The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (63 page)

[656]
See also Marcia M. Mathews,
Henry Ossawa Tanner
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969).

[657]
F. C. L., “Centennial.” Cf. Emma Lou Thornbrough, “American Negro Newspapers, 1880-1914,”
Business History Review
40, No. 4 (Winter, 1966): 467-490. The
New York (NY) Progressive American
newspaper was published in New York City 1871-1887.

[658]
William Peirce Randel,
Centennial: American life in 1876
(Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co. [1969]): 384-385: “reflecting the notion that art needed the guidance of the rich and the great, as if esthetic judgment grew with a man’s fortune.”

NOTES FOR 34. THE DEPARTURE OF EDMONIA LEWIS – 1877 to 1878

[659]
The Death of Cleopatra: A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis in Rome, Italy
( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878). Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale - Firenze. The compilation also included a poem, “Cleopatra Dying,” by Thomas S. Collier. Cf. W.L., “Thomas S. Collier,”
The Magazine of Poetry
II (1890), 37-38.

[660]
D. P. Seaton, “Travels in Rome,” ChRec, Mar. 28, 1878.

[661]
New York (NY) Age,
reprinted by H. R. Butler in “What the Negro is Doing,” AtlC, Oct. 30, 1898. The authors’ inquiries to the Archdioceses of New York, Albany, NY, and Newark, NJ,
Archivio Storico del Vicariato
, Rome, and a visit to the North American College in Rome did not locate this portrait. Cf. Pat McNamara, “Edmonia Lewis,”
Patheos, Catholic Portal,
Nov. 1, 2010, accessed July 28, 2011, http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Edmonia-Lewis-Artist-Woman-of-Color-Catholic?offset=1&max=1: “her bust of Cardinal John McCloskey, the Archbishop of New York from 1864 to 1885, may be found at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers.” Sr. Marguerita Smith, archivist, St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, Dec. 7, 2010, says there are no inscriptions whatsoever on the bust of Cardinal McCloskey attributed to Edmonia Lewis by Dr. McNamara. They have no records of its acquisition.

[662]
Indianapolis (IN) News,
Nov. 18, 1878. Cf. NYT, Affairs in Italy, “Dinner to Gen. Grant in Rome,” Mar. 26, 1878.

[663]
For example,
Waterloo (IA) Courier,
 “The Chicago Exposition,” Sept. 11, 1878: “Miss Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptress, has been induced to exhibit her most celebrated work, the colossal statue of ‘Cleopatra,’ so much admired by all connoisseurs at the Centennial exhibition.”

[664]
Chicago (IL) Daily Inter-Ocean,
“The Exposition,” Sept. 26, 1878: “Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor, who is exhibiting her “Cleopatra” and receiving any amount of rudeness and insult from boors who will not believe that such a beautiful creation could come from colored fingers. They should learn to think more of this article and less of the epidermis;” Moses (pseud.?), letter to the editor,
Chicago Daily Inter Ocean,
Sept. 27, 1878:

I was attending the Centennial Exposition one year and was engaged most of the time in the Memorial Hall. I then had the pleasure of seeing Miss Lewis’ ‘Cleopatra’ when it first was unveiled to the public as a piece of art but it having failed to impress the American people as a work of divine inspiration, a cry was soon heard of insults, personal abuse, yes, even to knock-downs, and instead of creating the sympathy intended, it only won disgust from the artists. The statue was condemned for is historical inaccuracy, for according to Roman history, Cleopatra died on a rug instead of sitting upright in the ‘old arm-chair.’

I have written this in a friendly spirit toward Miss Lewis, for I am a person who prefers a black skin to a black heart (that is borrowed from Emerson), but I think it poor revenge for an artist to be all the time accusing the American people of rudeness, ill manners, etc., etc., in order to cover up the defects of poor artistic abilities.

[665]
BDET, Sept. 16, 1878, etc.

