While artistic circles were complaining about cemetery commerce and piracy, William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief lived on in the American popular imagination owing largely to a multitude of unauthorized copies. No casts of Story’s white marble angel were displayed in U.S. museums or fine-arts exhibitions. His neoclassical style had lost its luster in the American art world, and he died soon after he completed the sculpture. But his monument in Rome—his highly personal expression of deeply held emotion—did not long remain a one-of-a-kind object. Located high on a hill at the edge of the Protestant Cemetery, where the graves of the romantic poets Shelley and Keats are also found, it became a well-known pilgrimage site for English-speaking tourists and artists who visited the Eternal City. And for monument dealers, too. The image soon crossed the sea and became one of the most replicated memorials designed by a fine artist in the American cemetery, with nearly twenty unapproved copies surviving today.1
A cemetery exists outside time, with all of its generations of “sleepers” resting together, and memorial styles often overlap there. Easily recognizable versions of Story’s design, ranging dramatically in quality and cost, can be discovered in cemeteries across the United States, from New York to New Orleans to Palo Alto, California. Some of these copies were commissioned by highly respected and well-to-do citizens in the American West, who considered their acquisition to be an act of universal human empathy rather than piracy. These included the extraordinary Jane Stanford (Figure 75), who with her husband, the railroad baron Leland Stanford Sr., founded Stanford University as a monument to their only child. Mrs. Stanford had determined to devote the rest of her life to God, whom she called “the great Comforter,” and to the memorialization of her family after her beloved son, Leland Jr., was stricken by typhoid fever at the age of fifteen during a trip to Florence, Italy, in 1884. She intensified her devotion after her husband’s death in 1893 and her brother’s passing in 1899, ultimately making the university’s campus one of the most significant mortuary sites on the American West Coast. Eventually a copy of Story’s Angel of Grief was installed there as well.
Figure 75.
The Stanford family. Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University.
“I have turned for comfort [over the years] to the giver of both good and evil … and now again I turn to Him with entreaties to save to me my darling boy,” Mrs. Stanford wrote a friend from Italy as she anguished at the bedside of her adolescent son. An attending physician had expressed cautious hope that young Leland Stanford Jr. might gradually recover from his illness.2 But on March 13, 1884, the worst occurred, and the bereaved parents sent the same friend this telegram from Italy: “Our darling boy was taken from us this morning after an illness of three weeks with typhoid fever pray for us.”3
The Stanfords, flush with the new money produced by the expansion of the railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century, had used their wealth to decorate multiple grand homes in California, and they had treated their son like a prince. He was especially loved as he had been a long-sought but late arrival in their marriage, coming into the world when Jane was forty. The couple dedicated themselves to his education and wrote letters laden with praise about his extraordinary intellectual capacities and curiosity. Leland Stanford Sr., who was president of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, governor of California, and then a U.S. senator, said he had a vision on the night of their boy’s untimely passing in Florence: the youth came to him in his dreams and asked him not to despair but to “live for humanity.” Stanford and his wife thus decided, as a memorial, to found their tuition-free university in California to educate young people. In addition, they built a museum in honor of their son, who had loved collecting and archaeology. Stanford also ordered the erection of a magnificent mausoleum on the university grounds, a white granite and marble temple surrounded by Ionic columns (Figure 76). Stone sphinxes flank the entry, and within are marble sarcophagi for just three bodies, those of the parents and son, whose names are listed just above the bronze doors.
According to a newspaper interview with the architect, the mausoleum was designed in 1888 to eclipse in excellence those monuments by Jay Gould at New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery and the Vanderbilt family on Staten Island, also famed for their immense wealth.4 No limit was set on the cost of the materials used—massive blocks of gray Vermont granite for the exterior and white Italian marble in the interior—and, despite its simple purity of design, the structure was at one point estimated at more than $100,000.5 The same architect, Robert Caterson, was involved in work on New York’s Grand Central Station and would later prepare the mausoleum in New York for fellow railroad entrepreneur Collis Huntington.6
Figure 76.
The Stanford Mausoleum designed by architect Robert Caterson. Male sphinxes created by sculptor William Couper replace the original female sphinxes at the front of the structure. Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University.
