Browere's Life Masks of Great Americans 2

Browere's Life Masks of Great Americans 2

_The Plastic Art in America_

 

 

Before entering upon the subject of Browere and his life masks, it seems

proper, if not actually necessary, to take a survey of the development

of the plastic art in that part of America now embraced within the

limits of the United States, prior to the time of Browere, so as to

understand what influences may have been exerted upon him in the

direction of his career. This becomes the more important from the fact

that while there have appeared in print, from time to time, numerous

references to this subject, not a single consideration of the topic,

known to the writer, has presented the facts with that accuracy without

which all deductions must be in vain. From the present consideration the

plastic work of the aborigines is necessarily excluded, as it belongs to

another and very different department of study; this having to do with a

branch of the fine arts, and that with a phase of archæology.

 

Prior to the war of the Revolution, while there were among us several

painters exercising their art, both those of foreign and those of native

birth, no note has come down of any modeller or sculptor in our midst,

save one--a very remarkable woman named Patience Wright. It may be that

we had no need for the sculptor’s art. We were mere colonies without

call for statues or for monuments. It is true there was the leaden

figure of King George, on the Bowling Green, in New York; but it came

from the mother country, and soon furnished bullets for her rebellious

sons. Likewise came from across the ocean the odd bits of decoration

intended as architectural aids in the building of old Christ Church, in

Philadelphia, and of a few other noted buildings. But our first

practitioner of the plastic art was, as has been said, a woman.

 

Patience Lovell was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, of Quaker parentage,

in 1725, and died in London, March 23, 1786. When twenty-three she

married Joseph Wright, who, twenty-one years later, left her a widow

with three children. She had early shown her aptitude for modelling,

using dough, putty, or any other material that came in her way; and,

being left by her husband unprovided for, she made herself known by her

small portraits in wax, chiefly profile bas-reliefs. In 1772, she sought

a wider field for her abilities by removing to London, where for many

years she was the rage, not only for her plastic work, but for her

extraordinary conversational powers, which drew to her all the political

and social leaders of the day. By this means she was kept fully advised

as to the momentous events transpiring relative to the colonies; and

being on terms of familiar intercourse with Doctor Franklin (whose

profile she admirably modelled, it being afterward reproduced by

Wedgwood), she communicated her information regularly to him, as shown

by her numerous letters preserved in his manuscript correspondence.

 

Mrs. Wright had a piercing eye, which seems to have penetrated to the

very soul of her sitters, and enabled her to read their inner-selves and

fix their characters in their features. Of her three children, one

daughter married John Hoppner, the eminent portrait-painter; another,

Elizabeth Pratt, followed her mother’s profession of modelling small

portraits in wax; and the son, Joseph, we shall have occasion to mention

on a subsequent page. Some idea may be gathered of the meritorious

quality of Mrs. Wright’s work from the fact that she modelled in wax a

whole-length statue of the great Chatham, which, protected in a glass

case, was honored with a place in Westminster Abbey. Although Patience

Wright never aspired to what is recognized as high art, still her

abilities were of a high order, and her career is a most interesting one

to follow and reflect upon, as she was the first native American, of

American parentage, to follow the art of modelling as a profession. Her

knowledge must have been wholly self-acquired, and in an environment not

conducive to the development of an artistic temperament.

 

Mrs. Wright is not known to have essayed sculpture, or to have worked in

any resisting material, so that the first native American sculptor was

William Rush. He was born in Philadelphia, July 4, 1756, being fourth in

direct descent from John Rush, who commanded a troop of horse in

Cromwell’s army, and, having embraced the principles of the Quakers,

came to Pennsylvania the year following the landing of William Penn.

From the emigrant John Rush was also descended, in the fifth generation,

the celebrated Benjamin Rush, physician and politician, and one of the

signers of the Declaration of Independence. The father of William was

Joseph Rush, who married, at Christ Church, Philadelphia, September 19,

1750, Rebecca Lincoln, daughter of Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield

Township, now in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. She was of the same

family as Abraham Lincoln, the martyr President of the United States. I

am thus minute in tracing the ancestry of William Rush, in order to

establish and place upon record, beyond a question or doubt, that he was

the first American sculptor by birth and parentage, and thus set at

rest, the claim, so frequently made, that this honor belongs to John

Frazee,[1] a man not born until 1790.

 

Rush served in the army of the Revolution, and it was not until after

peace had settled on the land that he seems to have turned his attention

to art. He soon became noted for the life-like qualities he put into the

figureheads, for the prows of ships, he was called upon to carve, and so

noted did these works become, that many orders came to him from Britain,

for figureheads for English ships. The story is told that when a famous

East Indiaman, the _Ganges_, sailed up that river, to Calcutta, with a

figure of a river-god, carved by Rush, at its prow, the natives

clambered about it as an object of adoration and of worship. Benjamin H.

