The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (19 page)

She had seen and met many colored women in Richmond and elsewhere. They were real, vital, and passionately expressive. Each had her own African look – body, hair, and face different from the Europeans that had populated the marble universe since the 4th century BC. The look was part of her own identity and inspiration. Fans who visited her studio or saw photos – even Mrs. Child at first – had cheered her on.

Although a few Europeans had sculpted black African women,
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no Yankee saw them idealized in white marble or suitably darker bronze. Story’s African women were “not Congo”
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in spite of the widespread and continued, near hypnotic, confusion of his work with the fictional
Cleopatra
described as “Nubian” by Hawthorne in
The Marble Faun
(1860).

Anne Whitney had used a white woman to model the semi-nude, larger-than-life
Africa Awakening
(ca. 1863-1864). After showing the remarkable work-in-progress in Boston (where Edmonia had seen it) and New York, she was unable to reconcile criticisms of its African facial features, and she destroyed it.
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Following the Civil War, a few Americans started modeling black men largely in connection with (and subsidiary to) the late president: Ball in Florence, Hosmer in Rome, Henry Kirke Brown, and John Quincy Adams Ward, both in New York.
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Some attempted, but none succeeded with images of black African-American women. Civic committees rejected designs for Lincoln memorials featuring a freedwoman proposed by Leonard Volk and Randolph Rogers.
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Rogers’ modest female “Africa,” on a corner of the bronze
Columbus Doors
(1858) at the Capitol, did not represent an American slave, and it completed an international theme. He did not add the female figure representing Emancipation to
The Soldiers and Sailors Monument
in Detroit until 1881. Ward did not install his tribute to
Henry Ward Beecher
in Brooklyn NY, embellished with a freedwoman, until 1891.

The early, radical
Slave Auction
(1859) of John Rogers was of painted plaster, not in a monument class. Even he wavered, saying he intended the colored woman to appear “more nearly white.”
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Hosmer also skirted the subject, her
African Sibyl
(started 1868) being neither “Greek” nor “Congo.”
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Not until the Great Migration and World War I turned over conventions hard-packed by habit was the depiction of African-American women in stone openly discussed and debated.
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Not until the twentieth century could African Americans see their sculptors – such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, and Richmond Barthé – celebrate the beauty of their women.

Why did Civil War-era sculptors memorialize freed men but not women? When slavery was still fresh in the American mind, a tacit rule haunted the social equation that guided monuments to cultural ideals. Like the far side of the Moon, colored women did not appear.

The notoriety of the powerless female, who so recently stood naked on the auction block, flew in the face of Victorian aspirations like a gangsta rapper at the opera. Sexually ripe, desperate to survive, and not bound to any man, Edmonia’s
Freed Woman
bore no presumption of virtue. She was the “Negro wench,” an image belittled by Mrs. Child when used as an argument to create sexual fears of freed slaves.
[251]

The term (including “colored wench” and “mulatto wench,”) was common in speech, books, ads, letters, and legal documents for over one hundred years. Hinting lust and mixed-race babies, it was more than an insult. Slave women had no more right to virginity, respect, or even to their own offspring than a rabbit did. Emancipation had no effect on such attitudes.

Ever complex, Child had no problem elevating the pulses of her readers with exotic sex that included intermarriage and her literary version of the wench, the “tragic mulatta.”
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Yet, her objection to the “Negro wench” as a pro-slavery argument ignored the concerns of her peers.

Black (or white), the “wench” was the nemesis of respectable womanhood: pure, pious, and bound to domestic bliss. For the abundance of Victorian ladies who competed for scarce, eligible bachelors (so many had gone west or died in the war), any glorification of the illicit option must have raised worries. To create a secular idol to the mistreated essence of Africa on a par with a Greek goddess or the Immaculate Virgin was not acceptable.