The Los Angeles Times, describing plans for their mausoleum before its completion in the summer of 1889, noted that the Stanfords would be leaving no heirs and thus put great store in their architectural and institutional legacy. “The mausoleum … will be a fitting abode for the remains of one of the most successful men of the day,” the newspaper declared, “a railroad magnate, a millionaire and a philanthropist, who is building a university … a man who lives magnificently, with wealth and friends, and everything that makes life worth living, yet who has had the great sorrow of losing his son, his only child, and when he and his wife are called to another world and their remains occupy their stately tomb, the family history will end.”7
Unhappy with the sphinxes originally provided by Caterson—a pair of bare-breasted female hybrid creatures that especially displeased Jane—the Stanfords commissioned the expatriate sculptor William Couper, who worked in Florence, to design another set of sphinxes in Carrara marble to flank the entryway of their mausoleum. Couper was an exceptionally well-connected maker of angels and memorials of all sorts. He had married the daughter of Thomas Ball, the former mentor of both Martin Milmore and Daniel Chester French, and worked closely with Ball in Florence. An expert on Italian stone, he had also some years earlier helped Frank Duveneck acquire the Italian marble necessary for the replica of his Elizabeth Boott Duveneck Memorial in Boston. By chance it was Couper who had been summoned to take a death mask of young Leland Stanford in Florence, and he recalled in a letter to Jane how he had arrived to complete this terrible task “in the most trying moments of your affliction.”8 His relationship with the Stanfords thus came full circle when, more than six years later, the heavily muscled male sphinxes he designed for them were shipped from Italy to New York and then on to California in 1891. Couper asked Mrs. Stanford to send him photos so that he could see, halfway around the world, what the stone creatures looked like in their place in the American West.9 Caterson’s sphinxes were not cast off but, rather, moved to the back of the mausoleum.
In the meantime and ever after, Jane Stanford did not restrain her own, often immoderate, expressions of grief, talking about her son at each opportunity and marking the events of his life and death on every anniversary. In this older Victorian manner of making her sorrow conspicuous, her conduct was far removed from Henry Adams’s public denial and silence, or even Frank Duveneck’s warm, nostalgic remembrances of his lost wife, and closer to William Wetmore Story’s expressive grieving. Mrs. Stanford can be seen in photos wearing a portrait of her son, whom she referred to as “our loved one,”10 on a brooch, her rather plain, dour face staring outward. She wrote long, poignant letters to distant acquaintances as well as intimate friends. She indicated no shame at the high visibility of her emotions and extreme sentimentality over every aspect of young Leland’s memory, seeing him as literally still alive in heaven above. On May 15, 1889, for example, she wrote of commemorating “the birth day of my precious son who was twenty one years old—flowers, God’s jewels to his children, were strewn along his pathway there, and here I laid a lovely pillow of flowers on his bed in the place where his head had lain so many times, and we placed flowers all around before his pictures … and silently I praised God for his great goodness to me in giving me this priceless gift of a son.”11
The university, which prepared students (female as well as male) for a “useful career,” was the couple’s true memorial to their son, an option they were able to choose because of their wealth.12 Their lifestyle had been opulent. Mrs. Stanford had lived in a forty-four-room mansion in Sacramento with her husband, and she later engaged painter Astley Cooper to record on canvas, as a souvenir, the collection of jewels her husband had given her over the years.13 But the couple also shared strong philanthropic values. After the death of Leland Stanford Sr. at age sixty-nine, Mrs. Stanford showed the strength of will to carry their university through difficult times following the panic of 1893 and in the face of a perilous court suit. She ultimately left her necklaces, earrings, brooches, and bracelets to the university as the Jewel Fund to support its libraries.
She also created a spectacular nonsectarian Memorial Church on the university campus, dedicated, in enormous capital letters across the front, “To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of My Husband Leland Stanford” (Figure 77). She stated that she did not want Stanford to be a Godless university. She hoped instead to see students experience “soul development” as well as other forms of education there. In a September 5, 1899, letter to university president David Starr Jordan, she spoke of a man named Ingersoll who had died without acknowledging God or life beyond, and she asked: “What monument has he left behind? What consolation has his family?”14
Figure 77.
Memorial Church, Stanford University (before the 1906 earthquake). Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University.
A deeply religious woman, Jane Stanford attended various Protestant churches but followed her own eclectic ideas about faith, and she was also attracted to the ritual and decorative richness of Italian Catholicism. Like her husband, she never committed to any particular denomination, and the Memorial Church offered no single specific creed.15 Her true religion was to view God as a comforter whom she could address personally in her grief. This view is summed up in one of the many inspirational statements by Jane Stanford that are carved into Memorial Church’s interior sandstone walls: “Religion is intended as a comfort, a solace, a necessity to the soul’s welfare; and whichever form of religion furnishes the greatest comfort, the greatest solace it is the form which should be adopted be its name what it will. The best form of religion is, trust in God and a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, life everlasting.”
