1. See “Death’s Sudden Summons,” Washington Post, December 7, 1885, 1; “Mrs. Adams’s Sudden Death,” New York Sun, December 9, 1885, 7; and “The Sudden Death of Mrs. Adams,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1885, 5. Ellen Gurney to Edwin L. Godkin, December 30, 1885, Godkin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Death certificate for Marian Adams, District of Columbia Health Department.
2. “Hell” is from Henry Adams (hereafter HA) to John Hay, December 8, [1885]; “calm,” HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, December 14, 1885; “crushing,” from HA to E. L. Godkin, December 16, 1885; “wretched bundle,” HA to John Hay, December 17, 1885; and “endurance,” HA to Oliver Wendell Holmes, December 29, 1885, all in J. C. Levenson et al., The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982–88) (hereafter cited as HA Letters). Because the letters are arranged in these volumes in chronological order, only the date will be given.
3. HA to Henry Holt, March 8, 1886, in ibid.
4. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 1:27. Vivien Green Fryd, “The ‘Ghosting’ of Incest and Female Liaisons in Harriet Hosmer’s Beatrice Cenci,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June 2006): 292–93, builds on this theme.
1. The literature on Adams is voluminous, including multivolume biographies by Ernest Samuels and Edward Chalfant as well as Patricia O’Toole’s The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1990). Adams family papers can be found at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Henry Adams Papers from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the John Hay Library at Brown University are accessible as a microfilm edition. Adams’s third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
2. Robert Gould Shaw to his sister Effie, February 25, 1863 in Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 299. Clover’s brother, Ned, also wrote many letters to her from his post on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, where he helped direct the care of former Southern slaves, known as contraband; see Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 33–36.
3. Marian Hooper to cousin Mary Louisa Shaw, Boston, May 28, 1865, in The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1936), 3–10, 468–71.
4. On their respective heights, see O’Toole, The Five of Hearts, 13. For the “clever woman” quote, see HA to brother Brooks Adams, March 3, 1872, in HA Letters.
5. HA to Charles Milne Gaskell, August 21, 1878, in HA Letters.
6. Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington D.C. after the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 2, 207.
7. Henry Adams encouraged her hobby but opposed publication of her pictures. After Clover’s death, the New York World, December 10, 1885, described her as “a very skillful amateur photographer” who “was a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club here. She has made a number of very artistic negatives of distinguished people among her friends and acquaintances.” Her interest preceded the introduction of the popular handheld Kodak camera in 1888. Three albums containing 113 of her pictures, a notebook in which she listed dates and technical details about her photographs from May 1883 to January 1884, and an album of commercial photographs purchased during her European travels, captioned in her hand, are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
8. HA to Anna Barker Ward, December 27, 1885, in HA Letters.
9. HA to Henry Lee Higginson, March 27, 1885, in ibid.
10. For “tired traveler,” see Marian Adams to John Hay, April 24, 1885; for “long and hard spell,” see HA to Charles Milnes Gaskell, May 10, 1885, both in HA Letters. After Marian’s death, an old friend, Eleanor Whiteside, wrote, “How often we have spoken of Clover as having all she wanted, all this world would give, except perhaps children. And now at forty years old, down comes a black curtain, & all is over.” Eleanor Whiteside [1885], George C. Shattuck Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
11. See, for example, Dykstra, Clover Adams; and Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).
12. HA to Charles Milne Gaskell, November 8, 1885, and HA to Robert Cunliffe, November 29, 1885, in HA Letters. Tradition required a year of mourning for a parent, but these time periods were being relaxed by the mid-1880s. See Mary Elizabeth Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887), 192, and Richard A. Wells, Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society (Springfield, Mass.: King, Richardson & Son, 1890), 318–19.
13. Rebecca Dodge Rae to Louisa Hooper Thoron, April 8, [1930s?], as cited in Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams; His Second Life, 1862–1891 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1994), 499.
14. “Memorabilia,” May 3, 1891, Charles Francis Adams II Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
15. “The Sudden Death of Mrs. Adams,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1885, 5.
16. HA to Rebecca Dodge, December 6, 1885; HA to John Hay, December 8–9, 1885, in HA Letters. Hay had lost his father-in-law, Amasa Stone, to suicide in May 1883.
17. “Was It a Case of Suicide?” Critic, December 12, 1885; the New-York Daily Tribune and the New York World carried similar comments on December 11 and December 13, 1885, respectively. The newspapers suggested that Marian Adams was the author of the novel Democracy, which “savagely criticized” Washington society.
18. Henry James to Elizabeth Boott, January 7, 1886, London, in Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 1883–1895, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 107.
19. Ellen Gurney to Elizabeth Cabot, December 31, 1885 (envelope dated January 1, 1886), Swann Papers Family Collection, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as quoted in Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 503–4, 840–43; Chalfant notes that Mrs. Gurney sent similar extracts from Clover’s letter to editor E. L. Godkin on December 30, 1885.
20. Adams also telegraphed his brothers with the shocking news. Charles, never a favorite in-law of Clover’s, recalled in his private journal in May 1891 that he was not surprised to learn of her sudden end. Charles said he had warned Henry before the marriage about her family’s inherited “latent tendency to suicidal mania.” One aunt, Susan Sturgis Bigelow, had poisoned herself when Clover was a child, and he remembered saying, “They’re all crazy as coots.” Charles wrote that Henry spoke freely with him in the days following Clover’s death, indicating he had twice before pulled her through “morbid periods” and had believed he could save her again. “Memorabilia,” Charles Francis Adams II Papers. Charles’s recollections contain some errors, however, and Chalfant questioned his motivations for penning such a harsh account of Marian Adams’s emotional frailty; Better in Darkness, 628–29. On asylums, see Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007).
21. Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 33.
22. See Dykstra, Clover Adams, 200.
23. Ellen Gurney to Elizabeth Cabot, December 31, 1885.
24. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Collier Books, 1993). Recently scholars have disputed the stages of mourning established by Kübler-Ross and revised notions about the intensity and duration of grief; see Ruth David Konigsberg, The Truth about Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
25. See Isabel Anderson, ed., Letters and Journals of General Nicholas Longworth Anderson (New York: F. H. Revell, 1942), December 9, 1885, 252.
26. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918; New York: Time, 1964), 1:58–59.
27. Ibid. “Sister Lou” (Catherine Louise Kuhn, d. 1870, the wife of Charles Kuhn) was buried in a tomb in the Protestant Cemetery, the Cimitero degli Inglesi (the English Cemetery) in Florence. According to Sister Julia Bolton Holloway, custodian and president of the Aureo Anello Associazione (Golden Ring Association) that oversees the cemetery, records verify the burial, but no marker remains.
28. HA to Elizabeth Cameron, December 10, 1885, and to John Hay, December 8, 1885 in HA Letters.
29. While much has been made of Henry Adams’s pleas for silence and privacy, his immediate response was socially acceptable. “No one should call upon a bereaved family while the dead remains in the house, and they are excusable if they refuse to see friends and relatives.… No one of the immediate family of the deceased should leave the house between the time of the death and the funeral.” Wells, Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society, 314, 318.
30. According to an accounting filed with the Probate Court at Boston by Edward Hooper, executor of Marian Adams’s estate, Reverend Hall was paid $250 on December 15 for his “services at funeral and trav exp.” Schedule B, Executor’s account filed January 31, 1890, in case No. 74682, Suffolk County Probate Court.
31. As quoted by Austin S. Garver in Edward H. Hall: An Address Given in the Church of the Second Parish, Worcester, 14 April 1912 (Worcester, Mass., 1913), 6.
32. See, for example, “The Dying of Death,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 20 (September 1899): 364–65.
