In the Adams Memorial, a sturdy bronze body cloaked in heavy drapery puts into physical form an abstract idea, the unanswerable question posed by human mortality. In the Milmore Memorial, a vigorous-looking youth and a powerful angel also present artistic euphemisms for life cut short. Both of these monuments feature symbolic figures that emerged from the sculptors’ imagination, intended to console and to turn visitors’ attention away from the cemetery’s primary role as the physical lodging place for decaying bodies. Frank Duveneck, locked in his own domain of regret after his wife Lizzie’s death, also wanted to make a monument that would aid the process of catharsis. But he chose a different approach in the memorial to his lost love, created with the aid of a young sculptor named Clement Barnhorn. He designed a recumbent figure of his wife, frankly dead but still beautiful, a portrait sculpture configured in the time-honored gisant tradition in which the full-length corpses of kings and queens and bishops are presented for public memory and reverence, most often in church settings. Duveneck “envisioned her as a knight’s lady in death,” one account noted, “and so he posed her, resting with her hands folded on her breast amid flowing drapery.”1 It is a serene passing that the artist portrays, even an elegant one, tantamount to a peaceful sleep, reverently observed. Yet his cemetery memorial does not deny that Elizabeth’s actual body, wraithlike and deprived of the vital force of life, lies beneath the ground at her gravesite in Florence. She is dead, tragically dead, like Clover Adams and Martin Milmore, before her time.
Unlike the other memorial figures, Lizzie’s is a clear and careful portrait, created with the aid of a deathbed drawing (see Figure 11). It shows us what Elizabeth Boott Duveneck’s face looked like, albeit in an idealized fashion. In addition, an inscription on the side of the pink granite base gives us her name and the cities and dates of her birth and death.2 The sculpture has a specificity not present in the Adams Memorial and a particularity even greater than the Milmore Memorial, creating a space for any visitor to learn about this unique person whose likeness is presented or to remember her. It was never tagged with an allegorical name such as “Grief” (as the Adams monument was commonly called) or “the Angel of Death.” Yet it also serves an elastic pedagogical purpose, reminding us of the universal brevity of life and inevitability of death. Something beautiful, like a flower or a flame or a work of art, notes writer Elaine Scarry, “fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself … with which it needs to be brought into relation.” A beautiful object requires “sustained regard” and “requires perceptual acuity, high dives of seeing, hearing, touching.”3
The monument for Lizzie’s gravesite in Florence began to take shape after Frank Duveneck’s return to Cincinnati in 1889. While he had traveled widely in Europe at the height of his career and would continue to do so intermittently for the rest of his life, he shifted directions after Lizzie’s death. His best work as a painter was behind him, and he focused more of his time and energy on teaching in the Midwest while spending many summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be near his son. He had two brothers, Charles and John, still living in the Cincinnati area, as well as his elderly mother and an unmarried sister, Mollie, who would share with him the modest house in Covington, Kentucky, where he was born and raised. Duveneck enlisted the aid of Barnhorn, a local sculptor he had first met a dozen years earlier, in preparing his memorial. More than ten years younger than Duveneck, Barnhorn would become his most loyal friend in future decades, when both men would teach at the Cincinnati Art Academy. Barnhorn apparently offered Duveneck space in his studio in the six-story Pike Building on downtown Cincinnati’s busy Fourth Street, where a number of artists worked, and provided the tools he needed to begin designing the monument for Lizzie.4 While Duveneck did not formally return to the church until just before his death in 1919, he was comfortable in the company of Barnhorn, a devout Catholic who attended Mass daily and who shared Duveneck’s German American heritage.5 Described as more mild-mannered and methodical in his methods than the dashing Duveneck, Barnhorn presumably contributed guidance and the technical expertise the painter needed to create such a complex figure in clay in his first major sculptural project. Having worked in a wide range of sculptural materials, from wood and stone carving to pottery, Barnhorn had begun to master low relief and architectural form, and Duveneck always credited him as his collaborator. Barnhorn went abroad to study for five years immediately after working on the project with Duveneck and, upon his return from Paris, made biblical subjects a central theme of his long sculptural career as well as portraits and playful fountain figures of children.
A clay model for the monument to Lizzie was fashioned first, and then in 1891 the plaster (Figure 48) was completed, from which the bronze was cast by Galli Brothers in Florence. A newspaper article published in July 1891 sheds light on Duveneck’s thoughts about the sculptural media he employed, and the ways in which he earnestly kept his wife’s memory alive.