She contrasted “earth-life” with the “angel-life” and appeared to believe that her husband and son literally were together in heaven and that she would join them there one day, even commissioning a bronze statue by sculptor Larkin Mead in 1899 of her kneeling on a cushion before the two men she loved, who stand above her (see Figure 19).16 When she revised her will in 1901, she ended it with a declaration of her gratitude to “an allwise, loving Heavenly Father,” declaring that through her bereavement “I have leaned hard on this Great Comforter and found peace and rest. I have no doubt about a future life beyond this: a fair land where no more tears will be shed and no more partings had.”17 On another occasion she wrote, noting that her husband’s birthday was approaching on a Saturday: “[H]e will be seventy one years old that day I feel sure he and dear Leland will talk about ‘dear Mamma’ that day—just as we used to talk about our dear boy on these days.”18
The Stanford Memorial Church was loosely modeled on H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston. It featured exterior and interior mosaics by A. Salviati and Co. of Venice, a firm that had been involved in the restoration of St. Mark’s in Venice, and a multitude of stained-glass windows by leading designers: J & R Lamb Studios of New York, Tiffany, and Gorham. Visitors who looked upward could view an “all-seeing eye” of God, with a teardrop in it, in the interior dome, surrounded by cherubs and a shooting star. The large rose window featured the face of a small child in the center.19 The decorative scheme featured numerous angels throughout, including four across the entry facade and a bronze angel lectern. For Jane Stanford the “real” was heaven, and art could provide concrete reminders of what was to come. The figure of the angel became for her a key symbol of the next world.
In 1901 she sent friends copies of a popular book of poems by Ernest Shurtleff titled The Shadow of the Angel, which she said had helped her through her trials.20 “By every troubled soul some angel stands, And stretches forth her gentle, pitying hands,” it states, addressing all those in pain, including “the mother bowed, with lips too sad for prayer.”21 The Stanfords had commissioned from French artist Émile Munier a painting of their son Leland coming to earth as an angel to comfort his grieving mother (Figure 78). Over his career, Munier painted many charming pictures of children, one of which—a little girl with a kitten and a dog—was adapted as a publicity poster for Pears Soap. The painting he made for the Stanfords shows a sweetly calm Leland with angel’s wings and with rays of light emanating from his head. He places one hand on the shoulder of his mother, who buries her face in her hands, eyes closed as if he were coming to her in a dream.22 In a stained-glass window designed for the church by Antonio Paoletti, the boy is shown being carried by angels up to the sky. The angels described in the Shurtleff book and the angels displayed in her church and in Munier’s painting all illustrated how a grieving Mrs. Stanford had been saved by the idea of love for God being above all, and by the belief that her boy and her husband were called not to death but home to an endless life in heaven.
For Jane Stanford, the most important aspect of visual art, like religion, was its capacity for giving comfort. Its effectiveness was more crucial than its originality. Her church was thus filled not only with angels but also with copies, in a variety of materials ranging from mosaics to stained glass and marble, of European artworks that she believed created an inspirational environment. The Stanford museum and her homes included some copies of artworks as well. The Stanfords commissioned or purchased original works by a number of important contemporary French and American artists, such as portraits by Léon Bonnat and Ernest Meissonier and paintings by artists of western scenes such as Albert Bierstadt. But they also participated in the late nineteenth-century “valorization of imitation and illusion” that included the acquisition of sculptural casts by museums. As scholar Miles Orvell has noted, “the nineteenth-century culture of imitation was fascinated by reproduction of all sorts—replicas of furniture, architecture, art works, replicas of the real thing in any shape or form imaginable.”23 At the turn of the century the shift was beginning from a culture of imitation to a cult of authenticity, in which the “original” would be privileged as far superior. Jane apparently felt that the copies she acquired created the best atmosphere for both devotion and the study of art, and she did not make acquisition of original old master paintings a major focus of her collecting activity. Rather, she had Raphael’s Sistine Madonna copied twice, once for the museum and once for the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sacramento. She also owned a copy of Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair in one of her homes.24 The stained-glass windows in the church were mostly inspired by well-known European artworks, including, for example, Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s Christ in the Temple. A mosaic of the Lord’s Supper in the church was described as an exact reproduction of the fresco by Cosimo Rosselli in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, and Mrs. Stanford obtained permission from the pope to commission it. Under the mosaic in the apse stood marble figures of the twelve apostles, again “exact copies” of figures from the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, executed by Bernieri & Company, a firm based in Carrara, Italy, which provided other replicas in the church.25
Figure 78.