33. Clover’s relatives, especially her mother, had been part of a group of intellectual Massachusetts Transcendentalists. Although Robert Hooper kept a pew at King’s Chapel Unitarian church in Boston, he rarely occupied it and was said to have expressed his religious feelings more “in his personal character” than in churchgoing. Clover herself did not embrace any institutionalized religion and liked to tweak the pomposity of church rituals. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1958; New York: History Book Club, 2003), 278; see also Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 32–33.
34. HA to John Hay, June 11, 1886, San Francisco, in HA Letters.
35. Adams had known La Farge since the early 1870s, when both were teaching at Harvard University, and possibly even earlier. La Farge was appointed a university lecturer in art composition at Harvard in 1871–72. The two men had overlapping circles of friends, including John Bancroft, with whom Adams traveled in Germany in 1859 and who was a Newport neighbor of La Farge’s in 1860. James L. Yarnall, John La Farge: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Ashgate, 2012), 54, 137. Helene Barbara Kallman Weinberg, “The Decorative Work of John La Farge” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1972), 128n1.
36. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 61–63.
37. For references to the monument as a Buddha figure, see diary entries for April 29 and December 10, 1888, in HA Letters.
1. For the sphinx’s journey to the cemetery, see “Mount Auburn Cemetery,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 16, 1872, 2. The granite block from which it was carved measured 15 by 8 feet.
2. The essential source on Bigelow and the creation and evolution of Mount Auburn has been Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989). An expanded edition has since been published: Blanche M. G. Linden, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). Bigelow and the sphinx are also treated in Joy Giguere, Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival, forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press.
3. See Jacob Bigelow, An Account of the Sphinx at Mount Auburn (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1872), 13–14.
4. Ibid. On the need for a good death, see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Bigelow apparently referred Milmore, among other things, to sphinxes pictured in an eighteenth-century travel book about Egypt and to a print of a restored avenue of sphinxes that served as the frontispiece to his own 1842 volume, The Useful Arts Considered in Connexion with the Applications of Science (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers).
5. On Bigelow’s blindness, see Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 293–94, and George E. Ellis, Memoir of Jacob Bigelow, M.D., LL.D. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1880), 71.
6. “Art,” Atlantic Monthly 31, no. 183 (January 1873): 116.
7. Quoted in Frank Foxcroft, “Mount Auburn,” New England Magazine 20, no. 4 (June 1896): 428.
8. On French’s visit to the Sphinx, see diary extracts, French Family Papers, Library of Congress.
9. Marian Hooper Adams to her father, Robert Hooper, from Paris, April 20, 1873, in Thoron, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 93.
10. For the Daniel Chester French quotes, see French’s letter to A[deline] A[dams], February 7, 1931, as cited in “Milmore, Martin,” in Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 7:18.
11. Roxbury, a fast-growing independent city, was annexed by Boston in 1868.
12. Milmore’s drawing (preserved by the headmaster with a chemical spray) and those by two other students were still there when the Brimmer free elementary school was closed in 1911 for conversion into a boys’ trade school. See “Milmore’s Youthful Blackboard Sketch Is in Jeopardy from Brimmer School Dismantling,” Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1911, 4.
13. American Architect and Building News 19, no. 527 (January 30, 1886): 49.
14. Thomas Ball, My Three Score Years and Ten: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 223–24. “Martin Milmore, Sculptor,” obituary, Boston Daily Globe, July 22, 1883, 6.
15. “Problems of Sculpture,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 7, 1862, sec. 2, 5.
16. See “The Sanitary Fair,” November 23, 1864, 2; “Sculpture,” April 23, 1864, 2; “Milmore,” November 23, 1864, 2; “What Shall I Buy for a Christmas Gift?” and “Phosphor,” December 6, 1864, 1, 2; and De Vries, Ibarra & Co. ad, December 9, 1864, 3, all in the Boston Evening Transcript. Articles on artists from the Evening Transcript were among those compiled from nineteenth-century sources by Colonel Merl M. Moore Jr., now on file in the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Institution. See also Jan Seidler and Kathryn Greenthal, The Sublime and the Beautiful: Images of Women in American Sculpture, 1840–1930 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1979), 19.
17. On the Horticulture Hall sculptures, see Ball, My Three Score Years and Ten, 236; “Martin Milmore,” letter to the editors, New York Evening Post, August 7, 1866, 1; as well as reports in the Boston Evening Transcript, April 20, May 15, May 30, and June 1, 1866, all on page 2, and June 6, 1866, 3. James and Joseph had established a sculpture business together as “J & J Milmore.”
18. On Emerson’s sitting, see Irving H. Bartlett, ed., “The Philosopher and the Activist: New Letters from Emerson to Wendell Phillips,” New England Quarterly, June 1899, 293–95. Milmore’s 1865 bust of Charles Sumner in neoclassical garb was especially well received for its “spirited” and “lifelike” appearance and won a gold medal at the 1869 exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. “Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association,” Boston Evening Transcript, October 27, 1869, 1.
19. For the quote, see “The Bronze Statue of a Union Soldier,” Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1868, 2.
20. The Milmore brothers made Civil War soldier statues or portrait statues for at least ten cities in New England and Pennsylvania as well as a six-foot-long Weeping Lion (1871) at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, commemorating students and alumni who died in the Civil War. This may have influenced Bigelow in his commission for the monumental sphinx. Bigelow had been inspired by examples such as the colossal dying lion designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen that was carved into a cliff at Lucerne, Switzerland, in memory of Swiss royal guards killed in the French Revolution. On Milmore, see Chandler Rathfon Post, “Martin Milmore,” in Art Studies, Medieval, Renaissance and Modern, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 41–60.
21. It is likely that the three Milmore brothers who worked as sculptors (the fourth brother, Charles, was listed in the city directory as a carpenter) made grave markers or monuments in their early years, since that was the stonecutters’ bread and butter. One of Martin’s earliest works, for example, was a bas-relief at Mount Auburn of the Universalist minister Thomas Whittemore (ca. 1862). He is also believed to have sculpted a life-size dog dated 1866 at the Wingate gravesite there, honoring two young brothers.
22. “Death of James Milmore,” Evening Transcript, December 27, 1872, 1. According to his death certificate, he died of Bright’s disease. His occupation was listed as “sculptor.” Martin and Joseph purchased the cemetery lot for $1,200 in 1877, according to the deed.
23. American Architect and Building News 19, no. 527 (January 30, 1886): 49.
24. The city council chose Milmore’s revised $75,000 proposal for a thirteen-foot statue of the Genius of America atop a tall column, with figures representing the Soldier, Sailor, History, and Peace at the base and female allegorical figures above. The monument was dedicated on September 17, 1877, with a grand procession, fireworks display, and banquets, and described in the next day’s Boston Morning Journal. The New York Evening Post reported, however, that Milmore’s mother was injured at the dedication when a platform fell, causing her to break a hip; Evening Post, September 25, 1877, 2. The monument became a model for other large group war memorials across the country; see Peggy McDowell, “Martin Milmore’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in the Boston Common: Formulating Conventionalism in Design and Symbolism,” Journal of American Culture 11, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 63–85.
25. “I have engaged to pay Martin Milmore the artist $2500 to make a marble monument and set it on my lot at Mount Auburn. The angel’s face to be a likeness of my deceased daughter’s face, Maria Frances Coppenhagen” (1838–1869); quote from the will of Mehitable Coppenhagen, dated March 24, 1871, as cited by Ernest Rohdenburg III in “A Bid for Immortality: The Sculpture and Life of Martin Milmore” (accessed October 27, 2000), at www.antiquesamerica.com/features/elibrary/printabble.cfm?ArticleNo=550.
26. Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan Co., 1903), 253. A failure for Milmore was his model for an equestrian statue of Robert Gould Shaw, which he exhibited at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association in 1874. A New York critic said it had “hardly a redeemable feature to raise it above the baldest mediocrity”; see E. M., “Art in Boston,” New York Evening Post, September 21, 1874, 2. Shaw and his troops would eventually be memorialized in Boston instead with a high-relief monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who practiced a more modern French-influenced brand of sculpture.
27. Milmore was an officer of the Boston Art Club and won prizes from the Mechanic Association; see Boston Evening Transcript, February 20, 1880, 1. He left no significant body of correspondence. His busts were shown regularly at the Doll & Richards art gallery in Boston. A number of reductions of his busts and statues were marketed in Parian ware for small prices, available for home settings. Lithographs of the Sumner bust and of the Soldiers and Sailors monuments were also sold. All of Milmore’s known commissions are in Massachusetts, New York State, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine.
28. October 9, 1872, passport application in the Colonel Merl M. Moore Jr. Papers, American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Institution.
29. See Boston Directory, 1871 and 1883. On his engagement, see “Milmore, Martin,” in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White & Company, 1900), 8:291.
30. According to an obituary in the Boston Evening Transcript, he suffered “a chronic affection [sic] of the liver.” His last work, a bust of Daniel Webster commissioned for the New Hampshire statehouse, was left in clay for Joseph to finish.
31. “Martin Milmore’s Funeral,” Boston Daily Globe, July 24, 1883, 5; “Martin Milmore Buried,” New York Times, July 25, 1883, 2. The Reverend Father O’Toole and other priests presided.
32. Joseph Milmore and lawyer James Bailey Richardson were named co-executors in the January 1882 will and instructed to sell three lots of property remaining in the estate to cover the costs of erecting the cemetery monument. “The Sculptor Milmore’s Will,” New York Times, August 2, 1883, 5. Probate Court, Suffolk County, records, No. 69830, November 1883.
33. “Martin Milmore’s Money,” Boston Daily Globe, September 14, 1884, 2. For Mrs. Hanley’s death notice, see “Obituary Notes,” New York Times, March 9, 1909, 9.
34. Forest Lawn Cemetery interment records state that Sarah Milmore died on May 31, 1884. Joseph had made a number of copies of Martin’s designs over the years as well as his own work, including a marble statue of Lord Dufferin in Montreal (ca. 1878), of which a bronze version was commissioned for London’s Hyde Park, and the newspapers reported that he was commissioned to make a grave statue for department store mogul A. T. Stewart.
35. Joseph’s death on January 10, 1886, was reported on the front page of the Globe, attesting to his final celebrity in Boston. “The deceased, although eccentric in some respects,” the newspaper reported, “was a man of marked ability in his profession, and of warm and generous impulses”; “Joseph Milmore Dead,” Boston Globe, January 16, 1886, 1.
36. His body was placed in a receiving vault until September 4, 1886, when memorial services were held at Forest Hills Cemetery.
37. “Milmore’s Will to Be Contested,” New York Times, February 20, 1886, 3.
38. “The Artist Milmore’s Widow,” New York Times, February 21, 1886, 5.
39. “The Will of Joseph Milmore,” Boston Evening Transcript, January 10, 1888, 1. Mary Milmore agreed to give Charles $1,000 in cash and deeds to several houses,
40. “Joseph Milmore’s Will,” Boston Daily Globe, February 19, 1886, 4.
1. On the sea voyage, see Francis Boott, Recollections of Francis Boott for His Grandson F.B.D. (Boston: Southgate Press, 1912), 58–59, and passenger list of the ship Sophia Walker, bound for Genoa, Boston Daily Evening Transcript, September 27, 1847. For details of the Bootts’ biography, see Carol M. Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 188–99; and Michael P. Vargas, Elizabeth Boott Duveneck: Her Life and Times (Santa Clara, Calif.: Triton Museum of Art, 1979).
2. For the “produced” quote, see Henry James, “Notes of a Son and Brother,” in Henry James: Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 520.
3. See Alta Macadam, Americans in Florence: A Complete Guide to the City and the Places Associated with Americans Past and Present (Florence: Giunti Guide, 2003). Boott, Recollections of Francis Boott, 66.
4. Boott at first published his songs under the name “Telford”; see Boston Globe, March 6, 1904, 42, which reported that his best-known song was “Here’s a Health to King Charles.” For their intersections with the Shaws in Europe, see Boott, Recollections of Francis Boott, including 69–71. A number of Boott’s compositions are to songs speaking of the heart seeking solace or the impossibility of forgetting loss; see, for example, “The Mind Has a Thousand Eyes, the Heart but One.”
5. William James to Henry Bowditch, August 12, 1869, in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (1920; repr., New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 155. Henry corresponded more than eighty times with Lizzie over the course of her life. He is said to have partially modeled Adam and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904) on the Bootts and made their villa the setting for his Portrait of a Lady.
6. Hunt had studied with Couture and recommended him as a teacher. Henry James wrote about the exhibition at the Boston Art Club in the Nation, June 3, 1875, where he famously called Duveneck “an unsuspected man of genius.”
7. Frank Duveneck’s oil painting, Francis Boott, 1881, is now in the Cincinnati Art Museum.
8. On Elizabeth Boott’s exhibitions, see, for example, “Art and Artists,” Boston Daily Globe, November 19, 1882, 3, “The Exhibition of Misses Boott and Dixwell” at Chase’s Gallery, in which Boott’s “vigorous” oil painting technique is admired. See also reviews in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 25, 1882 (where her painting of a gypsy was called “curiously unfeminine to come from the hand of a woman”); October 22, 1883; February 5 and 11, 1884; and April 30, 1885. Boott showed sixty-six paintings at Doll & Richards gallery in Boston in 1884.
9. Henry James to Charles Eliot Norton, March 31, 1880, Florence, and to Mrs. Henry James Sr., March 16, 1881, Genoa, in Henry James Letters, vol. 2, 1875–1883, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 280, 349; and James to Henrietta Reubell, March 11, 1886, in Edel, Henry James Letters, 1883–1895, 117. James mentioned that he himself had “no less than three Boots on my wall” and worried that Lizzie would not be able to maintain her career. At the time of the Boston Art Club show in 1875, a New York Evening Post account on July 29 described Duveneck as “the young Western artist,” another indication that he was an outsider. On James and Duveneck, see Mahonri Sharp Young, “Duveneck and Henry James: A Study in Contrasts,” Apollo 92 (September 1970): 210–17.
10. Josephine Duveneck, Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher (San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1970), 115: “Since Duveneck understood no French, Lizzie had to prod him to say ‘oui.’ ” On the premarital agreement by which Duveneck relinquished “any claim to Lizzie’s estate should she predecease him,” see Carol M. Osborne, “Frank Duveneck & Elizabeth Boott Duveneck: An American Romance,” essay for an exhibition at Owen Gallery, New York, 1996, www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa572.htm.
11. Elizabeth Boott to the Richard Morris Hunt class, July 22, 1879, part of a letter to “Dear Friends” in several installments beginning June 22, 1879, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 1097 (original letters, Cincinnati Historical Society). Lizzie called Duveneck “Herr Professor” in this letter, written while she was studying with him in Bavaria.
12. Ibid.
13. A July 27, 1875, passport application lists Duveneck’s height, eye color, and other descriptive information; a copy is in the artists’ files, Cincinnati Art Museum. “He was a real swell, swinging a cane and tossing a Munich cape back from his shoulders,” Clement Barnhorn is quoted as saying in Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 55.
14. His name may also have been an allusion to Frank Boott, Lizzie’s brother who had died in infancy in 1845, and of course to Frank Duveneck. Henry James once jestingly called Lizzie “the queen of the Franks”; James to Francis Boott, May 25, [1886,] in Edel, Henry James Letters, 1883–1895, 120.
15. Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, March 13, 1888, quoted in Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 120. Lois Dinnerstein in “From Private Grief to Public Monument: The Funeral Effigy of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck,” in Jaffe, The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, 200–213, raises the possibility that Lizzie’s death was a suicide, based on a phrase used by Alice James, as did Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 270. But other responses from friends and family members to her death do not support their awareness of such a self-destructive event. Constance Woolson, for example, wrote Francis Boott on September 15, [1888], “In all your grief and loneliness, it must still be a pleasure to remember how happy her life was during these last two years … I think she was one of the happiest wives I have ever known”; quoted in Osborne, “Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo,” 198. Lizzie’s own ebullient letters from her early marriage and the birth of Frank Jr. also argue against the notion of her having become suicidal.
16. Frank Duveneck to brother Charles Duveneck, March 23, 1888, Frank and Elizabeth Duveneck Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 1150.
17. Ibid.
18. See Luigi Santini, “The Protestant Cemetery of Florence: Called the English Cemetery,” www.florin.ms/cemetery.html. After Elizabeth’s burial, other artists and writers, including Thomas Ball, were interred on the hillside there.
19. For the James quote, see Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 121. Elizabeth’s nanny, Ann Shenstone, placed at the foot of the grave “a little round marble stone marked in loving & reverent memory from her old nurse”; letter from Ella [Lyman], December 21, 1894, in Duveneck Papers, reel 1097.
20. “Frankie” was raised by his great-uncle Arthur Theodore Lyman (1832–1915), the half brother of Elizabeth’s mother, and his wife, Ella Bancroft Lowell Lyman (1837–1894), who had had seven children of their own. The youngest, Robert, was nine when Frank arrived. Lyman, who headed textile manufacturing businesses, was also an adviser to major cultural institutions such as Harvard University and the Boston Athenaeum. Duveneck painted his portrait in 1893. See “Death of Arthur T. Lyman,” New York Times, October 25, 1915; Samuel A. Eliot, Biographical History of Massachusetts: Biographies and Autobiographies of the Leading Men in the State, vol. 7 (Boston: Massachusetts Biographical Society, 1917); and Historic New England, Lyman Estate History, www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/lyman-estate/lyman-estate-history/. The Lymans had a home on Beacon Street in Boston and a summer estate called the Vale in Waltham, Massachusetts. Duveneck visited regularly, but, according to Josephine Duveneck, Frankie’s wife, the son never saw his Duveneck grandmother and had no relationship with Duveneck’s family in Covington, making his first visit there only after Francis Boott’s death. See Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 154, and Josephine Duveneck, Life on Two Levels: An Autobiography (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1978), 83–86.
21. Henry James to Henriette Reubell, April 1, 1888, in Edel, Henry James Letters, 1883–1895, 230–31.
22. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 125, quotes an August 22, 1888, journal entry by Mrs. Lyman.
23. F. Boott, Miserere for Four Voices (Boston: O. Ditson & Co., 1888; No. 3606 Oliver Ditson Company’s Sacred Selections); a copy is in the collection of the Loeb Music Library, Harvard College. Miserere was Gregorio Allegri’s 1630s masterpiece, sung at the Sistine Chapel.
24. “The Fine Arts,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 21, 1888, 10.
25. After his wife’s death, Duveneck returned first to Boston, then Cincinnati, spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be near his son, and frequently traveling abroad. The drawing is in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the gift of Frank Duveneck. “He showed us the drawing taken of dear Lizzie after she died by his friend Mr. Ritter,” Ella Lyman wrote in her journal, August 22, 1888, as quoted in Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 124.
26. On Story’s life and career, see Mary E. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, the American Sculptor and Author (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1897); the biography by Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1903); and Jan Seidler Ramirez’s biographical essay in Kathryn Greenthal, Paula Kozol, and Jan Seidler-Ramirez, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1986), 107–9. The Harry E. Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, holds a major collection of Story papers. For “born by mistake,” see M. E. W. Sherwood, “William Wetmore Story,” New York Times, April 2, 1898, book review sec., 230.
27. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 276.
28. James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2:76–77.
29. Marian Hooper Adams to Robert Hooper, Paris, April 20, 1873, in Thoron, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 94–95.
30. “I Am Weary of Rowing,” sheet music, Oliver Ditson & Co., 1857, music by F. Boott, words by W. W. Story. Boott also composed music for Story’s “Garden of Roses” published in 1863 (see Figure 8); “I walked in the garden of roses with thee, In the garden where never again we shall be, And thy ghost in the garden is all that I see, For thou comest never, oh! Never.… Alone in the garden I cry in my pain.”
31. See Annette Blaugrund, Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 23–24.
32. For “my life, my joy,” see James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2:316. On the fainting episode, see Sherwood, “William Wetmore Story.”
33. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 277.
34. “Mrs. W. W. Story’s Funeral: A Large and Sorrowful Gathering at the American Church in Rome,” New York Herald, January 12, 1894.
35. “Obituary Notice of My Dear Wife: A Sculptor’s Wife, the Contribution of an Able Helpmate to a World-Wide Fame,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 20, 1894.
36. W. W. Story to “My Dear Julian,” January 25, 1894, Rome, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. My thanks to Kathleen Lawrence for sharing her research on the Story materials in Austin.
37. William Vance, America’s Rome, vol. 2, Catholic and Contemporary Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 211.
38. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 287.
39. James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2:324.
40. Henry James to Francis Boott, October 11, [1895], in Henry James Letters, vol. 4, 1895–1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), 23.
41. On the church, see Vance, Catholic and Contemporary Rome, 268–69.
1. Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years, 281, also states that Adams came down to dinner that day wearing a bright red tie (thus flouting mourning dress traditions for men to wear black ties). Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 842n6, says, however, that he was never able to substantiate the story of the red tie.
2. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), 85–90. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America (Stony Brook, N.Y.: The Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 11. Thoron, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 272n1, states that the Hoopers had inherited a “stoical custom” from their grandfather William Sturgis that “discouraged conventional outward signs of mourning.”
3. Advertisements for stores featuring mourning garments could be found in publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine in the 1860s; see Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 152. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 124.
4. Embalming was developed, for example, to enable the transport of soldiers’ bodies home from distant battle sites. David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 119–20. Marian Adams left a $40,000 estate. For the undertaker’s payment, see inventory of the estate of Marian Adams by Edward W. Hooper, executor, May 26, 1890, Probate Court, Boston; archives of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Boston.
5. The first national meeting of funeral directors was held in 1882 in Rochester, New York. The funeral director “moved in the direction of being a seller of personal services. The new role involved him closely with the bereaved, which he now conceived of as distraught human beings rather than as customers for his wakes.” Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee: Bulfin Printers, 1955), 475–77.
6. Florence Howe Hall, Social Customs (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1887), 256. Florence Howe Hall, The Correct Thing in Good Society (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1888), 202. The author was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and a descendant of one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
7. John Kasson, Rudeness & Civility. Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990) describes authors and audiences for such guides and their discussions of “feeling rules”; see esp. chapters 2 and 5, quote at page 5.
8. Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society (New York: Union Publishing House, 1880), 254, 256.
9. Blanche M. G. Linden, Spring Grove: Celebrating 150 Years (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1995), 93.
10. Sloane, “Retreat from Sentimentality,” chap. five in The Last Great Necessity, 99–127.
11. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), chap. 7.
12. Daughter Alice Longworth regretted that “he never even mentioned my mother to me.” See Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Longworth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 4. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility, 180, refers to “deep acting” based on habitual emotional management to achieve polished social performances.
13. Decorum, 260.
14. Rose E. Cleveland et al., Our Society: A Complete Treatise of the Usages That Govern the Most Refined Homes and Social Circles (Detroit: Darling Publishing Co., 1893), 289, 296.
15. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 132.
16. Hall, Social Customs, 264; Hall, The Correct Thing in Good Society, 208. By 1924 Margaret Emerson Bailey wrote in A Book of Manners: Present-Day Customs and the Courtesies of Social Intercourse (New York: McCall’s Magazine, 1924), 28: “Many persons do not put on mourning even for the closest kin, the idea being that by appearing in somber garments they inflict their sorrow on the notice of a world which is quite uninterested.”
17. In Massachusetts, for example, the life expectancy of a white male born in 1850 was calculated at just 38.3 years, while by 1920 it was 54.1 years. Nationwide figures are not available before 1900. Expectation of life at birth nationwide was 48.2 years for a white male in 1900–1902, compared with 56.3 years for the period 1919–21, according to Census statistics. See charts B126–135 and B116–125, U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International Publications, 1989), 1:56.
18. On the special fears of Bostonians, see, for example, Vincent J. Cannato, “Immigration and the Brahmins,” Humanities, May–June 2009, 12–17.
19. See “Irish Wakes,” on the Irish Apostolate website, http://usairish.org/pastoral-care/irish-rituals/ (accessed February 2014), and in Sean Connolly, ed., Oxford Companion to Irish History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The casket could have been uncovered or covered by a nicely ornamented black cloth called a pall. It was unlikely that anyone but the priest(s) and perhaps altar boys would have received communion, given the requirement for fasting beforehand, which was not practiced when a wake was held. My thanks to Mariann McCormally and Stephen F. Obarski for their assistance in understanding what a Catholic requiem Mass might have included at the turn of the century.
20. “Wm. H. Vanderbilt Dead,” New York Sun, December 9, 1885, 1; “Mr. Vanderbilt’s Funeral,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1885.
21. Mourning Glory: An Exhibition on Nineteenth-Century Customs and Attitudes toward Death and Dying (Wilmington, Del.: Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, 1980), intro. by Mary Durham-Johnson, 3. Elaine Nichols, ed., The Last Miles of the Way: African-American Homegoing Traditions, 1890–Present (Columbia, S.C.: South Carolina State Museum, 1989), 24–29. Karla F. C. Holloway has noted that African Americans, especially vulnerable to early death due to low income and lack of equal access to the best diet, housing, and medical care, often practiced expressive funerals and retained a sense of the presence of haunts and spirits; Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories; A Memorial (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
22. Adams gave friends Rebecca Dodge and Elizabeth Cameron, a senator’s wife who became his emotional confidante, gifts of his dead wife’s jewelry; see Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 506–7.
23. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 1917, republished in revised form in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1914–16), vol. 14, 245–58. On the comparison with slides, see James E. B. Breslin, book review, New York Times, July 24, 1994. On prolonged grief disorder, see Fran Schumer, “After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away,” New York Times, September 29, 2009, D1, D6.
1. William Walton, “A Higher Quality in Funerary Monuments,” American Architect 100, no. 1854 (July 5, 1911).
2. Writers of fiction have also addressed the issue. Marguerite Yourcenar, in her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, for example, described how the Roman emperor had animals killed to see if he could observe their spirits departing the body.
3. For Raboteau’s comments and others, see Robert J. Kastenbaum, Death: A Personal Understanding (Annenberg Media, Sleeping Giant Productions, 1999), video 1, “What Is Death?” The course is based on Kastenbaum’s classic textbook, Death, Society, and Human Experience, 10th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2009), see esp. chap. 2.
4. Hall, Social Customs, 255.
5. Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages, 188.
6. Despair was associated with Sloth, denoting an unease of mind and failure to fully accept God’s order of things.
7. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 125–26. The ideas of eighteenth-century scholar Emanuel Swedenborg, who postulated a heaven not far removed from earth that corresponded to the beauty of nature, proved influential.
8. For “dogged optimism,” see Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 322.
9. The same firms, like the large Memorial Card Company of Philadelphia, might sell “Hail Mary” prayer cards for their Catholic clientele; see advertisement, Memorial Card Co. of Philadelphia, from the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Delaware.
10. C. A. Belin to Mrs. du Pont, April 12, 1880, Box 79, Series E, group 9, Mrs. Samuel Francis du Pont, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.
11. Jane Stanford to Bishop and Mrs. Newman, 1893, n.d.; Jane Stanford to Susan M. Harvey, July 15, 1893, on black-bordered stationery, Stanford Family Papers, Stanford University Archives. The statue at Stanford University was designed by Larkin Mead and dated 1899.
12. Hall’s sermon quoted in Garver, Edward H. Hall, An Address Given in the Church of the Second Parish.
13. James De Normandie, Address Delivered on February 25th, 1912, at the Funeral of Edward H. Hall, D.D., Minister of the First Parish, Cambridge, from 1882 to 1893 (Cambridge, Mass.: First Parish, 1912).
14. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1:35–36. According to James Freeman Clarke’s Manual of Unitarian Belief (Boston: Unitarian Sunday-School Society, 1884), Lesson 9:61, “Unitarians believe that the future life will be a continuation of the present life, with opportunity for further growth and development. They think that every man will go ‘to his place,’ the place where he belongs, the place where it is best for him to be. Jesus says, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so I would have told you’ (John 14.2).”
15. John Hay to Henry Adams, December 9, 1885, in HA Letters.
16. See, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), which develops the theme of openness to a therapeutic culture drawing from many sources among those seeking meaning in this period.
17. Phillips Brooks to sister-in-law “Lizzie” Brooks, January 30, 1883. Brooks traveled to India from December 1882 to March 1883, visiting temples and other tourist sites, including the Bo tree where Buddhism began. “India has interested me intensely,” he wrote Herr von Bunsen on January 28, 1883. “I long to see Christianity come here, not merely for what it will do for India, but for what India will do for it. Here it must find again the lost oriental side of its brain and heart.” Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 2:392–93.
18. Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 143.
19. See Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, eds., Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009) for Gardner’s journal describing their journey; for the quote, see Chong’s “Introduction,” 18–19.
20. Frances Snow Compton [Henry Adams], Esther: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1884). The chief character is caught between religion (the Episcopal minister) and science, each presented as a form of profound mystery; she cannot accept either as providing the answer she requires after her father’s death. Clarence King told John Hay in a letter of July 4, 1886, that in Esther Adams had “exposed his wife’s religious experiences and as it were made of her a clinical subject vis-à-vis of religion.” Clarence King Papers, 1877–1934, Massachusetts Historical Society.
21. See Kastenbaum, Death, Society, and Human Experience, 526.
22. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; repr., New York: Modern Library Edition, 1994), 184, 175.
23. Ibid., 196. The book is based on the Gifford lecture series James gave in Edinburgh in 1901–2. Biographer Robert D. Richardson called it “the founding text” in his William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 5.
24. William James, “The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” American Magazine 68 (October 1909): 580. Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (New York: Penguin Press, 2006) recounts this lifelong quest by James and others to keep an open mind toward the evidence.
25. Compton, Esther, 87. In a letter dated March 20, [1881], Clover tells her father that Mrs. Baird Smith “is delighted with two books of Howells which I had sent her—Foregone Conclusions and Undiscovered Country”; see Thoron, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 278,
26. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 51, 54.
27. Conrad Wright, an expert on the history of the American Unitarian church, commented, “Whatever might have been said positively, it is clear that any Protestant evangelical or Catholic fear that suicide was a barrier to eternal salvation would be rejected.” Letter to author, August 2, 1994.
28. George Upton, “The Facts about Suicide,” New York Independent, April 7, 1904, 763–65.
29. The lecture, entitled “Is Life Worth Living?” was delivered at the Harvard YMCA in April 1895; Richardson, William James, 356; James, The Will to Believe, 35–55, 58–61.
30. Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 20. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York: A. L. Burt, 1880); First Principles was published in 1863 in Britain and underwent multiple revisions and editions.
31. Saint-Gaudens to Rose Nichols, September 23, 1898, quoted in Rose Nichols, ed., “Familiar Letters of Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” McClure’s Magazine, November 1908, 3.
32. “Walt Whitman Laid at Rest,” New York Times, March 31, 1892, 3.
33. In the Middle Ages a “wonder experience” meant an encounter with an object that was singular and significant, according to scholar Caroline Walker Bynum; in later times it might describe an event so extraordinary it could not be explained by the laws of nature. See Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), chap. 1, 37–75; also Penelope Curtis, Wonder—Painted Sculpture from Medieval England (Leeds, U.K.: Henry Moore Institute, 2002), 13–15.
34. Kastenbaum, Death, Society, and Human Experience, 48.
1. Adams purchased lots 202 and 203 in Section E, a grassy expansion section of Rock Creek Cemetery, on December 12, 1885, for $400, according to Ledger Lot Book, 1872–89, Rock Creek Cemetery archives. “Generally a family would buy one lot,” general manager David Downes said in an interview in 1994. “At that time, there probably were 10 burial sites for one lot.” Adams purchased two more lots on March 28, 1887.
2. Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 506, cites this as a tradition of the Sturgis family. It also fits within an “earth to earth” burial campaign in England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to let the body mingle with the earth; see Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages, 188. A “disintegrating coffin” of light permeable material, such as wicker or lattice-work, open at the top, was marketed by several British firms after 1875. In some such interments, the body was laid on a bed of ferns or mosses and covered with herbaceous material, aromatic or flowering plants; Julian Litten, The English Way of Death (London: Robert Hale, 1992), 117.
3. According to an accounting of Marian Adams’s estate filed with the Probate Court in Boston, $12 was paid out on December 28 for “Head stone for grave.” The estate also repaid Henry Adams $411.50 for the money he spent on the cemetery lots plus “expenses.” Account of the executor, Edward Hooper, January 31, 1890, in case No. 74682, Suffolk County Probate Court.
4. The outer boxes made of cheap wood protected the beautifully varnished or cloth-covered casket at the time of burial; see Virginia Russell Remsberg, “From Coffin-Making to Undertaking: The Rise of the Funeral Directing Industry in the 1880s” (Master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1992), 62. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, metallic “caskets” modeled after precious jewel cases made their debut on the U.S. market. See Mourning Glory, 8, and Habenstein and Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing, 171, 273, 400–402.
5. “Vale! Vanderbilt. Sudden Death of the Richest Man in the World,” Washington Critic, December 9, 1885, 1.
6. On cremation, see Sloane, The Last Great Necessity, 142–45, and Habenstein and Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing, 453–57.
7. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 17, 32–33.
8. On invoking the dead but signaling that they have departed forever, see Charlotte Stanford, “The Body at the Funeral: Imagery and Commemoration at Notre-Dame, Paris, about 1304–18,” Art Bulletin 89, no. 4 (December 2007): 665.
9. Charles Francis Adams II spoke of “wind and driving rain” at the cemetery in his “Memorabilia,” May 3, 1891, Charles Francis Adams II Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Cemetery records show that Mrs. Adams was not actually buried until December 11; her body apparently was placed in a holding vault at nearby Oak Hill Cemetery in the interim.
10. Ellen Gurney to Elizabeth Cabot, January 1, 1886, or December 31, 1885. As quoted in Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 223–24, and Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 503–4.
11. See Marian Hooper Adams to Robert Hooper, December 1 and 10, 1878, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. The grave digger had come to America decades earlier as a page to a ballerina named Fanny Elssler, and before that had lived with an upper-crust London family, he told them, taking on his current profession only in the United States. Elssler visited the United States from 1840 to 1842, according to Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography.
12. Marian Adams to Pater (Robert Hooper), February 19, 1882, in Thoron, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 349.
13. Marc Friedlander et al., eds., Diary of Charles Francis Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 7:400.
14. See Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 171.
15. Jacob Bigelow, A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn (Boston: J. Munroe and Co., 1860), 170. Bigelow’s son, Henry Jacob Bigelow, later married William Sturgis’s daughter, Susan. The Sturgises apparently rejected ostentation and developed a tradition at Mount Auburn of modest white marble gravestones inscribed only with the initials of the deceased. Henry Adams may at first have placed a similar stone on Clover’s grave in Washington.
16. An act authorizing the incorporation of a Rural Cemetery Association passed the New York State Legislature in 1847.
17. Angels and female mourning figures sometimes appear in nearly equal numbers. The variety of angels found in rural cemeteries is described by Elisabeth L. Roark in “The Annexation of Heaven: The Angelic Monument in the American Rural Cemetery” (Master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1984).
18. As one of his first important projects, the young sculptor would design a statue there of Justice Story to record his participation. Linden-Ward describes Justice Story’s important role in the development of the cemetery in Silent City on a Hill, 130–32. For the address, see also Sweet Auburn, Fall–Winter 2011, 9.
19. See, for example, Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997), 19.
20. On Bigelow, see Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, esp. 258–94.
21. Ibid., 291. Sphinxes had existed in U.S. cemeteries before the Civil War. David Lawler, one of the founders of Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, had a bluestone sphinx installed there in 1850, commemorating his parents. Linden-Ward has speculated that Bigelow was also influenced by a small Civil War painting by Elihu Vedder entitled The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), then in a private collection in Boston; Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 290–91. Bigelow, An Account of the Sphinx of Mount Auburn, 9, 10, 13.
22. Regulations of the Laurel Hill Cemetery, on the River Schuylkill, near Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John C. Clark, 1840). Some rules, such as restrictions on Sunday visits, might have been adopted to discourage immigrants or low-income visitors deemed to be using the grounds in alien or disrespectful ways.
23. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 127. Sloane, The Last Great Necessity, 115.
24. The German quotation is from scene 19 of Goethe’s Faust. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds two prints of this image; only one has the inscription.
25. Saint-Gaudens served on a panel of experts advising the U.S. Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, and his comments were incorporated in its report on park and cemetery planning, report no. 166, 57th Congress, 1st session. See Charles Moore, ed., The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 58–59.
26. By the turn of the century, the “modern” idea is a modest stone marker that does not stand high enough above the grass to break the continuity of the lawn; see Suzanne S. Ridlen, “Funerary Art in the 1890s: A Reflection of Culture,” Pioneer America Society Transactions 6 (1983): 27–35. The landscape aesthetics were of lesser importance in much of the rural South or the West, which featured different kinds of landscapes. Decoration could be a source of local pride, with distinctive ethnic features. Catholics and Jews more often buried their dead in cemeteries reserved for their faith; Eileen Wilson Coffman, “Silent Sentinels: Funerary Monuments Designed and Executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Tiffany Studios” (Master’s thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1995), 146, 152.
27. See, for example, Annual Reports of the Trustees of the Wood-Lawn Cemetery to the Lot-Owners for the Year 1867 (New York: Office of the Wood-Lawn Cemetery, 1868), esp. 16. Prepared by R. E. K. Whiting, superintendent, Woodlawn Cemetery archives, Bronx, New York.
28. While iron fences and hedges had been encouraged to mark the boundaries of family cemetery plots in the 1840s, these enclosures elicited widespread criticism among the post–Civil War generation. Not only did they create maintenance costs, but they were deemed antithetical to the basic tenets of American democracy in that they perpetuated class divisions and exclusivism as well as conflicting with the emerging interest in unbroken lawn vistas, according to Mourning Glory, 9.
