The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (30 page)

Mrs. Bullard cut the subscriber price and widened the editorial range, aiming to recapture northern readers with more fiction, reviews, and travelogues – and fewer quarrelsome editorials. With brief notes about Edmonia, she flagged the sale of
Hagar
in Chicago.
[448]
When she sailed for Europe in late November, she aimed to assess feminism abroad. High on her agenda was Edmonia’s studio.

Even at the height of the Civil War, some Union boosters preferred not to sing of John Brown, the radical martyr. Fitting new text to the rhythm of “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” Julia Ward Howe adopted the tune of the colored soldiers’ anthem to create the
Battle Hymn of the Republic.
She wrote a more religious theme: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The old “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” refrain worked fine with the new lyrics. Many northerners sang both with resolve and affection.

The story of the Union League Club of New York is less widely known. Founded in 1863, the Club aimed to support the Union and its army. Later it thrived on patriotic symbols, holding regular art exhibitions and commissioning artists. In 1870, it installed the large bronze
Lincoln
[449]
that stands vigil in New York’s Union Square.

About that time, the
Revolution
reported Edmonia had an order from the Club for a life-size statue of a seated John Brown.
[450]
This was her first full-length portrayal of the man. To the Club, John Brown was a hero to be revered. The
Woman’s Journal
added she would return with it in a few short months. Nearly two years later, newsmen noted the piece still in her studio along with a
Lincoln
for Central Park and a
Longfellow
for Yale.
[451]
Judging from the number of busts she would claim of “dear old” John Brown (nine), he was her most valued secular hero. She took her time. By Spring 1873, visitors to her studio made no mention of the large portrait.
[452]
Perhaps it was already crated for shipment.

Club records describe the statue as a gift from Edmonia.
[453]
The arrangement could have been similar to her other donations, such as the Madonna made for the church in Baltimore. Her labor and vision were donated. One or more members likely paid for marble, rough carving, and shipping. Such joint donations helped solve her need to connect. They also advanced her cause and brought her talent to public notice.

Sculptor J. Q. A. Ward, author of
The Freedman
and important public monuments, was on the Club’s art committee. He must have considered Edmonia’s work skilled and significant.

At the time of the commission, the
New York Times
covered the monthly art receptions run by the Club. The coverage faded after 1872, likely wilted by the death of publisher George P. Putnam, the Club’s art committee chairman for seven years, and a shift of art-interest to the new Metropolitan Museum. When she delivered the work (likely mid-1873), the media failed her. We could locate no further mention in the press, not even within the extensive reporting of a fire at the Club in 1875.
[454]

According to Club records, her statue rested under a grand staircase facing a large drawing room. The Club valued the work at $300 in 1881, at the time of its move to Fifth Avenue and 39th Street. About twenty years later, the Club sold or gave away much of its art collection. No account of the dispersal survived. In 1932, when the Club moved to its present location at 37
th
Street and Park Avenue, the pitiless comment, “Not Found,” appeared beside the Brown entry.

In January 1871, Edmonia returned to a Rome recovering from a flood. The mess gave her one more reason to be thankful she had moved to one of the famed hills. The foul waters of the Tiber had imperiled everyone with studios around the low-lying Via Margutta.
[455]
Months earlier, the army of Italian unification had invaded Rome and confined the Pope to the Vatican.
[456]
The Pope termed it “sacrilege” and the flood “divine retribution.” He never regained secular control. Rome soon modernized – many said for the worse.

Anne Whitney, who followed the military conflict as a sort of theatre, was more interested in Edmonia’s news from America. One tale held her interest above all: the dishy saga of Edmonia’s brother. More than a year earlier, he had been captivated by a live-in woman. A few months later, Anne had updated her sister with new details of Edmonia’s worries about not hearing from him.
[457]

Now freshly back from Chicago, Edmonia gave no further hint of shocking cohabitation. Meeting Anne on the street, she claimed she found her brother and said the reason that he could not write was that he had been shot in his hand.
[458]

A disappointed Anne sensed a cover-up. Learning of
Hagar’s
financial success, she also realized with some bitterness that Edmonia had kept the essence of her 1869 tour under wraps. Anne’s sculpture was not at all profitable.

