The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (45 page)

As Reconstruction wound down, Congress ended the Federal protection of former slaves. Soon, Jim Crow partitions, along with poll taxes, literacy tests, and cruel injustice, ruled in the South –
de facto
segregation in the North. In northern cities with a southern trade, once-warm welcomes for colored patrons vanished.

By 1880, Edmonia and her American campaign were equally done. Curiosity had given way to boredom with her biracial talent. Moreover, the style she had mastered was in
rigor mortis.
Excitement about Rodin and realism in Paris made Rome and the Greek revival passé.

Aging and facing the ebbs of social reform and artistic interest, she must have rethought her life and her marathon touring. She had won credit for her talent on behalf of all colored people. Was that not enough? Was it not irreversible? She once expressed her code to the
Daily Graphic:
“when I claim my work before the world, if it is not a success, I shall bow before the public verdict.” At the end of her 1879 tour, she sailed away with little fanfare.
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An important interview published in 1880 belittled her while trying to disguise the writer’s frustration with her success. Oddly, Edmonia had given it before she sailed, but it was not released for a year.

It opened with a recall of her arrival in Boston and her association with Brackett (misspelled “Becket”). While sniffing at her gifts and her important works, it dwelled on her unusual blood, religion, and rebel personality as it overstated her age:

The life of Edmonia Lewis is a curious story. She is of mixed African and Indian blood, her father being a negro, her mother an Indian squaw of the Chippewa tribe in New York, in which state she was born near Albany, somewhere about 1840. Of her parents she remembers very little. They died in her childhood and she lived and roamed [with] the tribe until she was fifteen when, by the assistance of her brother, she went to Oberlin, Ohio, to attend school. Before this, by one of those strange idiosyncrasies that made up her character, she had become a Catholic, and the religious atmosphere was not congenial to her.

Miss Lewis is by nature very strongly imitative, with a veining of artistic perceptions and strongly tinctured with art feeling. It is not in a marked degree an intellectual nature, although her natural abilities are good.
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Here and there, to disarm the reader, the writer mentioned famous patrons and mentors, or added faint praise such as, “There is a pleasing lack of self-consciousness about her, and her manner is very amiable and pleasing.” Conceding her gifts required the author to make excuses about how underclass origins and blood tarnished her character and work.

It is easy to see how, with just this combination of mental qualities, she would not take kindly to the rather stern intellectual atmosphere that characterizes Oberlin. The freedom of the Indian nature rebelled against the right angled methods of discipline; the imitative and color-loving African tastes demanded somewhat more of activity of form and outline….

Without a master she commenced work. From childhood she always had wonderful power with her hands, in shaping anything she touched. It began with beads and wampum, and her modeling was therefore instinctive, an inner force that wrought outward. There is not that finish and rare delicacy about her work that characterizes genius, but it is a high order of talent….

While Miss Lewis is yet to a marked degree an unplaced sculptor, it is sure that she will take creditable rank. The higher meanings of art do not appear to be interpreted by her, for particularly to the creations in marble, must the place in art be determined by ideal excellence. Sculpture can not depend upon accessories. The limitation of its material isolates it from all other arts. Its true place is to immortalize for us types of humanity and the epochs of life….

While she has not a sufficiently marked development of the purely ideal and spiritual nature to carry her to the attainments of genius, she has the artistic temperament and patience and unwearied devotion to her work which mark the true artist.
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It seems Edmonia pierced the façade of Victorian manners to detect arrogance toward the pope and her religion. When confronting the racist editor of the
Daily Graphic
six years earlier, she had offset his tilt by bragging and dropping names. Now she rose up again to boast – a detail that sets this interview apart – that the late pope “visited her studio and blessed a work upon which she was engaged.” Two years earlier, she had claimed only a blessing, likely in a general audience.
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This new declaration that the Vatican (which keeps detailed records of the Pope’s meetings) could not confirm, was clearly inflated.

The writer seems to settle scores by calling Edmonia “unplaced” and describing her at first as years older than she ever claimed to be. A second reference to her age conflicts with the first. The error suggests neurotic confusion, a careless editor, and perhaps a second writer.
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The Boston imprint, haughty tone, and a quaint embrace of bygone neoclassical ideals are suggestive of Maria Child’s fierce attacks a decade earlier. Many details (even typos) appear cribbed from the 1879
New York Times
piece.

That the essay was not published for many months after Edmonia’s final tour begs the question of who wrote it. Did Mrs. Child (who died ten months after Edmonia sailed
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and a month before the interview appeared) or Anne Whitney have a hand in writing it?

Unquenchable feelings of superiority and frustration had filled the hearts of Maria Child, Anne Whitney, and others no matter the opinions of art critics, aristocratic patrons, and the public. Child was the first to celebrate the “colored sculptor,” a feather in her liberty cap. When her dream took on a life of its own with a spirited independence, the story could no longer be about her, her lofty ideals, and her radical ideas. Anne, too, had selflessly mentored the “queer little creature,” only to find her own name eclipsed in the press.

Child’s curses echoed through her friends, perhaps even making it difficult for Edmonia to collect debts from Boston clients like Dio Lewis and the Minns family. Her
Letters
were selected, edited, and published by fellow reformer Wendell Phillips and Harriet Sewall.
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Not surprisingly, they excluded any mention of Edmonia while praising Harriet Hosmer and Anne Whitney.

Phillips, thanks to Mrs. Child, had been one of Edmonia’s first subjects for a medallion and a bust.
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When he died four years after Child, the
Hartford Courant
reported the following slap: “The proposal to erect a statue to his memory has been abandoned at Mrs. Phillips’s request. Mr. Phillips had a poor opinion of American sculptors of his own race, and there is no colored sculptor who would be likely to satisfy the artistic sense of his more appreciative admirers.”
[742]

The comment could have referred only to Edmonia.