29. Adolph Strauch, Spring Grove Cemetery: Its History and Improvement with Observations on Ancient and Modern Places of Sepulture (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1869), 23.
30. Ibid., 56.
31. Ridlen comments on the “breakdown of kinship emphasis” and “paternal bias” in “Funerary Art in the 1890s,” 35.
32. See “President’s Address” by Ossian C. Simonds, superintendent of Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, during the association’s 1896 convention in St. Louis. Modern Cemeteries: A Selection of Papers Read before the Annual Meetings of the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents, 1887–1897 (Chicago: Association of American Cemetery Superintendents, 1898), 166–70.
33. “Cemetery Superintendents in Annual Convention,” Monumental News 14 (October 1902): 590–91.
34. Mariana Van Rensselaer, Art Out-of-Doors (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 236.
35. Rex McGuinn makes similar parallels for the elegy in his “Discourtesy of Death: The Elegy in the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980), 284, 290.
36. While Mount Auburn had been formed as a private association, Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was intended to be a more democratic space established by the city. As a municipal cemetery, it at first offered free spaces to the indigent. Spaces were more reasonably priced than in Mount Auburn, ultimately attracting the well-to-do and merchant classes, and after the Civil War Forest Hills also became a private nonprofit corporation. Forest Hills Cemetery: Its Establishment, Progress, Scenery, Monuments, Etc. (Roxbury, Mass.: John Backup, 1855), 11–12. Many cemeteries continued to be racially segregated into the second half of the twentieth century. Rock Creek Cemetery adopted a policy allowing interments of blacks only in the 1960s; see “Cemetery Race Policy Reviewed,” Washington Post, April 5, 1964, and “Interment for All Faiths Approved by Rock Creek,” Washington Post, April 14, 1964.
37. J. H. Griffith, “Cremation, the Lawn Plan, and the Granite Industry,” Monumental News 14 (October 1902): 639.
38. Fanny Copley Seavey, “The Cemetery as a Work of Art,” in Modern Cemeteries, 180.
39. Ibid.
40. Van Rensselaer, Art Out-of-Doors, 235.
41. Ibid., 237–39.
42. James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 126.
43. Pyne refers to a “unified therapeutic environment” and design as an agent of progress in her important Art and the Higher Life, 40, 44.
1. Gurney, who had introduced Henry Adams to Marian Hooper, died September 12, 1886.
2. HA to Anne Palmer Fell, December 5, 1886, Massachusetts Historical Society. Fell had informed Adams that she had named her new baby daughter after Marian; see Dykstra, Clover Adams, 212.
3. As a historian Adams was aware that he could shape his own legacy, and he carefully destroyed his earlier diaries and some of his correspondence. He also selectively destroyed some correspondence coming to him and instructed others, such as his friend Elizabeth Cameron, about preservation of his letters. See diary entries September 16 and September 30, 1888, in HA Letters.
4. The exact date of the initial discussions is not known. Adams mentioned seeing Saint-Gaudens and other friends in New York in 1886 as he was departing for Japan. He had made up his mind to proceed with an elaborate memorial by March 1887, when he purchased two more lots at Rock Creek Cemetery, doubling the size of his already substantial plot. Adams purchased lots number 204 and 205 in Section E for $400 on March 28, 1887; “Deed No. 612,” Lot Ledger Book, Rock Creek Cemetery archives, entry 351. For complete accounts, see Cynthia Mills, “The Adams Memorial and American Funerary Sculpture, 1891–1927” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland at College Park, 1996); Joyce Karen Schiller, “The Artistic Collaboration between Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1997); Lois G. Marcus, “Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907)” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 1979), and John Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 189–93.
5. HA to Elizabeth Cameron, April 19, 1903, section quoted is April 21 in HA Letters.
6. Henry J. Duffy, “American Collectors and the Patronage of Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” in Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848–1907: A Master of American Sculpture (Paris: Somogy, Éditions d’Art, 1999), 56.
7. Diary entry, May 3, 1891, Charles Francis Adams II Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
8. C. Lewis Hind, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: International Studio, John Lane Co., 1908), xxx.
9. Duffy, “American Collectors and the Patronage of Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” 49.
10. This is the formula that Adams passed on to other patrons, such as Clara Hay, who came to him later for advice. See Epilogue.
11. Michael Richman, in the introduction to his Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), notes that a sculptor expected four or five reviews by a patron during the production of a statue.
12. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 20th anniversary ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), see 33, 35–36 for “deep acting.”
13. Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: Century Co., 1913), 1:129 for the quote and 1:285 on the sculptor’s reaction to his father’s death. (Hereafter cited as Reminiscences.)
14. Ibid., 2:203.
15. Ibid., 2:60.
16. Quoted in James Earle Fraser unpublished autobiography, Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College.
17. On artistic deference masking a form of resistance or rebelliousness, see Susan Rather, “Contrary Stuart,” American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 66–93, esp. 78.
18. “Highest Art Appreciated Here,” New York Times, April 5, 1908, SM 3.
19. Saint-Gaudens met La Farge in the 1870s, possibly through David Maitland Armstrong. La Farge oversaw the execution of numerous decorative projects for which he hired artists. Saint-Gaudens painted the St. James figure at Trinity Church in 1876 as an assistant to La Farge and worked on the St. Thomas angels in 1877 and the King Tomb in 1877–78.
20. Duffy, “American Collectors and the Patronage of Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” 57n17. For the Saint-Gaudens quote, see Reminiscences, 1:161.
21. M. V. Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, trans. O. W. Wright (New York: Appleton, 1857), 162–63.
22. The bas-relief at St. Thomas, completed in a project arranged by La Farge, was destroyed in a fire in 1905, shortly before Saint-Gaudens’s death.
23. Two plaster sketch models at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site and several photographs are all that remain of the Morgan tomb. See Duffy, “Angels,” in Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 112–13. On the Morgan tomb project, see “A Cemetery Fire,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 23, 1884, 2; correspondence and photos, reel 46, microfilm edition of the Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College; Louise Hall Tharp, Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 179–82; Reminiscences, 1:179, 220–25, 272–73; and “Great Art Work Lost,” Hartford Courant, November 2, 1913, A3.
24. Amor Caritas was reproduced, in reduced form, many times. The Morgan angel also was used for the John Hudson Hale Tomb, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York, ca. 1898, and the Maria Mitchell Memorial in a Philadelphia church; see Thayer Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 40, 42.
25. Fish had first approached sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer about his commission; Palmer, citing poor health, recommended Saint-Gaudens in a letter to the patron on January 6, 1887. Fish and Saint-Gaudens discussed photographs and portraits of the women and the degree of likeness achieved in letters exchanged on June 14, 1889, May 18, 1890, September 2, 1890, and September 4, 1890; Hamilton Fish Papers, Library of Congress. The Fish Papers contain extensive correspondence on the commission.
26. Saint-Gaudens to Hamilton Fish, February 20, 1891, Hamilton Fish Papers.
27. Homer Saint-Gaudens, in Reminiscences, 1:108, describes how Saint-Gaudens at first modeled the figures kneeling and included an infant, which Fish wanted removed, then later began the revised standing version. The final Fish cemetery monument was not installed in the cemetery until late 1891, months after the Adams Memorial. The 1887 Fish contract states the main elements of the projected monument: “two life size figures, in a general way representative, one of his wife, Mrs. Fish, and the other of his daughter, Mrs. d’Hauteville,” with a “bronze cross to be likewise executed according to Mr. St Gaudens design.” Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College. A separate contract with Stanford White was prepared for the setting, and it appears that White ultimately designed the cross; see Lawrence Grant White, Sketches and Designs by Stanford White (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1920), 11. Fish died September 6, 1893.
