The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (62 page)

[596]
Thorp,
The Literary Sculptors,
93.

[597]
Unless indicated otherwise, references to the Richard Allen monument appear in the following sources: ChRec, “The Allen Monument,” Nov. 12, 1874; Apr. 13, 1876; June 29, 1876; ChRec, Brevities, May 11, 1876; Andrew J. Chambers, letters to the editor, “Allen Monument,” ChRec, June 29, 1876 and Sept. 7, 1876;
Philadelphia (PA) Press,
May 15, 1876; June 12, 1876; June 13, 1876 and Sept. 23, 1876, quoted in Kachun (below); ChRec, “Destruction of the Allen Monument,” Oct. 5, 1876; ChRec, “Bishop Allen Monument,” Nov. 9, 1876;
Mitch
Kachun, “Before the Eyes of All Nations,”
Pennsylvania History
65 (Summer 1998): 300-323; “Historic Bust of Richard Allen Returns to Phila.,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
June 11, 2010, accessed Oct. 8, 2010, http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20100611_Historic_bust_of_Richard_Allen_returns_to_Phila_.html
.

[598]
Mary Sayre Haverstock, et al.,
Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900: A Biographical Dictionary
(Oberlin OH: Oberlin College Library, 2000); 1870 U.S. census;
History Of Cincinnati And Hamilton County
(Cincinnati OH: S. B. Nelson & Co., 1894): 908-909.

[599]
Kachun, op. cit., esp. 315. See also Gary B. Nash,
First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory
(Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 268; Richard S. Newman,
Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
(New York: NYU Press, 2008), 293.

[600]
Susanna W. Gold, Temple University, Feb. 1, 2011.

[601]
USCC, dept. IV, 148.

[602]
ChRec, “Allen Monument,” June 29, 1876; ChRec, “Allen Monument a Success,” September 7, 1876.

[603]
ChRec, “Allen’s Monument,” October 26, 1876.

[604]
Melba Joyce Boyd,
Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994): 228-229; Kathleen Ann Clark,
Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South 1865-1923
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 122-123.

[605]
Salisbury,
op. cit.

[606]
ChRec, Oct. 5, 1876. Cf. Nelson,
The Color of Stone,
57.

[607]
NYT, Dec. 29, 1878.

[608]
The building survives in Fairmont Park as the Please Touch Museum.

[609]
(Robert M. Douglass, Jr.), “Centennial Exhibition, by RD” ChRec, Sept. 28, 1876.
Cf. USCC, dept. IV, 118.

[610]
USCC, dept. I
V
, 91: “63 Pezzicar, F[rancesco]., Trieste, The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863 (statue in bronze).”

[611]
William Dean Howells, “Sennight at the Centennial,” AtM, July 1876.

[612]
NYT, “Bronze Statue of a Slave,” May 25, 1876.

[613]
R. D. Dove, “Centennial Exhibition,” ChRec, Oct. 12, 1876
.

[614]
New York (NY) Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
Aug. 5, 1876. Printers still generally relied on engravings
until the 1890s
although
the
half-tone screen
technique of rendering photos
had been introduced
in
1873.

[615]
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Hiawatha,
modeled 1871-1872, carved 1874, accessed July 28, 2011, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2001.641
.

[616]
Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Reminiscences
(New York: Century Co., 1913), I, 107-113.

[617]
Story, Medea, 1866. Marble, 76¼ in.

[618]
Semiramus was an Assyrian queen whose legends involve lust, suicide, and unrequited love.

[619]
Thorp,
The Literary Sculptors,
174, indicates they were there. They do not appear in USCC. Edward Strahan [pseud., Earl Shinn],
Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition
(Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1876-1878): Vol. 1, 214-217, accessed Nov. 24, 2010, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.MastCent01, mentions these three works only in passing while confirming the appearance of
Medea
and
Beethoven.

[620]
Cooper,
Vinnie Ream,
207-209.

[621]
Gay, “Edmonia Lewis;” USCC, dept. I
V
, 52, 59: Memorial Hall, Gallery K. No. 1231,
Death of Cleopatra.
Her other pieces were relegated to the interior of the Annex, Gallery no. 20: No. 1409,
Asleep, Hiawatha’s Marriage, Old Arrow Maker and His Daughter,
and terra-cotta colored busts of
Longfellow, Sumner,
and
John Brown.

[622]
Rydell,
All the World’s a Fair,
14.

[623]
Newport (RI) Daily News,
Sept. 19, 1878, 4: “At the Centennial she was insulted and struck because she was a negress claiming to have done the works she did;” BDET, Art and Artists, Sept. 16, 1878, 6;
Atchison (KS) Globe,
Oct. 8, 1878, 1; DKJ, “Miss Edmonia Lewis,” Oct. 21, 1878, 3.

[624]
HELBAA. A final paragraph added to the 1876 edition reads, “Her last great work, a Colossal statue, the Death of Cleopatra, can be seen in Memorial Hall.” Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

[625]
Alexandria (VA) People’s Advocate,
July 1876, 3. quoted by Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis’ The Death of Cleopatra. Myth and Identity,”
International Review of African American Art
12, no. 2 (1995): 36–52. Guarnerio illustrated a small boy in a nightshirt resentfully saying bedtime prayers; it won several prizes in Europe. Cf. Christie’s “Sale 8272, lot 79,” Sept. 14, 1995, accessed May 11, 2012, http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=330332.

 
[626]
James Henry Haseltine and Italian sculptor Enrico Braga also entered Cleopatras; an animated Cleopatra of wax appeared in the Annex. English painter V. C. Prinsip entered a
Death of Cleopatra
in oil.

