Hiram Powers

Compared to painting, sculpture was slow to blossom in America. This delay may be attributed to several factors: a lack of sophistication among patrons, the absence of talented artists, and dilemmas regarding materials and ultimate display. The earliest practitioners were woodcarvers, who often made figureheads for seafaring vessels or decorative details for buildings and furniture. Philadelphian William Rush is considered the first major American sculptor and he worked largely in wood. It was not until the 1830s, with the emergence of Horatio Greenough, Thomas Crawford, and Hiram Powers (1804–1873), that a true sculptural tradition began. Ironically, all three worked in Italy, employing superior Italian marble and skilled stone carvers. Together they created thoroughly Neo-classical sculpture.

Powers was born in rural Vermont, near Woodstock, but as a child moved with his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, a city of great wealth and cultural aspirations known as the “Queen City of the West.” After a series of odd jobs as a young teenager, at age eighteen Powers apprenticed at a clock and organ factory, a position that suited his innate mechanical abilities. In 1826 he joined the staff of the Western Museum, which featured curiosities and specimens, rocks and coins, an Egyptian mummy and life-sized wax figures of George Washington, Charlotte Corday, and Napoleon. Powers’s main responsibility was to mold these figures. He took lessons from Frederick Eckstein, a German sculptor and painter, and began to model busts of local citizens.

Around this same time, Powers met Nicholas Longworth, a real estate entrepreneur in Cincinnati, who by 1850 was one of the richest men in the country. Longworth was a great promoter of his city and an art patron; he commissioned Robert S. Duncanson to paint landscape murals for his house, which is now the Taft Museum. Longworth also supported Powers throughout his career, both financially and in an advisory capacity; he offered to underwrite a trip abroad for the young sculptor, who demurred, feeling he was unready for the challenge.

Instead, Powers went to Washington, DC, a decision that significantly enhanced his reputation and gained him new patrons. He was in the nation’s capital from late 1834 until late 1836, with several return trips home to Cincinnati and to Boston. He modeled a plaster bust of President Andrew Jackson, who declared: “Make me as I am, Mr. Powers, and be true to nature always, and in everything. It’s the only safe rule to follow. I have no desire to look young as long as I feel old.” The end result is an unidealized image of a craggy older man. Other prestigious sitters included John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams. Of all the contacts he made in Washington, the most momentous one was Senator William Preston of South Carolina; with his brother, John S. Preston, he enabled Powers to establish a studio in Italy. The latter was a liberal patron, who gave Powers one thousand dollars for three years with the following instruction: “Permit me to say that when in Europe, do not work for money, at least for several years.” [1]

In late 1837, Powers and his family arrived in Florence, never to return to the United States. He brought with him numerous plaster busts and soon after his arrival he arranged to have them translated into marble by Italian stone carvers. Even though Powers himself eventually learned to carve, he typically worked in clay first, and then allowed his assistants to make the plaster models and carve the final pieces. During the almost four decades that Powers spent in Florence, he lived and worked in three different locations, each one grander than the last. In addition to a large workshop and living quarters, Powers had his own private office, a garden, and a salon where he entertained and greeted Americans, English gentry, and the King of Prussia. The city sustained a lively community of expatriates, which included fellow sculptor Greenough, and poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Powers was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, which regularly met at his premises.

Like many American artists, Powers at first struggled to support himself, and he turned to portraiture for guaranteed income. However, his real ambition was to win government commissions and to create ideal figures. He did not succeed with the former, and never undertook a multi-figure group. Instead, he achieved both wealth and fame with a few single figures. The conception of Eve Tempted, 1839–1842, Smithsonian American Art Museum, dated to a childhood experience; he later told a cousin: “I used to see in my sleep, when a child, a white female figure across the [Ottauquechee] river, just below your father’s house. It stood upon a pillar, or pedestal, was naked and to my eyes very beautiful. But the water was between me and it, too deep to ford. I had a great desire to see it nearer … At that time I had no wakeful thought of sculpture, nor had I seen anything like it to excite such a dream.” [2]

The overt religious justification of Eve Tempted—the Mother of Mankind—does not apply to the controversial full-length nude figure of the Greek Slave, 1841–1843. The subject is a Christian woman—her chastity reinforced by the white marble—who is about to be sold into slavery by the Ottoman Turks during the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1832. Simultaneously, the statue alludes to American slavery, hence the chains, and efforts to abolish it, a position advocated by the sculptor. Through these dual interpretations, Powers hoped to appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Basing the pose on the famous Hellenistic statue, the Venus de’ Medici in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, he modeled the figure which eventually was carved into six full-length versions, at least two two-thirds life-sized statues, and over one hundred busts.

Greek Slave was first exhibited on a revolving pedestal in London in 1845, followed by an extended tour in the United States. It went to all the major eastern cities, where more than one hundred thousand people viewed it. Along the way, it generated controversy, because of its nudity and references to abolition, which in turn made it a financial success. It was shown at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition to great popular acclaim, but won only a second award, much to Powers’s disappointment. Noted critic Henry T. Tuckerman enthused over the Greek Slave, stating: “This beautiful female figure bears the emblem, yet wears not the subdued look of captivity; and, for that reason, vindicates its significance to imaginary sympathy—showing that Beauty is not only a Joy but a Power.” [3] Presumably the pun was intended.

Though Powers went on to create six more full-length statues, largely of ideal or allegorical subjects, he entered into a period of complacency. He supported himself through replicas and reduced versions of his most famous statues. Plagued by underachieving and troublesome sons, he turned more and more to his correspondence and his inventions, such as designing special marble-carving tools. When he died of heart failure aggravated by silicosis, a lung condition brought on by inhaling marble or plaster dust, his workshop was filled with plaster models and half-finished marbles. Many of these are now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, along with considerable correspondence and studio journals.

Notes:

[1] Jackson quoted in C. Edwards Lester, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici and of Our Own Times (New York, 1845), 66, quoted in Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont sculptor, 1805–1873 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 69, and Preston to Powers, June 27, 1837, Powers Papers, Smithsonian Institution, quoted in Wunder, Hiram Powers, 97.

[2] Powers to Dr. Thomas Powers, January 8, 1851, Powers Papers, Smithsonian Institution, quoted in Wunder, Hiram Powers, 181.

[3] Tuckerman, Book of Artists (1867, reprint, New York: James F. Carr, 1966), 285, quoted in Wunder, Hiram Powers, 265.