Émile Munier, Leland Stanford Jr. as an Angel Comforting His Grieving Mother, 1884. Oil on canvas. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Stanford Family Collections, JLS.14897.
Shortly before ground was broken for the church, Mrs. Stanford was forced to write that she was facing another wrenching personal loss, having “almost lived night and day” by the sickbed of her brother Henry Clay Lathrop. She feared she would soon face “disaster” in “parting with a brother who has been devoted and loving through all my life.”26 Lathrop had been ill for eight years and had lived part of that time with his sister. He died in early April 1899, apparently of cirrhosis of the liver, and Jane had to consider how to memorialize him as well.27
According to an account in the San Francisco Examiner, she looked at many designs for a memorial sculpture and finally chose William Wetmore Story’s beautiful Angel of Grief from a photograph.28 Its sentimentality and pathos and apparent emphasis on the plight of the lonely survivor appealed to her. In her book The Gates Ajar (1868), Elizabeth Stuart had identified “any servant of God” as an angel; for Jane this may have meant also the human survivor who had to struggle with absence after being abandoned on earth. She wrote of being left “Alone! Alone!” describing herself once as “the lonely bleeding bruised one here.”29 What’s more, Story’s angel is distinctively a female angel, more so than Daniel Chester French’s majestic angel of death; it is delicate and vulnerable in appearance. It is all too human, not supernatural, in its momentary surrender to grief. Jane Stanford decided to install a copy of Story’s grieving angel near the Stanford Mausoleum in her brother’s memory. Her commission went to Antonio Bernieri, who fabricated the sculpture in Italy, reportedly carving it from a single block of Carrara marble. Bernieri also set the angel in an elaborate marble canopy that must have added significantly to its cost (Figure 79). It was erected by early March 1901, as work on the church was also under way. A bronze urn containing Henry Lathrop’s ashes was set into a hollow in the granite base, and then the statue was rolled into place over it. The marble had reached the Palo Alto train depot after a three-month journey across the sea, from Genoa to New Orleans and from there by rail to California. The tips of the angel’s wings were damaged in transit, and they had to be slightly shortened and reshaped on arrival.30
Did Mrs. Stanford or Antonio Bernieri ever consider whether they were committing an unethical act, an act of piracy, by copying Story’s angel? Jane certainly knew of the Story family, having commissioned two neoclassical marble reliefs from the sculptor’s son Waldo (1855–1915). Yet nothing in her records or the correspondence of Waldo Story suggests that she ever asked the artist’s estate for permission. (The account in the San Francisco Examiner mistakenly stated that the statue was a copy of a work Story made for the Rothschild family in Paris, not for his own wife’s grave.) Yet the Stanford replica provoked milder bursts of outrage than Eduard Pausch’s copying of the Adams Memorial. A few months after its erection, the trade journal Monumental News did decry the commissioning of an unauthorized copy by “one of the wealthiest women of the country.” But it noted that there were mitigating circumstances: “The original was probably not copyrighted and it has been duplicated more than once in American cities.”31 Since the monument originated on foreign soil and its double was fashioned there for a site on the western edge of the American continent, its great distance from East Coast art and legal centers may have had much to do with the lack of furor, eliminating a sense of high risk. Story did not have a widow who aggressively looked after his intellectual property. Bernieri had used high-quality stone and created the memorial for a rich philanthropist.
Figure 79.
Antonio Bernieri, Angel of Grief (Henry Clay Lathrop Tomb), Stanford University, 1899–1901. Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University.
Mrs. Stanford was looking for beauty and utility but was less concerned with the singularity of her monument—with its being a work of one artist’s imagination and creative genius. She could have asked a sculptor such as Couper, or Daniel Chester French, both of whom made many angels of their own design, for assistance, but that would have entailed a higher cost. For her purposes, too much newness, novelty of composition, might even be suspect. She was not a great connoisseur of sculpture (although she had collected a few other works created by neoclassical American artists), but she was a connoisseur of expressive feeling.32 Her pieces were intended to be didactic, to inspire, and to persuade in an often eclectic and usually moralizing combination. Thus she did not care if the artist himself had made the work, or if a workshop like Bernieri’s, which specialized in replicating other people’s designs, executed it. In fact, in mid-nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture the greatest originality had come in the initial conception, and the execution was usually done by workmen, perhaps with some finishing touches by the artist himself. There is no evidence that Mrs. Stanford ever gave Story any credit for the design, though she was apparently aware of his role as the original creator.
