic. It was the route favored by visitors heading from the railroad terminal to the studios of Via Margutta. The narrow Via di San Nicola da Tolentino descends steeply from the Gardens to the Piazza Barberini where Via Sistina leads directly to the Spanish Steps and the heart of the Via Margutta art district.

Flanked by green landscapes, artists’ studios began to stud the Via di San Nicola like gems on a Coronation crown. Foremost among them, at no. 14, Story’s sublimely large ‘museum,’ was open on Saturdays. Its receptions attracted European notables as well as rich Americans – even though the great artist might not be on hand to greet them. He soon moved to no. 2 at the top of the street, first in line to greet incoming crowds. Sculptor G. B. Simonds worked at no. 6. Across the street, the eminent German painter, Johann Friedrich
Overbeck,
and other artists had shops. Anne Whitney’s studio was also there, up one flight.

One day, painter Elihu Vedder would live there. By 1868, American portraitist G. P. A. Healy – who painted royalty, celebrities, and even Pope Pius IX – and English sculptor
Albert
Bruce-
Joy
worked in the narrow
vicolo
[lane] that crossed the Via di San Nicola at right angles and connected it with the unpaved Via di San Basilio where Stebbins and others had their studios. Leading British and Roman artists reigned in great showrooms near the Piazza Barberini below.