In the article in the Cincinnati Times Star titled “An Artist’s Grief: How It Finds Expression in Cold Bronze,” a reporter described meeting Duveneck at the studio where the artist was preparing his final model for the foundry. Duveneck began by providing practical rather than emotional explanations for his decision to have the full-length reclining figure cast in bronze, despite the tradition for gisants made of stone. “Of course, I would prefer marble but I wanted something lasting as well as appropriate,” he told the correspondent. “Then marble is too apt to be marred, either by people or the weather. This memorial will not be more than three or four feet high, and could be easily got at.… [R]elic hunters are not over particular, and it would not be long perhaps before there would be a finger gone or the nose broken off, or other portions marked and hacked. So take it all round I found that bronze … would be the best of all [media] I could select. Come in and see it.”6
Figure 48.
Frank Duveneck and Clement Barnhorn, plaster model for the Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Memorial, 1891. Cincinnati Art Museum.
The reporter, for his part, was moved by the “face of exquisite sweetness” in the model, saying, “The likeness was of the dear being it was sought to immortalize. Two delicate hands were folded over the breast, and a robe sweeps gracefully away.… Over all is a long palm branch that completely takes away all that hardness and starkness of the reclining figure in effigy. There is relief, repose, rest. The work is the idea, and possibly the ideal of a master artist to the most beloved of his life.” The interviewer indicated that Duveneck spoke openly in his earnest and unpretentious manner of his wife, their past happiness, and his hopes for the memorial. Unlike Henry Adams, he often talked about his late wife, friends said, with great affection and without shame or remorse.
Duveneck, with Barnhorn’s help, achieved a simple yet elegant monument that combines affection, reverence, and imagination. For him, the personal effort of creation must have been critical in resolving any lingering guilt over having failed to prevent Elizabeth’s death. He was aware of her father’s concerns about his capabilities as a suitable husband and protector—to the point that Francis Boott had arranged for the care of the couple’s child, Frank. In the end, Duveneck’s innocent, heartfelt warmth and caring nature come through—qualities that his wife had so well understood.
Duveneck, in his first significant sculpture, created a composition with strong massing, clean contours, and without fussy detail that could detract from the overall sense of a unified composition, leaving the focus on the clear, uncluttered silhouette of Lizzie’s profile and on her folded hands. In doing so, despite his closeness to the subject, he made a monument that did not suffer from being overly sentimental but that expressed instead a subtle play of the material and immaterial, the real and the decorative. He clearly hoped that it would serve not only to aid his own recovery from this personal tragedy but that it could also be a pilgrimage site for his son and for Lizzie’s father, who was waiting in judgment. With this memorial, Duveneck offered his late wife and those who loved her all that he had to give: his talent to create a modern artwork that drew on a variety of traditions. Despite his own unpretentious, plainspoken manner, he captured her innate intelligence and the aura of cosmopolitan elegance that surrounded her life. He achieved a restraint that was more Lizzie’s and her father’s than a part of his own personality, hinting at his desire to please.
Throughout history, sleep has been described as “counterfeit death,” and representations of death have frequently been softened by depicting the person enveloped in slumber.7 In the tradition of recumbent memorials of young women, Elizabeth is shown asleep in death, with the hint of a smile on her lips and without any gesture of anguish. Kings and queens and civic, military, and religious leaders have also been memorialized as calmly sleeping, and thus Duveneck’s creation summons up a panoply of historical allusions to effigies of great men and women found in European Gothic and Renaissance churches that promised future resurrection for the faithful (Figure 49).8 For Duveneck, a former altar boy who began his career as a church decorator, this must have been comfortable territory, harking back to his early training. The monument is laid out on a cleanly cut block of modern pink granite, in the shape of a sarcophagus or, perhaps, an altar. Duveneck had made and gilded altars in a workshop as part of his youthful training.