After several years of media silence, the
Baltimore Sun
reported on Edmonia in early 1883. It announced her bas-relief in white marble would be unveiled during Easter week at the Protestant Episcopal Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin on Orchard Street. Describing it as the adoration of the Magi at Bethlehem, the
Sun
provided the following details:

The Virgin Mary and the child Jesus are the central figures with Joseph to the left and the three Kings kneeling on the right. In accordance with tradition, one of the Kings is represented as a Caucasian, another as an Asiatic and the third as an African. As a compliment to the race worshiping in the church for which the piece is intended, the African King is given the greatest prominence.
[743]

It added that the work suffered delays in completion due to faults in marble blocks. Installation was further delayed as debts took priority for church funds.

Rev. Calbraith Perry recalled meeting Edmonia at the Centennial. When he told her about the new building, she at once came up with the idea for a gift.

Unlike tax policies of today, tariffs (or duties) on imports financed most government spending while protecting domestic industry from foreign competition. (There was no income tax.) In 1883, the U. S. Congress suddenly spiked the tax on foreign art to thirty percent.
[746]

The impact was dramatic. The value of art imports fell nearly eighty percent. Europeans fumed at the loss of sales to Americans. They threatened to retaliate with duties on American artists, whether they worked in the Old World or New. They sought nothing less than
free
commerce in art across the Atlantic, in harmony with tariffs on the Continent. American artists and collectors fumed along with them.

William Story sprang into action. He revived rusty legal skills and political connections to briskly oppose the tax. Mounting his new cause, he kicked off a campaign that would run for decades.

Declaring, “Art is a free field to which all competitors should be admitted on equal terms,” his first petition made news.
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He criticized the tariffs as unjust, illiberal, and impolitic, “unbecoming the free spirit of a great nation … injurious to the development of art in our own country.” As a famous artist and author, he could proclaim with certainty, “The productions of the master of the past and the present are to the artist what the great works of literature are to the scholar.” He appealed to national pride: “What our country requires is not protection … but rather the establishment of a national department for art and a great national museum.” At one point he added that high tariffs favored cheaper items – “the refuse of foreign studios”
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– that discouraged the private acquisition of works of high quality.

Nothing like new taxes makes comrades of old rivals. Hat in hand, Story asked the American artists of Rome for their help, deploying charm few could muster. One suspects he personally poured the tea or wine brought by servants to his palazzo drawing room. More than thirty artists, many of whom he had snubbed for years, signed his petitions. Many were quite famous:

Dwight Benton, who edited the
Roman World
and specialized in painting souvenirs of the Protestant Cemetery;

Moses Ezekiel, whose
Religious Liberty
was commissioned for the 1876 Centennial;

James E. Freeman, whose painting the
Savoyard Boy
hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum;

Richard S. Greenough, whose bronze
Benjamin Franklin
fascinated Edmonia in her youth;

Albert E. Harnisch, whose equestrian
Robert E. Lee
can be seen in Richmond;

Chauncey Bradley Ives, whose
Roger Sherman
stands in Statuary Hall;

Randolph Rogers, noted for the bronze doors he made for the Capitol and for his
Nydia,
which he reproduced 100 times;

Franklin Simmons, who produced
George Washington
for Valley Forge and
Roger Williams
for Statuary Hall;

Elihu Vedder, known for his devotion to beauty and art as an end in itself, whose painting
Roman Girls on the Seashore
would hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

William Story invited Edmonia to add her name to the signatures of artists who had slighted and slandered her since her arrival. She could have said no. But it seems more likely she rejoiced that Story and the rest acknowledged her as a valued American member of Rome’s arts colony. The document appeared in newspapers, books, and Congressional papers. Nowhere was the usual reference to her color, mixed blood, or sex.
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The words were probably not missed by most readers, but Edmonia must have noted it with satisfaction.

When Story was done with his first petition, he started over, consulting friends, writing letters, and twice more launching the petition for more rounds of signatures.

William Story’s behavior had veered but not his heart. He had called on her only to bolster his cause. Ten years later, he died and now lies under his own personal, marble mourner,
The Angel of Grief.
His biography by Henry James, commissioned by his heirs, made clear his low opinion of artists and the Cushman crowd, lower yet of Edmonia – not even mentioned by name. It is doubtful Story ever sponsored her or made her a regular at his soirées, as some twentieth century rumors would have one believe.

The debate over tariffs, by the way, dragged on for long after Story’s death. Some people had imported lead statues of Venus and Mercury as art only to melt them down and avoid higher duties on metal.

In the end, the artists won. In their petitions, they had claimed harm to American museums. Collectors, backed by museums, adopted this tactic in earnest, eventually with success. J. P. Morgan and other rich Americans bought European art worth millions of dollars and just stored it abroad.

Word of the private embargo sharpened Congressional focus on the ill effects of the tax. Noting that great museums depend on bequests and donations for the bulk of their collections, the argument supporting free art for the people discredited any complaint of tax credits for the rich and threats of second-rate artistry.

Today, works of art, collectors’ pieces, and antiques, with some exceptions (such as mass-produced castings), pass United States Customs duty-free.

Weeksville started as a settlement of freed slaves in Brooklyn, New York.
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Before the Civil War, its people served the Underground Railroad. When the draft rioters crossed the East River, these freedmen defended their homes. Then they set up the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum
[751]
to fill the void left by vandals who burned down the large building in Manhattan.