***

As if to balance the allegorical weight of
Hagar,
Edmonia returned to Genesis to carve
Rebecca at the Well
in 1871 and
Rebekah
in 1880.
[459]
The discovery of Isaac’s future bride is a favorite subject of artists. It is not about slavery, struggle, and suffering but about the promise of remarkable beauty. Her story, however, is not without misery. She conceived rivalrous sons and, like Abraham, took sides with the second son against the first.

Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 validated backers of racial equality in the voting booth. Not realizing how new Jim Crow laws and customs would undermine their goals, they rejoiced with gatherings, resolutions, and parades across the nation. For editors and publishers, the news sparked reports that shed light on their values. In the context of women’s claims on suffrage, feminist Laura Bullard offered an historic admiration of Edmonia on page eight of the
Revolution
magazine.
[460]
Although we use quotations from this popular source elsewhere in our text, we offer it here complete.

Rome, Italy, Mar. 21, 1871. One of the first studios which we visited in Rome was that of Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor. We were interested in her even before we saw her; or any of her works; not only because of her sex; but of her race, and our acquaintance with her and her works has only heightened the interest which we felt in her.

The world has advanced in the route of progress, but it has not yet reached that point to which we hope a few more centuries will bring it: when a woman can enter upon any vocation, whether literary, artistic, mercantile, or mechanical, with the same freedom as a man, and find no greater obstacles in the way of her success than her brother has to encounter.

That equal start and fair chance in the race of life has not yet been given to woman. In her struggle to reach the goal of independence, she finds herself heavily weighed by her sex, and if, in addition to that burden, she has to bear also, like Edmonia Lewis, the prejudices felt against color and race, she needs a vast amount of enthusiasm and courage to venture into the field at all.

That enthusiasm and that courage Edmonia Lewis had, and the result has justified her dauntless faith in the power of a strong will and untiring patience to conquer all difficulties.

And if ever a woman had a rough path to tread in her road to success, that woman was Edmonia Lewis.

She is of mingled Indian and African descent. Her mother was one of the Chippewa tribe, and her father a full-blooded African. Both her parents died young, leaving the orphan girl and her only brother to be brought up by the Indians. Here, as may well be imagined, her opportunities for education were meager enough. On her first visit to Boston she saw a statue of Benjamin Franklin. It filled her with amazement and delight. She did not know by what name to call “the stone image,” but she felt within her the stir of new powers.

“I, too, can make a stone man,” she said to herself; and at once she went to visit Lloyd Garrison, and told him what she knew she could do, and asked him how she should set about doing it.

Struck by her enthusiasm, Garrison gave her a note of introduction to Brackett, the Boston sculptor, and after a little talk with her, Mr. Brackett gave her a piece of clay and mould of a human foot, as a study. “Go home and make that,” said he, “if there is anything in you it will come out.”

Alone in her own room, the young girl toiled over her clay, and when she had done her best, carried the result to her master. He looked at her model, broke it up and said, “Try again.”

She did try again, modelled feet and hands, and at last undertook a medallion of the head of John Brown, which was pronounced excellent.

The next essay was a bust of the young hero, Colonel Shaw, the first man who took the command of a colored regiment, and whose untimely and glorious death, and the epitaph spoken by the South, “Bury him with his niggers,” have made him an immortal name in the history of our civil war.

The family of this young hero heard of the bust which the colored girl was making as a labor of love, they came to see it and were delighted with the portrait which she had taken from a few poor photographs.

Of this bust she sold one hundred copies and with that money she set out for Europe, full of hope and courage.