Shortly after Jane Stanford’s death33 in 1905 and her funeral in her Memorial Church, the great San Francisco earthquake wreaked great destruction on the Stanford campus, severely damaging the church. The family mausoleum stood, but the Angel of Grief sculpture was damaged and its canopy destroyed (Figure 80). In 1908 Bernieri replaced the original sculpture with a second angel of the same design, but without a canopy.34
Figure 80.
Angel of Grief (Henry Clay Lathrop Tomb) after 1906 earthquake. Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University.
Mrs. Stanford’s experience, and the later earthquake incident, may have helped to spawn future generations of reproductions of the Story angel in the United States. Several nearly contemporary examples are known in the state of Texas, for example, where a German immigrant sculptor named Frank Teich made at least two versions of the Story angel. Teich, who had come to the United States in his early twenties, opened a monument works in Texas about 1901 and completed many Confederate memorials in southern states as well as a number of cemetery sculptures. His reproductions of Story’s angels, erected about 1903 and 1904, became local icons. He continued to advertise the design in a 1926 catalogue of Teich’s Studio of Memorial Art, which features a picture of the sculptor at work on one of these angels, a laborer with a pneumatic tool assisting him as he poses (Figure 81).35
Peter Youree, a Confederate veteran who became a prominent Shreveport, Louisiana, businessman and banker, and his wife, Mary Scott, had commissioned Teich to make a copy of the Angel of Grief for their family burial site in Scottsville, Texas, after the interment of their only son, William Scott Youree, age thirty-one, there.36 Teich’s catalogue reported that recommendations from the patron, based on his satisfaction with the angel, later proved to be a boon to the monument company, contributing at least $40,000 worth of orders of all kinds. Teich also had made an angel memorial in Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery, presumably after the death in 1903 of Angie Hill, the European-educated daughter of Judge E. P. Hill (1838–1920). A newspaper obituary said Ms. Hill, who was about thirty-seven years old, had been “engaged in literary pursuits in the North.”37
Figure 81.
Frank Teich carving his version of the Story Memorial in Texas. Photo from Frank Teich, Book of Miscellaneous Memorials We Executed and Erected, a promotional and sales catalogue of Teich’s Studio of Memorial Art, Llano, 1926.
The makers of other reproductions of the angel in the United States, including one example inside an expensive mausoleum in New Orleans’s Metairie Cemetery, are unknown, but most likely the sculptures were created by regional monumental works, such as Kavanagh Brothers. One of these, the monument to Maria Hooper in Hingham Cemetery, Massachusetts, not far from Boston, was pictured in an influential book on memorial art without any reference to its origin overseas.38 In some reproductions the angel holds a wreath or a scroll; all are carved in stone. In each, the names of the specific individuals and their life and death dates, and perhaps cities of birth and passing, are listed.39 Further copies are still being made in the twenty-first century, and recently the monument has been featured on blogs, websites, YouTube videos, and cover art for musical groups.40 The story of its creation by William Wetmore Story seems well known and is sometimes mentioned, yet the sculpture’s continuing appeal appears to lie not in its history but in its simple visual expression of a heartfelt sentiment.
Story had written a treatise, The Proportions of the Human Figure (1866), and admirers across the decades, consciously or not, have recognized the essential harmony of his angelic figure and its altar-base. The sculpture embodies his interest in combining the circle, square, and triangle. “The circle is the world,” he wrote in his book; “the triangle is the Trinity or divine nature enclosed within the world, or Christ, the ideal man, the God in nature; and the square is his manifestation and establishment according to law in the world.”41
At the same time, however, the sculpture refuses to cloak the artist’s despair, or the angel’s, over the way death, even for the most faithful, separates loved ones from the living before resurrection. Unlike Henry Adams, Story never minded the word “grief,” and his figure is universally known as The Angel of Grief. It also was criticized by at least one writer, Lilian Whiting, as being nearly atheistic in its lack of any “vision of divine consolation,” since the angel does not celebrate resurrection and the dead person’s arrival in heaven but rather dwells on loss. She notes in one of her Italian travel guides that the angel’s head is “bowed in the utter despair and desolation of hopeless sorrow,” a grief “that has no support of faith.”42 She preferred Franklin Simmons’s later Angel of Resurrection, a more optimistic-seeming monument to his wife who died in 1905, also erected in the Protestant Cemetery.