Elizabeth’s brow is open and honest, without any signs of anxiety. Her eyes are gently closed, and her head, supported by a plush bronze cushion, lies in comfortable alignment with the rest of her body. While her face is the most clearly defined part of the sculpture, her hair becomes an abstract play of shapes, accurately reflecting the way she parted her dark locks in the center and braided her hair tightly in the back. Some European gisants, such as François Rude’s famous 1847 sculpture of the antiroyalist Godefroy Cavaignac in Paris’s Montmartre Cemetery, show bodies stiffened and backs arched in death, arms thrown aside. But her hands are crossed over her heart, right hand over left, as if presented in a coffin for a genteel last viewing. Her deathbed gown flows downward from the high collar snugly encircling her neck. Pleats radiating from this collar direct attention to the head. The long, wide, loose sleeves of the gown cover even her wrists. The cloth extends beyond her tiny, upward-pointing feet and over the end of the bed. Her form has become so slight that the volumes of her breasts, belly, and hips are barely sensed beneath the flowing drapery. Her enrobed body appears to rest on another cloth, which is spread over the edge of the bronze bed, like a cavalier’s cape, and folded up at one side. The large palm frond laid diagonally atop the entire length of Lizzie’s form provides the major decorative element other than the folds of the gown and cloth. The curve of its stem and irregular shapes of its leaves overlay the flowing drapery to unite the whole and link the monument finally to a decorative aestheticism more closely associated with British nineteenth-century art than with earlier gisant traditions.
Figure 49.
Jacopo della Quercia, Funerary monument of Ilaria del Carretto (post-cleaning), 1405–1407/8. Duomo (S. Martino), Lucca, Italy. Marble, figure 80 × 27 in. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
The memorial constitutes a horizontal relief sculpture, life-size in scale (about 86 inches long) and is thus best viewed from one side and above, where the whole figure and the palm can be seen. The palm branch is the major allegorical element. Historically, it suggests both ideas of martyrdom and victory in Christian symbolism, victory of the spirit over the flesh in death. Here it becomes a laurel for a life of creativity, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and virtue.
Works of art can be sites where fundamental issues are illuminated and reconsidered by groups of viewers, large or small. In the community around Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, the desire for a funerary monument was not so much an urgent need for a portrait likeness as a desire for another indicator of her intelligence, good character, lack of self-indulgence, and place within refined society, concerns similar to those of Henry Adams’s circle of friends. The monument helped to create a memory space about her role as a member of the Florentine community of Brahmins and, for others, as a bright flower who strived for excellence and a sensitive, sympathetic nature in her art and life. It thus fit into a tradition of expatriate Brahmins supporting each other’s legacies, often by writing memoirs, as Henry Adams did, that mentioned each other’s achievements and shared values. Lizzie’s father penned a family account, Recollections of Francis Boott for His Grandson F.B.D., in 1912. These elites also perpetuated their cultural legacies by donating artworks to the new museums arising in America as well as with a variety of expensive artistic funerary monuments that helped to establish a collective identity. The Anglo-American community in Florence would have been familiar, for example, with the elaborate tomb erected for poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one symbol of the expatriate community in which Lizzie lived.9 Thus several groups could find their own readings in the monument.
Figure 50.
Frank Duveneck and Clement Barnhorn, Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Memorial, Allori Cemetery, Florence. Photo by Cynthia Mills.
Henry James hailed the Duveneck monument (Figure 50) in 1893, writing to Francis Boott that the work is “noble and beautiful, and simply serene and unique.” He continued, “One is touched to tears by this particular example which comes home to one so—of the jolly truth that it is art that triumphs over fate.”10 He had in mind the Latin phrase Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short).
The location of the gravesite in Florence made pilgrimages difficult, however, and Duveneck and his father-in-law did not object to the circulation of the image at home via replicas and photographs, which functioned differently than the monument in the cemetery. Sculpture can be a multiple form, reproduced in various media and sizes, and placed in diverse settings and locales that serve different functions over time; these can be made even more visible by the circulation of prints and photographs. Eventually museums in a number of major American cities acquired plaster, marble, and bronze replicas of the Duveneck monument. Francis Boott began this wave of interest and replication in 1893 when he commissioned a white marble version, which was carved in Italy and finished there by Duveneck’s own hand.11 Boott loaned it in 1895 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he and his circle of acquaintances could visit it.12 That year the plaster was also exhibited at the Paris Salon, where it won an honorable mention for Duveneck and Barnhorn.
While cemetery memorials often begin with a sense of urgency, as in Adams’s case, the survivors find themselves in a different place in the process of mourning by the time, years later, that a sculpture is completed; many complicated steps are involved, including financing, design, casting, and installation. As the years passed, Francis Boott’s attitude toward his son-in-law softened further and warmed. Boott received many positive comments from acquaintances who saw the marble sculpture in Boston (his friend Henry Lee, for example, wrote of its impression of Lizzie’s sweetness, “the grace and feeling of that statue,” praising its beauty and repose).13 Whether visiting the marble in the museum or the original in the cemetery, friends described it as noble and serene, and valued the strong likeness they found in the face.14 The old man reportedly took his grandson “Frankie” every Sunday to the museum, where he told him stories of his mother.15 His private memories were perpetuated across generational lines in a public, fine-art setting.