[627]
S. P. Leggett, “Woman at the Central Exhibition--- V.”
Albany (NY) Sunday Press,
Jan. 21, 1877 reprinted in
The Death of Cleopatra: A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis
( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878), 49-52. Biblioteca nazionale centrale – Firenze.

[628]
Boston (MA) Daily Traveller,
Nov. 17, 1880.

[629]
Although we found no record of her brother’s travel to Philadelphia, 1876 was probably the last time they met. His memoir in Leeson,
History of Montana,
1141, reported he had not “been three miles from the city of Bozeman for the past seven years.” A “Publishers’ note” disclosed the research had been collected in late 1883. Based on this date, the last time he ventured more than 3 miles from Bozeman was 1876. This would encourage beliefs that Samuel traveled to meet Edmonia in 1870 in Chicago (as indicated by Whitney, Jan. 14, 1871), in 1873 in California, in 1875 when she disappeared from St. Paul, and finally in 1876 in Philadelphia. Montana area newspapers reported on Edmonia after the Centennial.

[630]
Gay, “Edmonia Lewis.” See also Stylus (pseud.), “Philadelphia Letter,” SFPaA, Aug. 5, 1876.

[631]
John Thomas Dale,
What Ben Beverly Saw at the Great Exposition
(Chicago: Centennial Publishing Co., 1876): 187-188.

[632]
Gay, “Edmonia Lewis.”

[633]
SFPaA, Aug. 26, 1876, p. 1.

[634]
Maquoketa (IA) Jackson Sentinel,
Miscellaneous, Mar. 28, 1889, 6; reprinted
Waterloo (IA) Courier.

[635]
1860 census: William W. Wright (ca. 1814-?) “horticulturalist.”

[636]
Albert Alan Wright (1846-1905), class of 1865, became Professor of Geology and Zoology at Oberlin College.

[637]
Wright to his wife Oct. 15, 1876. Oberlin College Archives, A. A. Wright papers, Box 1.

[638]
Oberlin Review,
Nov. 8, 1876.

[639]
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
(New York, Random House, 1952).

[640]
Henry McNeal Turner, “To Colored People,” AtlC, Jan. 13, 1895, 3.

[641]
United States Centennial Commission,
International Exhibition 1876,
(Philadelphia, Lippencott, 1877). s.v. “Painting and Sculpture,” by John F. Weir; “Reports on Awards, Group XXVII,” no. 144-186.

[642]
The Centennial recognized Palmer’s portrait of Robert Livingston, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.

[643]
Certificates went to Isabella Gifford of Syracuse, NY, who studied in Florence, Italy, and Montague Handley, an American living in Rome.

[644]
A.C.A.P., “Notes from Philadelphia,”
Athenæum
2546, Aug. 12, 1876, 208-209.

[645]
Daily-News,
(London, England), “September 1876,” reprinted in
The Death of Cleopatra : A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis in Rome, Italy
( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878), 53-54. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale- Firenze.

[646]
J. S. Ingram,
Centennial Exposition
,
372. Apparently, Ingram interpreted Cleopatra’s large nose as Jewish stereotype.

[647]
Clark,
Great American Sculptures,
141-142. Gould did not enter his earlier dying
Cleopatra
(1873) at the Centennial. If he had, Edmonia’s detractors could have matched them like a pair of colossal bookends and accused her of plagiarism. He presented the queen in similar size, pose, dress, and throne, right breast also bared. Close up, one sees considerable differences in detail. We found no indication that one influenced the other. Richardson, “Death,” suggested Edmonia and others followed a concept well established by Canova. See also Buick,
Child of the Fire,
190-200 for more comparisons with Gould.

[648]
Clark, op. cit., 88.

[649]
Taft,
History,
153.

[650]
Judith Wilson, “Hagar’s Daughters,”
Bearing Witness
(New York: Spelman College and Rizzoli International, 1996): 103. See also Charmaine A. Nelson, “Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra,” in
Local / Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century
(Aldershot, Hants., UK: Ashgate, 2006): 223-244; Lisa E. Farrington,
Creating Their Own Image
(New York, Oxford University Press, 2005): 62-63.

[651]
Foner,
Reconstruction,
437, 570-572, re Colfax, cites Congress, 2nd session, Senate Miscellaneous Document 48, 1:34-35, 48, 73, 2:207; and Memoirs of Reconstruction, MSS, Matthew C. Butler papers, Duke University. For Hamburg, Dee Brown,
Year of the Century, 1876
(New York: Scribners, 1966): 267-83; Joel Williamson,
After Slavery in South Carolina during Reconstruction
(Chapel Hill, 1965).

[652]
ChRec, Jan. 22, 1874; Mar. 5, 1874; July 9, 1876. As an AME pastor, B. W. Arnett served in Toledo, Cincinnati, and Columbus; he became the first colored man named as foreman of an otherwise white jury, and he was elected to the Ohio State Legislature from a district with a white majority where he authored the bill that repealed the Black Laws of Ohio.

[653]
(Robert M. Douglass, Jr.
)
, “Centennial Exhibition,”
by R.D.,
ChRec, Sept. 28, 1876.

[654]
Sampson, “Doing the Centennial.” Sampson mistook the John Brown bust for Joshua Reed Giddings, a leading bearded abolitionist Congressman.

[655]
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Philadelphia Negro
(1899), 392. Du Bois also observed (p. 177), “[members of the emerging Philadelphia black middle class] shrink from all such display and publicity as will expose them to the veiled insult and depreciation which the masses suffer. Consequently this class, which ought to lead, refuses to head any race movement on the plea that thus they draw the very color line against which they protest.”