[666]
DKJ, Oct. 21, 1878. This article was one of several that claimed Edmonia was born in Maine – confusing her with Mary Augusta Lewis who married Rev. Johnson, head of the Howard Orphanage, and
who
would welcome Edmonia to her home. See also
Bath (ME) Daily Times,
Sept. 20, 1873; DKJ, “A Famous Sculptress,” Jan. 5, 1905;
New York (NY) Age,
reprinted in H. R. Butler, “What the Negro is Doing, AtlC, Oct. 30, 1898, and excerpted
Southern Workman and Hampton School Record,
Dec. 1898, 253.

[667]
WoJ, Concerning Women, Oct. 12, 1878.

[668]
ChT, House of the Good Shepherd ad, Nov. 3, 1878. See also
Encyclopedia of Chicago,
s. v. “House of the Good Shepherd.”

[669]
Indianapolis (IN) News,
Nov. 18, 1878, Excerpted in WoJ, DKJ,
Boston (MA) Globe,
Emmetsburg (IA) Palo Alto Reporter, Bristol (PA) Bucks County Gazette, Placerville (CA) Mountain Democrat, Detroit (MI) Free Press
and perhaps other papers into 1879.
Indianapolis (IN) Sentinel,
Nov. 26, 1878, reported the presentation of the bust to Rev. Townsend. Francis C, Stout, historian, Bethel AME Church, Indianapolis, Nov. 9, 1998, indicated they have no record of the bust.

[670]
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852), chap. 20. Topsy, a wild, uncivilized slave girl, said, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” Edmonia also seemed to reflect Topsy in 1866, when she told the
Athenæum
interviewer, “[I] was declared to be wild – they could do nothing with me.”

[671]
ChT, Nov. 17, 1878.

[672]
ChT, obituary, May 22, 1879; ChT, May 24, 1879;
Chicago (IL) Times,
May 24, 1879; SFPaA, “Funeral of Hon. John Jones,” June
7
, 1879.

[673]
NYT, “Reception to Miss Edmonia Lewis,” Dec. 26, 1878;
New York
(NY)
Tribune,
“A Memorial Bust of John Brown,” Dec. 27, 1878;
Daily Witness
(Montreal, PQ
, Canada
), “Unveiling John Brown’s Bust,” Dec. 27, 1878;
Newark (NJ) Daily Advertiser,
Dec. 27, 1878; NYT, Dec. 29, 1878.

[674]
Henry Highland Garnet, Memorial Discourse. Address to the House of Representatives, Feb. 12, 1865, also called “Let the Monster Perish.”

[675]
NYT, Dec. 29, 1878, was reprinted in the
Burlington (IA) Hawk-Eye
and SFPaA; excerpted in
Springfield (MA) Daily Republican, Petersburg (VA) Index-Appeal, Titusville (PA) Morning Herald,
and WoJ.

[676]
In 1955, Rosa Parks set off a storm of protest when the police arrested her for refusing to obey Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, AL. Parks, who stood 5’
3” tall, claimed Native-American as well as African-American and white blood.

NOTES FOR EPILOGUE I – Post Scripts and Traces. 1. ISHKOODAH’ and EDMONIA

[677]
Basil H. Johnston, telephone, Jan. 28, 1991, suggested Edmonia’s Chippewa name was
Ishkoodah´
– a name later confirmed by Edmonia’s hand (Figure 47)
.

[678]
Daniel E. Moerman,
Native American Ethnobotany
(Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1998), 311-312; Frances Densmore, “Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians,”
Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 44
(1928), 222; Virgil J. Vogel,
American Indian Medicine
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 69. 

[679]
Daniel Wilson, “The Artistic Faculty in Aboriginal Races,” in
Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada
(Montreal, Dawson Bros., 1886), III 65-117. Wilson described Anne Whitney’s
Africa Awakening
and misattributed it to Edmonia. See also Payne MSS, 522.

[680]
Richard Rhodes, University of California, Berkeley, to author July 12, 2010.

[681]
E. M. Ruttenber,
Footprints of the Red Men. Indian Geographical Names
(n.p.: New York State Historical Association, 1906), 189-190. “The Delawares called them
Sankhikani
or ‘The fire-striking people.’”