“I thought I knew everything when I came to Rome,” she said naively, “but I soon found that I had everything to learn.”

At once she devoted herself to hard study and hard work, and here she made her first statue: a figure of Hagar in her despair. It is a work full of feeling, for as she says, “I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered. For this reason the Virgin Mary is very dear to me.” The first copy
[461]
was purchased by a gentleman from Chicago. A fine group of the Madonna with the infant Christ in her arms, and two adoring angels at her feet, attests to the sincerity of her admiration for the Jewish maiden.

This last group has been purchased by the young Marquis of Bute, Disraeli’s Lothair, for an altar piece.

Among Miss Lewis’ other works are two small groups, illustrating Longfellow’s poem of Hiawatha. Her first, “Hiawatha’s wooing,” represents Minnehaha seated making a pair of moccasins and Hiawatha by her side with a world of love and longing in his eyes.
[462]

In the “Marriage” they stand side by side with clasped hands. In both the Indian type of feature in carefully preserved and every detail of dress, &c. is true to nature: the sentiment is equal to the execution. They are charming bits, poetic, simple, and natural; and no happier illustrations of Longfellow’s most original poem were ever made than these by the Indian sculptor.

A fine bust, also, of this same poet is about to be put in marble, which has been ordered by Harvard College, and in this instance, at least, Harvard has done itself honor. If it will not yet open its doors to women who ask education at its hands, it will admit the work of a woman who has educated herself in her chosen department.

Miss Lewis has a fine medallion portrait of Wendell Phillips, a charming group of sleeping babies, and some other minor works in her studio.

She is just about finishing a commission which Dr. Harriet [
sic
, Harriot] K. Hunt, of Boston, has given her: a monument for her last resting place at Mount Auburn.

We have not yet seen this, but are told that it was Dr. Hunt’s own design: a life size statue of Hygeia, with various bas-reliefs on the pedestal.

Miss Lewis is one of the few sculptors whom no one charges with having assistance in her work. Everyone admits that, whether good or bad, her marbles are all her own.

So determined is she to avoid all occasion for distraction, that she even “puts up” her clay; a work purely mechanical, and one of great drudgery, which scarcely any male sculptor does for himself. It is a very hard and very fatiguing process, for it consists in the piling up masses of wet clay into a vague outline of a human figure, out of which the sculptor brings into form and beauty.

If Miss Lewis were not very strong she could not do this, and it seems to us an unnecessary expenditure of her physical powers.

Edmonia is below the medium height, her complexion and features betray her African origin; her hair is more of the Indian type, black, straight, and abundant. She wears a red cap in her studio, which is very picturesque and effective; her face is a bright, intelligent, and expressive one. Her manners are child-like, simple, and most winning and pleasing. She has the proud spirit of her Indian ancestor and if she has more of the African in her personal appearance, she has more of the Indian in her character.

She is one of the most interesting of our American women artists here and we are glad to know that she is fast winning fame and fortune. There is something in human nature, poor as it is, which makes everyone admire a brave and heroic spirit; and if people are not always ready to lend a helping hand to struggling genius, they are all eager to applaud when those struggles are crowned with success.

The hour for applause has come to Edmonia Lewis. All honor to the brave little African girl who has earned her own way to fame and independence.

Mrs. Bullard’s enthusiasm was so strong she added
Hiawatha’s Wedding
to her private collection – by 1880,
The Wooing
as well.
[463]
The article, which introduced the favorite quote, “I, too, can make a stone man,”
[464]
soon turned up on the front page of the
Washington (DC) New National Era,
edited by Frederick Douglass.
[465]
Praising Edmonia as “the young and gifted artist,” he hailed progress: “Surely the world moves.” Also bowing to her success, the
Atlanta Constitution
– in the heart of Dixie – and other publishers excerpted and plagiarized Mrs. Bullard’s rare impression of the artist at work, including its quaint puzzling over biracial blood.