As a colored artist, alone, at the mercy of, and advised by sympathetic female members of society, Edmonia must have realized her
Freed Woman
dredged up deep-seated qualms. She could hardly resolve them alone in the 1860s. Her art could not exist without money.

In retrospect, it seems she decided to adjust her tactics to advance her mission and swallow her ample racial pride. Whether this was Child’s reasoned intent is not the issue. Edmonia got the message. She never again idealized a woman with African features.

Political news from America brimmed with promise. The nation had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, extending Emancipation beyond the former Confederate states. By summer, the Reconstruction Congress had passed the Fourteenth. When ratified, it made citizens of former slaves, guaranteed them due process, and extended equal representation in Congress.

This was the moment to honor the historic proclamation! Edmonia dug in and tried again. By the end of 1866, she wrote to the
Freedmen’s Record
– that is, to her friends at the Freedmen’s Bureau – and to Mrs. Child, enclosing a photo of a second Emancipation group. She called it
Morning of Liberty.
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She also wrote to Mrs. Chapman, who answered quickly with critical comments.

Around this time, Harriet Hosmer had designed an elaborate memorial to Lincoln and Emancipation and sent a model to America.
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Her
Temple of Fame
proposed to tell the freedmen’s history with a novelty: four statues of colored men in various costumes that traced the progress of their race during the Lincoln Administration – from auction block to laborer to aiding Union troops to uniformed soldier. Estimated cost? £50,000! Then came another new idea: financing was to come from freedmen! The fund boasted thousands already.

Aha! Free colored people could be a source of money. Edmonia followed suit, responding to Mrs. Chapman’s comments at once with “new zeal.”
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She promised changes and another photo. She then added her fund-raising proposal: “If every black man in the United States would give a penny each, I could very soon be able to do my part. I will not take anything for my labor. Mr. Garrison has given his whole life for my father’s people and I think I might give him a few month’s work.” She estimated the cost at $1,000 and asked for $500 to begin. Generously, she proposed applying $200 that two abolitionists
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had given her. If she could get $500 by April, she could have the statue finished within the year.

In New England anti-slavery circles, Garrison was surely as important as Lincoln, a latecomer. Garrison had led the movement from its infancy, undeterred by threats, jail, or proslavery thugs who once dragged him through the streets. With slavery done, he had published the final pages of the
Liberator
and shut it down.

Chapman considered the penny-raising scheme but then lost interest. In the half-hearted solicitation she started, she omitted mention of Garrison and any description of the work.
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She never finished.

Trapped in self-exile, Edmonia waited for word. She must have felt encouraged by Chapman’s critique and other reactions. Wary of another conflict, she must have pondered what to make of the silence that followed. Her model lay trapped under damp cloth for months. She had other needs: customers to serve, ideas to sketch, commissions to complete. Promising at first to be a very long year, 1867 was already quite busy.

About a year after the
Athenæum
article, an American writer gave further appreciation of their rising star. Not an art critic himself, he gushed, “I have heard several gentlemen say that there is not anything in Rome, of modern art, surpassing [Edmonia’s Hiawatha groups] for beauty of design, or excellence of execution in bringing out the peculiarities of Indian character.”
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Meanwhile the beast of bigotry lurched mindlessly in Edmonia’s favor, the yin of America becoming the yang of the English-speaking colony in Rome. The English Catholics who came to Rome were prosperous and educated. Officially suppressed for generations until 1832, they instinctively sympathized with her low status among Americans – still resented for their Revolution. A Boston newspaper reported, “Miss Lewis is well received and hospitably entertained in Rome, and especially by the English who have shown her many kindnesses. I often see her driving on the Pincian [Hill] with the wife of a prominent English teacher belonging to the Catholic Church, who in this way is able not only to help an artist who needs assistance, but to show her hatred of Americans, which she omits no opportunity of displaying here in Rome, in common with many of her nation.”
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English Catholics meant a great deal to Edmonia, no matter the reasons why. They inundated her with orders (possibly the 1867 bust of an unidentified woman; Figure 52), kept her company, and gave editors benign bits of gossip.
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Most important among them were Isabel and Hugh Cholmeley. Hugh, a banker whose blood traced back to Edward III,
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spent much of his adult life in Italy. During his childhood in North Yorkshire, the Cholmeleys had often welcomed John Sell Cotman, the watercolorist of austere landscapes and one of England’s greatest artists.