Speaking of the “delight” the monument brought to audiences, Boott gave permission for another plaster to be created for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1898, when a version was also exhibited at the National Sculpture Society show in New York. Sculptor-critic Lorado Taft commented that the Duveneck tomb “seemed to convert its surroundings into a memorial chapel” at the Sculpture Society show, creating a tone of reverence.16 Other plaster versions of the Duveneck Memorial were eventually acquired or exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which later had it cast in bronze and gilded; see Plate 3), the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the San Francisco Art Association, and Yale University.17 It was not unusual for American museums at this point to exhibit casts of famous works of art; only later did the idea that museums should exclusively display original works of art, created by the hand of the artist, take hold, at which point some of these plaster casts were destroyed along with other cast collections.
Although the gisant form of memorial sculpture experienced a revival in some European settings in the nineteenth century, it was not adopted with any frequency in American cemeteries. It did come into fashion, however, in a few churches in the United States. An early example is a figure of lawyer Edward Shippen Burd, with hands folded in prayer, on a wall tomb commissioned by his widow after his death in 1848, for St. Stephen’s Church in Philadelphia. A marble gisant of Southern cavalier-general Robert E. Lee, made decades later and enshrined in a special chapel at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, is still an important Southern pilgrimage site. William Wetmore Story created a rather stiff, fully clothed recumbent portrait figure of Ezra Cornell for the nondenominational Gothic-revival crypt created in 1883 beneath Cornell University’s memorial chapel, where memorials to men important to the university’s history were paired with figures of their wives or daughters; these include Jennie McGraw Fiske, who reclines holding a decorative branch akin to Lizzie’s.18 Tomb figures of important Episcopal clergymen were represented in gisant form after 1898 in Trinity Church, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, as well as the Cathedral of St. Luke in Portland, Maine, all closely based on European medieval and Renaissance traditions.19
Churches, like cemeteries, were never deemed to be sites of particularly high achievement in American sculpture. In fact, critic Sadakichi Hartmann complained that the “mechanical” repetition of “stereotyped mediocrities” stamped church sculpture as products of a “trade” rather than of the highest minds of creative art.20 The fine-art displays, however, of the Duveneck Memorial in addition to the growing critical knowledge of the Adams and Milmore memorials ultimately helped to shift negative art-world attitudes toward funerary sculpture. The best sepulchral sculpture could now be elevated to a status akin to high art, suitable for exhibition in museums and fine-art galleries. It was no longer simply an anonymous artisan’s work.
After seeing the marble sculpture in the Boston Museum, Daniel Chester French wrote Duveneck in 1895 of his “deep and sincere admiration and respect” for the beautiful monument. “I came upon it just after the death of my mother, thus, perhaps, I was more than usually in a mood to appreciate the sweet and serious sentiment of it and I have seldom been so moved and impressed by a work of art,” he said. “[I]t is as excellent in execution as in feeling.… I think your greatest happiness must come from your having succeeded in raising so noble a memorial to your wife.” French also wrote Duveneck’s son years later that he had fond remembrances of Lizzie, given that she had “attended Dr. Rimmer’s lectures in Boston about the same time that I did—about 1870.”21
Duveneck completed only a few other works of sculpture in his remaining career and, despite French’s kind remarks, complained in an 1896 letter to Francis Boott that all such work in Boston was done by French or Saint-Gaudens or the pupils they recommended, so that he had no hope of further prospects for commissions there. But he also related to Boott how personally moved he had been by an “unexpected ovation” he received at a meeting of the Society of Western Artists, when “someone got up and proposed to drink to the health of the American Phidias,” comparing Duveneck to the legendary Greek sculptor.22
Duveneck considered making a second funerary monument, honoring his mother, Katherine Siemers Decker, an immigrant from Oldenburg, Germany, after her death in 1905. But he decided instead to paint a three-part mural for the new French Gothic–inspired Roman Catholic cathedral in Covington, Kentucky, St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, as a memorial to her (Figure 51). The mural, completed in late 1909, features Mary Magdalene kneeling beneath the crucified Jesus in the central panel, with God the Father and the Holy Ghost above. Side panels, each twenty-four feet high, represent the Old and New Testaments: a Jewish priest praying in a temple, and a Catholic priest lifting up the sacrament of the Mass. The coloristic panels, featuring figures clearly defined in a decorative range of saturated blues, gold, and reds, are unified by a choir of white-robed angels across the top. One local commentator called it “the greatest church decoration in America.”23 It is inscribed, “in Memory of his Mother, Katherine Siemers Duveneck, dedicated by the artist Frank Duveneck.” Barnhorn, for his part, created all of the sculptural decorations for the central facade of this important new cathedral.