[682]
Oberlin College.
Annual Catalogue … for the year 1861-62
(1861), 27, changed Edmonia’s entry from Mary E. Lewis to M. Edmonia Lewis; it was her third year. See also Child to Theodore Tilton, May 27, 1866, in
Selected Letters,
460-461.

[683]
U. S. census, 1850. Of twenty-three Edmonias marked “black,” “colored,” or “mulatto,” nearly all appeared in Virginia or Kentucky. Cf. U. S. census, 1860, shows the Highgate family in Syracuse, NY
.
See also Sterling,
We Are Your Sisters,
294-305. Edmonia Highgate was born in 1844 to Charles Highgate and his wife Sarah. She was principal of a colored school in Binghamton, NY, before becoming a teacher of freed slaves at the age of 20. After years of teaching and lecturing, she died in 1870.

NOTES FOR 2. ROME AND LA DOLCE VITA

[684]
Hawthorne,
The Marble Faun,
chap. XIV.

[685]
Story, referring to Canova's
Venus
in the Pitti Palace, Florence, quoted in Jan Seidler Ramirez, “The ‘Lovelorn Lady:’ A New Look at William Wetmore Story,”
American Art Journal
14 (1982): 32-41.

[686]
NYT, May 17, 1873. See also James,
William Wetmore Story,
II, 81-84.

[687]
John L. Idol, Jr., and S. Eisiminger, “Hawthorne Sits for a Bust by Maria Louisa Lander,”
Essex Institute Historical Collections
114 (1978): 207-212; Rubenstein,
American Women Sculptors,
63, 1858. See also SIRIS.

[688]
Hawthorne, Apr. 15, 1858, to William Ticknor, quoted in Idol and Eisiminger, “Hawthorne Sits for a Bust;” See also Carol Ticknor,
Hawthorne and His Publisher
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913), 214-215.

[689]
John Rogers, letter Dec. 14, 1858, quoted in Rubenstein,
American Women Sculptors,
59.

[690]
J. Hawthorne,
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,
II, 182-183.

[691]
Sherwood,
Hosmer,
213-215.

[692]
Sherwood,
Labor,
130.

[693]
Wikipedia
,
“Emma Stebbins,
”
accessed Nov. 11, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Stebbins. “According to Central Park historian Sara Cedar Miller, Emma Stebbins received the commission for the [Angel of the Waters, 1873] as a result of influence from her brother Henry, who at the time was president of the Central Park Board of Commissioners. Henry's motivation, Miller believes, may have been an unsuccessful attempt to induce her to return to New York and break up with Cushman, a relationship that to Henry was a source of embarrassing gossip in New York.”

[694]
J. Hawthorne,
Hawthorne and His Circle,
288.

[695]
Noted, for example, by Darlene Clark Hine,
Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History
(Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 45.

[696]
Sherwood,
Hosmer,
124; Culkin,
Hosmer,
37. Cf. Louisa May Alcott,
Diana & Persis,
ed. by Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Louisa May Alcott,
Journals
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 211-212. Alcott never finished
Diana & Persis.
One of its central characters is a sculptor who rejected her sexual nature in the pursuit of professional success. Louisa May Alcott never married.

[697]
ChT, “A Genial Gathering,” Aug. 20, 1873. See also ChT, Mar. 12, 1875, described Jones’s Ray Street home and history as he celebrated his 30th year in Chicago.

[698]
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, note 11; Sherwood,
Hosmer,
260.
C
f. Scott Trafton,
Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 165-168, 175, 179-180, etc., took an opposing view, that Edmonia was a lesbian, and then (306, note 173), lacking confirmation, complained of “closeting
.
” See also
New York (NY) Tribune,
“A Memorial Bust of John Brown,” Dec. 27, 1878, “She is small of stature, and modesty promoted her to sit on a front seat in the church, leaving the platform to her husband [
sic
!], to Dr. Garnet, the Rev. [J.] S. Atwell, who presided, and Charles Douglas[s], the son of Frederick Douglas[s] and ex-Consul to San Domingo.” This unique spousal reference was likely an error.