William Rimmer

William Rimmer (1816–1879) was a man of many talents—a self-trained physician, lithographer, sculptor, painter, and teacher. Rimmer’s work reflects his fascination with the human form and affirms his reputation as the finest anatomical draughtsman of his era. [1] Although he rejected the idealized models of neoclassicism to explore more realistic depictions of the human figure, he turned to the classical past to explore allegorical themes of heroic struggle. Rimmer’s art stands as a testament to his skill and dedication as well as his personal eccentricities.

Rimmer’s father Thomas believed he was the lost Dauphin of France, the youngest son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and heir to the throne—a claim that has never been successfully proven. At the height of the Reign of Terror, the infant Thomas was sent from France to England where he received an education fit for a king from his adoptive family, the Rimmers. He served as an officer in the British army, but after the defeat of Napoleon he was passed over as king of France in favor of his uncle. Fearing for his safety and having fallen in love with an Irish maid, he fled for America shortly after William’s birth in Liverpool in 1816. The wealth and privilege Thomas had enjoyed in England did not follow him to America. He struggled to support the family as a cobbler, and despite limited means was able to provide his children with an education similar to his own in England. They were taught music, painting, Latin, French, and mathematics. Over the years Thomas grew increasingly paranoid and eventually lost his mind to alcoholism. William was forced to take up menial jobs to support his mother and siblings, but soon moved on to create a successful career for himself. [1]

The young William was apprenticed as a lithographer and typesetter at T. Moore’s shop in Boston where he learned basic drawing skills. After marrying Mary Peabody, a Quaker, in 1840, the self-taught Rimmer, like many aspiring artists of his day, worked as an itinerate portraitist for a short time. His obsessive interest in anatomy led him to pursue the study of medicine. In 1855 he received a license from the Suffolk Medical Society and began to work as a physician. During this period, he pursued painting and sculpture, but found that critics were unreceptive, perhaps because they considered him a hobbyist due to his career in medicine. Rimmer decided to devote himself full-time to the pursuit of his art and soon found high praise for his impressive sculptures and oil paintings. He is credited with creating the first nude sculpture in America, Seated Man, and his1877 publication, Art Anatomy, was the manual used by artists well into the twentieth century.

Rimmer often found inspiration in the ancient and classical worlds and explored themes of struggle and defeat in his paintings. Lincoln Kirstein, a founder of the New York City Ballet along with George Balanchine, admired Rimmer’s work, wrote about it on several occasions, and, in the 1940s, owned Reynolda House’s Lion in the Arena. Seeing a connection between Rimmer’s personal history and his subject matter, Kirstein proposed that, “inspired by the tales his father had told him, Rimmer's imagination seems always to have teemed with equestrian battles, wild charges, the rush of banners, armies sweeping up dizzy parapets, the fall of angels, the thunder of demon wings.” [3]

While his work was generally well received, Rimmer’s testy personality prevented any widespread success, as indicated by one contemporary description: “He was stubborn and unmanageable. In spite of the unartistic condition of things around him, he was his own worst enemy. He expected princes and kings to come to him. … Poverty and neglect not only depressed him, but stopped his art. Even when he had a chance, he failed to do his best.” [4] Teaching became his primary means of support and throughout the 1860s he taught at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Harvard University, the National Academy of Design and the Cooper Union, among other prominent institutions. His students included such important figures of American art as Daniel Chester French, John La Farge, and William Morris Hunt. An obituary notice in the American Art Review reveals Rimmer’s important contributions to the training of American artists: “His profound knowledge of anatomy, coupled with his great artistic talent, fitted him to render the most important services to art education, and we may long wait before we can hope to fill the place which he has left vacant.” [4]

Notes:

[1] Charles C. Eldredge, Barbara Babcock Millhouse, and Robert G. Workman, American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House, Museum of American Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990): 80.

[2] Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 129; and Jeffrey Weidman, and Neil Harris, William Rimmer, A Yankee Michelangelo (Hanover, NH: Distributed for the Brockton Art Museum/Fuller Memorial by University Press of New England, 1985): 3–5.

[3] Lincoln Kirstein, “William Rimmer: His Life and Art.” The Massachusetts Review 2, no. 4 (Summer 1961): 691.

[4] Anonymous quoted in Truman Howe Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer, Sculptor, Painter, and Physician (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881. Reprint, New York: Kennedy Graphics, 1970): 27, 96,128,137.

[5] “American Art Chronicle.” The American Art Review 1, no. 2 (December 1879): 87.