Figure 51.
Frank Duveneck, Panel from mural for St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington, Kentucky, 1909. Inscribed “in Memory of his Mother, Katherine Siemers Duveneck, dedicated by the artist Frank Duveneck.” Creative Commons photo by Nheyob.
Duveneck died of cancer at age seventy-one. His funeral was held at the cathedral on a wintry morning in January 1919, when his body lay in a casket covered with a blanket of oak leaves; newspaper reports noted that a facsimile of his artistic signature had been created in red flowers in the center. Barnhorn was among the grieving former colleagues and students who acted as pallbearers. Only Duveneck’s son, a Harvard-educated engineer then serving as a radio officer in the U.S. military in France, was absent.24
By retreating to Cincinnati after his wife’s death, Duveneck had removed himself from the East Coast center of the American art world, yet he was now cited as one of the most important American artists of his time. The many encomiums published after his death mentioned the national honors finally bestowed on Duveneck in his late years: these included a gold medal of honor in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where a cast of the Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Memorial was displayed at the center of a gallery devoted entirely to his works (Figure 52). Obituaries often recalled his “magnetic” personality, and he was described by critic Royal Cortissoz as “a personality born to excite sympathy and devotion.”25
After Duveneck’s death, family and friends expressed a wish to complete the sculptural memorial he had once planned for his mother, but this time as a memorial to the artist himself. Barnhorn was given the task of executing it. It consists of a massive block of Red Warsaw stone, with bronze angels, wings spread wide, at each of the four corners (Figure 53). They represent Faith, Hope, Charity, and Resurrection. One angel holds a Chi Ro sign (the first two letters of Christ’s name), another a tablet reading “surrexit non est hic” (from the biblical phrase “he is not here”; he is risen). A third angel (the only one who appears to be female) holds a heart in one hand and gently touches the stone memorial with her other, while the fourth angelic figure holds one hand to his forehead, gathering the material of his cloak before his body with the other hand. The monument is located in Mother of God Cemetery in Latonia, Kentucky, where Duveneck’s devoted students and friends gathered annually, and where admirers still gather, to express their abiding affection for his generosity of spirit and contributions to Cincinnati art.26 A Crucifixion group composed by Barnhorn earlier, in 1915, stands nearby on a high base, overlooking the tomb and the cemetery.27
Figure 52.
Exhibition of works by Frank Duveneck, including cast of his Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Memorial, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco. 1915. Photo, Cincinnati Art Museum.
Duveneck had retained much of his own artwork and actively reacquired some that he no longer owned. He left all of this, in addition to the plaster of Lizzie’s tomb, to the Cincinnati Art Museum, where he had served as a consultant, extending his realm of influence by actively helping to direct its acquisitions.28 A palm frond like the one gracing Lizzie’s tomb was used on the frontispiece of the catalogue for the museum’s retrospective exhibition, held in 1919, after Duveneck’s death.29 Photographs show that the plaster of the Elizabeth Boott Duveneck tomb was again placed in a central position, in a room surrounded by his paintings. In his late career, and with his death, his productions for the cemetery thus were interpreted as requiems to the artist himself and to his expression of personal emotion. This would be true in the cases of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French as well as for Duveneck, and especially for William Wetmore Story. The meanings of the memorials shifted with the decades, and they became monuments as much or more to the artists who had made them as to the deceased whose graves they marked. It was a strange thing that funerary sculptures, intended by their patrons to seal a vivid wound, ultimately became monuments instead to their creators, the sculptors. There were many reasons for this, but, as it turns out, French would play an important part in shaping this new attitude.
Figure 53.
Clement Barnhorn, Tomb of Frank Duveneck, ca. 1923. Mother of God Cemetery, Latonia, Kentucky. Photo by Sean McCormally.