Hugh’s father’s absorption with art was probably a factor in his marriage to the sophisticated Isabel Curtis. She was talented in the arts: a sculptor, a poet, a painter, a singer, and later a published translator. It was possible for her to pursue the arts as a pastime thanks to Hugh’s wealth and good nature. A year before Edmonia arrived, Isabel had arranged a concert for Franz Liszt. She “kindly sang a few of my compositions,” Liszt recalled.
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She also sculpted a bronze portrait of the spectacular musician that appeared in the 1864 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition.

The Cholmeleys must have found Edmonia fascinating. Isabel modeled clay in Edmonia’s studio,
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providing ample time for chatter and mutual admiration. Hugh also loaned Edmonia money for marble.

Edmonia would have blushed like a young girl in love to read she was “unquestionably the most interesting representative of our country in Europe,”
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according to Henry T. Tuckerman. He was the leading American art historian and critic of the day whose six-hundred-page survey came out in 1867 and remains an essential source. Edmonia’s success in Boston and
The Freed Woman
(as praised in Wreford’s
Athenæum
article) had animated what the
Book of the Artists
described as “curious and speculative interest.”

The force of his excitement was overwhelming. He devoted a full page of text to her – as much as he gave to Hosmer! Most important, he rejected any notion that Edmonia was of interest only because she belonged to “a hitherto oppressed race, which labors under the imputation of artistic incapacity.” He praised “[her] grasping in her tiny hand the chisel which she does not disdain – perhaps with which she is obliged to work.”

The populist phrases jabbed at rich sculptors who hired artisans to build their armatures, mass their clay, and do their carving. Hoping, perhaps, to encourage her growth, and noticing her conflict with Greek-revival rules, he asserted she had already succeeded in “naturalistic” sculpture. He added, “It may be reserved for the youthful Indian girl ... to indicate to her countrymen, working in the same field, a distinctive if not entirely original style in sculpture, which may ultimately take high rank as the ‘American school.’ Has sculpture no new domains to occupy, no new worlds to conquer?” Then, citing Edmonia’s “great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and a simple, genuine taste,” he appreciated that she cleverly adapted the mannerisms of the day to her own themes.

He dismissed, however, her Hiawatha groups as “girlish sentimentality.” Showing off his ease with exotic native heroes, he hoped, “[she would abandon] the
prettinesses
of poems and give us Pocahontas, Logan, Tecumseh, Red Jacket and, it may be, Black Hawk and Osceola. Or if these may seem too near and real, and admitting less of effective accessories, there lie behind them all the great dramatic characters, Montezuma, Guatimozin, Huascar, and Atahualpa, to say nothing of the Malinche, that lost her country that she might save her love.”
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Tuckerman’s parade of ideas would have made little sense to an artist with her eye on the market. People bought her Hiawatha groups because the poem had presold them and because she made them authentic as “the Indian girl.”

Male sculptors took advantage of primal innocence to sell eye-catching nudity. Joseph Mozier succeeded with
Pocahontas
and his
Indian Maiden’s Lament.
Powers had some success with a nubile young Indian woman fleeing her captors, the sentimental
Last of Her Tribe.
Erastus Dow Palmer had sold several renderings of his
Indian Girl,
topless but pondering a cross, by this time.

But who would buy a memorial to old Montezuma? Or Tecumseh? Not the English, the Germans, or the American abolitionists. Not the poor Indians who lost their lands to Europeans or the emigrants who pressed the natives to go west.