But Story had explained in a poem his view, like Mrs. Stanford’s, that grief and belief could go hand in hand: “I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the battle of life—, The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strive; /… With the wreck of their life all around them, unpitied, unheeded alone, / With death sweeping down o’er their failure and all but their faith overthrown.” It was later republished in the Boston Daily Globe.43
The presence of so many reproductions over time suggests that others shared Story’s views or reinterpreted them. For them this frankly emotional expression of temporary prostration was more moving than intellectual allegories of psychic serenity. For some, it spoke a greater truth, acknowledging rather than hiding the real, immediate human response to loss, expressing overtly one’s grief in defiance of society’s stoicism and taboos.
Story’s extraordinary monument thus lived on in America through piracy and the popular imagination. Other artists like Daniel Chester French and Frank Duveneck had arranged casts of their works in high-art settings in order to protect and preserve their designs. Oddly, things did not work out as they had hoped, for the museums where they had sent approved copies to guard their fine-arts legacy began obliterating them in the twentieth century.
After French’s death in 1931, his only child, Margaret Cresson, an accomplished sculptor herself, wrote a biography of her father and actively preserved his estate, playing a role in this respect similar to that of Augusta Saint-Gaudens at Cornish. Under her care, Chesterwood became a historic site and museum honoring the sculptor’s legacy, and she acquired examples of his most important works to display there. In her research, she discovered that all but one of the plaster casts of her father’s Angel of Death and the Sculptor, made for major museums, had been destroyed over the years. With the permission of the Milmores, French had arranged for the creation of four or five such casts in addition to the marble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cresson visited the Frick Art Reference Library in New York to research the issue “and wrote to seven or eight museums which had owned plaster casts by my father,” she told a colleague in a May 4, 1956, letter. To her “horror,” she discovered that most of the large plaster casts had been destroyed: “Museums nowadays only want bronzes and marbles and so they take it upon themselves to get rid of anything in plaster.” Cresson took steps to acquire “at any cost” a cast of the Milmore relief that was being sold by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and it remains on display at the Chesterwood estate.44
Similarly, a number of the plasters of the Duveneck Memorial were destroyed, though versions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Cincinnati Art Museum were carefully preserved and revered, remaining on view, perhaps in part because of their associations with one artist’s personal life story and their suitability, as gisants, to a museum environment, where they fit in an art-historical continuity with the story of royalty and Renaissance sculpture.45 The Metropolitan cast its version in bronze in 1927, years after Duveneck’s death, and covered it with gold leaf, likely under French’s guidance, giving it a sense of even greater preciousness (see Plate 3).
The casts had been created in the 1890s at the height of interest in building American cast collections in the newly developed museums in major cities. Casts, especially those of ancient Greek and European Renaissance art, were deemed to be an important way to circulate knowledge about high culture in the nineteenth century and to develop U.S. culture in competition with the Old World. Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White were members of a special Metropolitan Museum cast committee that raised $80,000 in the early 1890s to support development of its historically arranged cast collection there.46 But as the twentieth century unfolded, ideas of originality took precedence and aestheticism was given greater importance than education in museum settings. Casts were no longer valued in the same way. Museums began to deemphasize casts, replacing them with expensive original artworks with the help of elite millionaire collectors on their boards or in their donor circles, such as J. P. Morgan.47 What were museums to do with casts no longer on display? The plaster degraded with time, and museums did not wish to expend the considerable sums that would be needed to repair them; they also needed the storage space these huge sculptures took up for other purposes. Museums sometimes offered them to other institutions or ultimately simply broke them up and removed them. Some Milmore and Duveneck casts were destroyed in this process, casualties of this trend, even though they had been acquired with the participation of the artists themselves.
Sculpture by its nature is a medium of multiples. Yet in the swirl of time, changes in material, venue, attitudes about originality and genius, and viewers’ expectations transformed all of these monuments, leading to the destruction of some copies of celebrated memorials but keeping alive through reproductions the legacy of William Wetmore Story’s deep personal emotion in American cemetery settings.
