The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (48 page)

By 1905, Edmonia moved further west, to 4a Earl’s Court Road, Kensington. It is walking distance to Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A venerable Catholic Church, Our Lady of Victories, dominated the crossroads at Kensington High Street.

She made good friends there, in particular with the daughter of a German baker. A sign of failing health, she wrote her will, which called for a coffin of dark walnut and a service at Our Lady of Victories. She named a priest as her executor and main beneficiary. The huge Kensal Green Cemetery, which has a section for Roman Catholic burials, would be her last resting place.
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She restored “Mary” as her preferred name at some point, a token of retreat from her role as the famous “Edmonia.”

Other old friends and patrons were already gone. Amelia Edwards passed away in 1892. Henry Wreford also died that year in Capri. Lord Bute passed away in 1900. Another powerful English patron, former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, died in 1881. In America, Mrs. Chapman died in 1885, the Waterstons, Robert and Anna, passed away in 1893 and 1899, respectively.

The third Remond sister, Caroline Putnam, lived nearby in Kensington. She and Edmonia shared some history, and a continuing friendship would have been likely. Frederick Douglass’s Rome diary had noted Caroline at Palazzo Moroni. Her son’s wife managed the hotel at the time. Caroline had moved back to England and had become a British subject in 1889.
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In the neighborhood of Brook Green in the borough of Hammersmith, just west of Kensington on London’s agricultural outskirts, a colony of Catholics could have attracted Edmonia’s attention. They had a church, several schools, a convent of teaching sisters, and an almshouse. A mansion called Bute House stood nearby. Of most interest to Edmonia, given her history, would have been St. Mary’s orphanage for girls next to the large gothic church.

Edmonia took a room a few minutes away in a three-story Victorian brick house at 154 Blythe Road, one of a row that lined the sunny north side of the street. She boarded there, a mile and a half from her Kensington church, until, diagnosed with chronic Bright’s disease (of the kidneys), she fell into a coma and died.

Figure 51. Official death record, London, 17th Sept., 1907.

Deathly ill, she gave her name to hospital authorities as “Mary Lewis” and her age as “42 years.” The record – with understated age and omission of the unusual name connected with her celebrity – resulted in a mystery for over one hundred years. She was actually sixty-three years old.
The description of “Sculptural Artist” and other documentation leave no doubt this was our subject.
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Her death notice appeared in the Catholic weekly,
The Tablet
(Sept. 28, 1907, 488). Printed in a tiny font, and crowded into a page full of bold advertisements, it was as brief as it was humble:

LEWIS – On the 17th inst. at Hammersmith, Mary Edmonia Lewis, formerly of 7, Via Gregoriana, Rome. R.I.P.

The reference to Rome has meaning for Catholics, but it misleads as to her origin. Why was there no mention of her homeland? Her will and her death certificate noted she was a sculptor, but
The Tablet
did not. The omission saved a few pennies for her estate, the editors failed to recognize her fame, and the news of international interest stopped there.

In a clichéd paradox of celebrity, fame never changed her status as outsider. Thanks to political reversals in America, the mainstream press had dropped her decades before. Her self-exile cut off contact with fans. She turned her energies to private retirement and eventually died in near anonymity.

Her towering legacy stands in contrast to her humble end. She was as complex as she was tough. To achieve her patriotic goals, she embraced her outsider status early in life. As with so many details of her life and spirit, more clarification via letters and diaries evades us.

It is tempting to infer that she rejected her native land entirely. She became a Catholic, but she never became a British subject, as Caroline Remond Putnam did.

Six years before she died, a census taker wrote “India” in the “where born” space. Was it an error or a joke? To mislead a bureaucrat was one of the guilty pleasures she shared with Hosmer and other members of the sisterhood. When someone accepted her age plus two or three – or later less ten or twenty – she could smile a secret smile. It was customary. “Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age,” scolded Oscar Wilde’s arbiter of Victorian manners, Lady Bracknell.

Meanwhile, it is time for us to smile. We found her last days to be peaceful and prosperous. Let us celebrate the lasting triumphs that put her name on lists of heroes and her work in our major museums.

One visitor to the 1878 Chicago Exposition was an astute young gambler, complete with hard derby and mustache. Before he passed away in 1915, he would have a “remarkable” array of art in his mansion.
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John Condon was a poor lad who started out as a Shave-and-a-Haircut / Two-Bits barber in Logansport, Indiana. Tutored by professionals, he developed remarkable dexterity as a faro dealer, one of the most expert in the country. He never lost his nerve, even facing the best players.

Curious and irrational about luck, his gambler’s soul told him Egypt was his lucky star. Moreover, he lived in superstitious awe of ancient symbols. Edmonia’s colossal
Death of Cleopatra
had a special attraction for him. If it shocked others, it touched his inner child.

His skill at card games led him to leave sleepy Logansport for booming Chicago. There he owned a gambling house on Clark Street in the late 1870s. In the process of setting up, of learning who was who in the quick and easy lanes, he invested in race tracks and other gambling houses. One of them may have flaunted
The Death of Cleopatra
as an astonishing mark of conspicuous wealth and Old World elegance.

Condon also built the Harlem Racetrack at the site now occupied by Forest Park Mall in a suburb just west of Chicago. He reportedly made a million dollars in eighty-eight days during the 1897 season.

He was reportedly indifferent to the
sport
of racing and didn’t know a thoroughbred from a plow horse. However, at some point he became interested in a filly. Indeed, ‘enamored’ would be a more appropriate term. The horse was “Cleopatra.” Whether he named her or she already bore the name is unknown. Given gambling superstitions, he could have bought the horse
because
of her name.