Latrobe, the noted architect, in a discourse before the Society of

Artists of the United States, in 1811, says, speaking of Rush: “His

figures, forming the head or prow of a vessel, place him, in the

excellence of his attitudes and actions, among the best sculptors that

have existed; and in the proportion and drawing of his figures he is

often far above mediocrity and seldom below it. There is a motion in his

figures that is inconceivable. They seem rather to draw the ship after

them than to be impelled by the vessel. Many are of exquisite beauty. I

have not seen one on which there is not the stamp of genius.”

 

Rush was a man of warm imagination and of a lively ideality. These are

shown by his figures symbolical of Strength, Wisdom, Beauty, Faith,

Hope, and Charity, carved by him for the Masonic Temple; by his figures

of “Praise” and “Exaltation,” two cherubim encircled by glory, in St.

Paul’s Episcopal Church; and by his “Christ on the Cross,” carved for

St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church. His best-known work is his

whole-length statue of Washington, carved in 1815, from recollection, by

the aid of Houdon’s bust, which it closely resembles, now in the old

State-house, or Independence Hall, Philadelphia. Another noted work of

his, from Miss Vanuxem, a celebrated Quaker City belle, having posed for

the model, is the graceful figure of a nymph, with a swan, located upon

a rocky perch opposite the wheel-house at Fairmount water-works,

Philadelphia.

 

Beside carving in wood, Rush modelled in clay, and his portrait-busts

have always been recognized as truthful and satisfactory likenesses. The

bust most commonly seen of Lafayette is his work. William Rush died in

the city of his birth on the seventeenth day of January, 1833; and

considering the era in which he lived and its uncongenial atmosphere,

his achievement is most noteworthy and commendable.

 

Twelve days after the birth of Rush, Joseph Wright came into the world,

inheriting from his mother her artistic temperament. At sixteen he

accompanied the family to England, and received instruction from

Benjamin West and from his brother-in-law, Hoppner. He returned to

America late in 1782, bringing a letter of commendation from Franklin to

Washington. In 1783, he painted a portrait of Washington from life, at

Rocky Hill, New Jersey, and the next year was permitted to make a cast

of Washington’s face, which is said to have been broken irreparably in

removing from the skin,--a story the veracity of which may be akin to

that in regard to Browere’s mask of Jefferson, hereafter to be told.

However this may be, Wright made a bust of Washington, for which

Congress paid him “233⅓ dollars,” and also modelled in wax a

laureated profile portrait of Washington, which is of both artistic and

historical value. Wright died in Philadelphia, during the yellow fever

epidemic of December, 1793, and his bust, by his friend Rush, whom he is

said to have instructed in clay modelling, belongs to the Academy of the

Fine Arts, at Philadelphia.

 

Patience Wright, her son Joseph, and William Rush are the only native

Americans that we know to have worked at the plastic art during the

period we have limited for this review; and thus John Frazee, who

claimed to be, and therefore is commonly credited with being, the first

native American sculptor of American parentage, need not be considered;

for he was only two years old when Browere was born, and therefore can

have had no part in influencing Browere’s career.

 

There were, however, two foreigners who certainly did exercise a decided

influence upon art in America, and cannot properly be omitted from any

consideration of the causes that helped the plastic art onward in these

United States. Both of them were men of commanding ability and

importance in sculpture. One was the eminent French statuary Houdon, who

visited this country in 1785, to prepare himself to produce his famous

statue of Washington; and the other, the not much less able Italian,

Giuseppe Ceracchi, who came here, in 1791, for love of freedom, and

lived among us about four years. Ceracchi’s plan for an elaborate

monument to commemorate the American Revolution, which was warmly taken

up by Washington and members of the cabinet, and received the

consideration of Congress, made his artistic proclivities better known,

and gave the subject a wider range than the limited scope of Houdon’s

work. Yet the influence of both these eminent devotees of the plastic

art left, without doubt, a strong impression upon the minds of the

people--an impression constantly refreshed by the sight of their works,

which helped to create a healthy atmosphere for the development of a

taste among us for the plastic art.

 

NOTE. John Dixey, an Irishman about whom little is known, and John

Eckstein, a German by birth and an Englishman by adoption and

education, settled here toward the close of the last century, and

both did some work in modelling and in stone-cutting; but they were

of mediocre ability, and left no impression upon the artistic

instinct of the people.

 

 

 

 

III

 

_John Henri Isaac Browere_

 

 

What one generation fails to appreciate, and therefore decries and

sneers at, a subsequent one comprehends and applauds. It is