To his great sorrow, she died. He buried her at Harlem Racetrack, right in front of the grandstand. He had Edmonia’s
Death of Cleopatra
mounted above the grave to impress racing fans with his broken heart. He was so grief-stricken he wanted to make sure the marble shrine remained in perpetuity. He put a covenant to that effect in the deed to the property.
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There it was, a blaze of white marble in the green infield as racing colors streaked past. After a while, few fans knew why it was there.

In 1910, when Illinois again made betting at tracks illegal, Condon converted the track into a golf course. Knowing that times change – and laws along with them, he left the grandstand and the statue in place. Golfers in baggy pants played around the statue as if it were a slow foursome. By this time, he had lost his sight and the press started calling him “Blind John.”

Condon died in 1915. The golf course was sold and the grandstand demolished, but
The Death of Cleopatra
stayed put. During World War II, a U.S. Navy torpedo plant occupied the site. Honoring Condon’s covenant, the owners left the statue untouched, more out of place than ever. After the war, military dwelling units surrounded the marble queen. It quickly became part of games played by officers’ children.
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In 1973, the post office set a bulk mail center there. No one remained to defend Condon’s shrine to a dead horse. The builder simply hauled the ton-and-a-half stone statue off to his storage yard. There it stood for years, a surreal contrast to steel debris.

One day a fire inspector, making a tour of the yard, discovered it. “The minute I saw her, I knew that statue was something beautiful. She was like a big white ghost lying out there between all that heavy machinery and crying out to be saved,” he told the
Chicago Tribune.
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He rallied his son’s Cub Scout troop to the rescue. Blessed by the yard’s owner, they moved the dirty, chipped marble out of the yard. They tried to remove grease and graffiti. When all else failed, they tried white paint. Despite the carved signature on its base, no one knew how to identify the work or the artist. Adams tried to interest local colleges in the statue without luck.

Finally, in 1987 the Forest Park Historical Society took over and began a new effort at restoration. Headed by Dr. Frank Orland, they moved it to the basement of a shopping mall to protect it. They verified Edmonia’s name carved in the base with the help of a University of Chicago Egyptologist.
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The staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art recalled a
New York Times
query about Edmonia Lewis by Marilyn Richardson. She went to Chicago where she announced the discovery.

James H. Ricau, Jr., whose passion for nineteenth-century sculpture was legendary, was among the first to recognize the value of Edmonia’s art. By the late 1970s, he owned several of her works –
Helen Ruthven Waterston
(then thought to be of Anna Quincy Waterston),
Poor Cupid,
the
Old Arrow Maker,
and a bust of a
Woman with plaited hair
(Figure 52; once thought to be Maria Weston Chapman).

A group of individuals bought them in order to donate them to a new museum honoring Frederick Douglass. Thus, as museums merged and reorganized, most of Ricau’s collection of Edmonia’s works eventually went to the national collection, now called the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Smithsonian added
Hagar,
a second
Old Arrow Maker,
and the copies of Michelangelo’s
Moses
and the Vatican’s
Young Octavian
. It is the largest collection of Edmonia Lewis’s work. The Ricau bust of a
Woman with plaited hair
went to the Harriet & Harmon Kelley Foundation for the Arts in San Antonio, TX. Other public collections are noted in Appendix A, below.

In 1995, the Smithsonian acquired and restored
The Death of Cleopatra.
The news made Edmonia’s dream a reality.
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The long-lost work could once again be seen by thousands of Americans. This rescue by ordinary people after more than one hundred years added to the legend. They only saw a thing of beauty that did not belong in the company of rusting hulks. Without them, the weather-scarred queen might have never again rivaled the coddled polish of Story’s African themes, the renowned
Libyan Sibyl
– now a few feet away – and his more literary
Cleopatra.

After the fall of Reconstruction, the rights of colored people suffered a backlash in Northern states, worse in the old South. Even at Oberlin College, white students refused to share their tables, Greek clubs denied admission, sports teams forced colored athletes to make their own travel arrangements, and a dean of women discouraged colored girls from living in the dorms.
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It is small consolation that such free-range bigotries also hurt many other minorities seeking the American dream.

The success of civil rights reforms in the 1960s reversed the tide. Edmonia’s work, ignored for decades, suddenly regained the spotlight. It took honors in the Bicentennial Freedom Train’s celebration as well as in fresh appreciations of African Americans’ contributions to society in exhibits, textbooks, educational programs, and the media.

One hundred and forty years after driving her out, Oberlin College celebrated Edmonia as one of its own. In 2001, Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum borrowed
The Death of Cleopatra
and exhibited it with great pride. A center honoring Edmonia Lewis serves modern outsiders – those oppressed because of their “sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ability, size, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and language.”
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Private collectors of her work include a number of successful professionals and celebrities, such as financier Eddie C. Brown, Camille and Bill Cosby
, Walter O. Evans, MD, Harmon and Harriet Kelley, and George Wein. Starting in the late 1970s, Dr. Evans accumulated a fabulous array of important African-American fine art.
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He later donated most of it, including an early copy of the
Wooing of Hiawatha
(1866), to the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art.

The significance of Edmonia’s life and work prompted art historian David C. Driskell of the University of Maryland, College Park, to call her “the only African-American artist of the period who left a body of work worthy of review.”
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Barbara Chase-Riboud, an artist who lived in Paris since 1961, pointed to Edmonia’s life as symbolic of every issue confronting today’s African-American artists.
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Feminist critic bell hooks called her an inspiration.
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Sculptor Denise Ward Brown eulogized her in 2009, acknowledging the ground-breaking history that encouraged her career and that of other minority artists.
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