28. Adams’s niece wrote that he “seized the new abstraction [nirvana] and returned [from Japan] with it, resolved to have the idea embodied in a Western form of expression, that the Western world might understand and be consoled by it as he had been.” Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres, by Henry Adams, with a Niece’s Memories by Mabel La Farge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), 9.
29. Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia, 1890, 956.
1. A number of photographs of Saint-Gaudens’s sketches were contained in a large scrapbook, which survived the fires of 1904 and 1944; see John Dryfhout to Richard Wunder, March 23, 1967, Eduard Pausch curatorial file, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photos of these survive in the Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College.
2. Another surviving drawing proposes a bas-relief of two standing figures on the upper half of a vertical block of stone, with a cornice above. The two figures might also stand for an idea Adams later included in his poem “Buddha and Brahma.” It says, in part, “But we, who cannot fly the world, must seek / To live two separate lives; one, in the world…/ The other in ourselves, behind a veil.” Adams sent the poem to John Hay, April 26, 1895 in HA Letters.
3. Saint-Gaudens to HA, September 11, 1887, Windsor, Vermont, Henry Adams Papers, microfilm edition, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter HA microfilm).
4. White to HA, January 9, 1888, HA microfilm.
5. Reminiscences, 1:356, 359.
6. Homer Saint-Gaudens said his father wrote only one sentence about the Adams Memorial in his original “Reminiscences of an Idiot”: “Following the [Puritan monument to Deacon Samuel] ‘Chapin’ on the scaffolding was the figure in Rock Creek Cemetery which I modeled for Mr. Henry Adams.” But he wrote “Amplify” in the margin. In trying to fill in what happened, the son relied heavily on letters loaned to him by Adams. Homer discussed the Socrates sketch and objections to it in a draft of the Reminiscences and in the article “Augustus Saint-Gaudens Established,” Century Magazine 78 (June 1909): 220. It was not mentioned in the final text for the book published in October 1913, although the photograph of the Socrates clay sketch was retained. The reference to Flanagan’s modeling for the monument was also deleted from both the Century article and the book. Homer Saint-Gaudens may have excised these parts in consideration of Adams’s distaste for any mention of suicide or to a specific model. Drafts of Reminiscences are in the Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College.
7. See Grave Stele of a Seated Woman, Cypriot limestone, ca. 400–350 B.C., purchased by subscription 1874–76 (74.51.2485); and an example acquired in the twentieth century, Fragment of a Grave Stele with a Seated Woman, mid-fourth century B.C., Greek marble found in Attica before 1827, purchased in 1948 (48.11.4); both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
8. Flanagan to Richard Watson Gilder, March 1908, box 15, folder 51, Richard Watson Gilder Papers, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library.
9. Gustav Kobbé, “Mystery of Saint Gaudens’ Masterpiece Revealed by John La Farge,” New York Herald, January 16, 1910, magazine sec., 11.
10. Ibid. La Farge sent a correction to the New York Herald pointing out that he was not at the critical meeting between Saint-Gaudens as Kobbé had stated. “Mr. Adams alone suggested to Saint-Gaudens the meaning and the pose,” he added. “Mr. La Farge Explains,” letter dated January 21, 1910, in New York Herald, January 26, 1910.
11. Flanagan to Richard Watson Gilder, March 1908, Gilder Papers, New York Public Library. It is uncertain, however, whether Flanagan (1865–1952) was working for Saint-Gaudens early enough to have been present for initial meetings. The crucial meeting probably occurred in January 1888 when Adams visited Saint-Gaudens’s New York studio, for Saint-Gaudens wrote Adams on January 25, 1888: “The reason I have not sent you the photographs sooner is the idiot who posed so finely as Budha before you not getting the negatives printed.” On November 5, 1888, Saint-Gaudens could write Adams, “I have commenced on your work.” He asked him to send back “the photographs that I took of my boy” in January.
12. See John Milton, “Il Penseroso,” in Milton: Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1953), 45–50. Many American artists had addressed the theme. Thomas Cole painted an Il Penseroso and Allegro set in the Italian countryside in the 1840s. Hiram Powers completed a standing Penserosa, with proper left hand held to a face tilted slightly upward, in the 1850s and made a bust, Il Penseroso; Joseph Mozier’s Il Penseroso, with a similar gesture and the name inscribed on the base, was exhibited at the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia. Ideal “Penserosa” or “Penseroso” busts were also done by Launt Thompson, Joel Hart, and William Rinehart, among others, before the centennial. Adams was fascinated with Michelangelo’s memorial to Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, widely known as “Il Penserioso.” In May 1899 he wrote niece Louisa Hooper that he was visiting Florence “solely to look once more at the Medici figures,” including the “Lorenzo, pondering over it, but not seeing either Hope or Consolation or Faith”—conventional categories for funerary sculpture.
13. Outside of his funerary work, his major commission in this vein had been Silence, an early marble figure of a woman, holding a rose in one hand and a finger of the other hand to her mouth. It was created for a Masonic lodge in Utica, New York, and he later expressed dissatisfaction with it. See Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 75.
14. HA diary entry, April 29, 1888, in HA Letters.
15. In an entry in his diary, September 30, 1888, Adams wrote: “Have sold at a sacrifice of two thirds all the railroad stock I still own, and am beginning to provide twenty thousand dollars for St. Gaudens and Stanford White,” in HA Letters. White at first acted as an intermediary in the matter, writing Adams on August 13, 1888: “Unless some definite time and price is set, I think he [Saint-Gaudens] will always look upon the thing as a matter half of art and half of friendship, to be begun when he is in the mood.” And on October 2, 1888: “He [Saint-Gaudens] told me that he would rather make the matter a work of love than have you think he was in any way charging you an excessive price, and yet he was in such a position he could not attempt work … unless at some profit.” HA microfilm.
16. On September 2, 1888, White sent Adams a copy of the Hamilton Fish contract as a possible model for an agreement with Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens sent Adams a draft contract October 11. On December 11, 1888, Saint-Gaudens sent the countersigned agreement back to Adams with a “memorandum” [bill] for his preliminary work; HA microfilm. A copy of the contract can be found in the Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College, in papers not microfilmed.
17. HA diary entry for Sunday, December 10, 1888, in HA Letters.
18. Saint-Gaudens to HA, January 3, 1889, HA microfilm. Another set of photographs had changed hands as the work got under way and the pace seemed to quicken. On meeting with La Farge, see Saint-Gaudens to HA, March 21, 1889, HA microfilm.
19. In a letter now lost, Adams wrote to La Farge of his concerns. La Farge in his response tried to soothe Adams’s frayed nerves and offered to pass on information from the artist on the progress of the project. See, for example, La Farge to HA, July, August 14, and September 29, 1889, La Farge Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
20. In January 1888 Saint-Gaudens wrote Adams about a “stunning scheme” White had proposed. By June 11, 1888, White was receiving a bid from the American Marble Co. in Marietta, Georgia, for the stone work, although he advised the company that the large upright stone “may be delayed … on account of the sculpture to go on it, and it may be somewhat altered in form.” White wrote Adams on August 9, 1888, in a similar vein; White Letterpress Books, Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Adams noted in his diary for August 26, 1888, that he had finalized a contract with White for the stone work in HA Letters.
21. Kirk Savage, “The Obsolescence of Sculpture,” American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 12.
22. These ideas are developed in Schiller, “The Artistic Collaboration between Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White.”
23. White also informed Adams that Flanagan had completed a model for the folded wings that would demarcate the ends of the seat. “I am quite proud of the result—it is an owls wing (sleep)—and we invited in one of natures own make to help us.” White to HA, May 29, 1889, HA microfilm.
24. White to HA, May 31, 1889, HA microfilm. White wrote the firm several angry letters calling this “a complete and unpleasant surprise to me,” and stating, “The whole scheme of the monument and the sculpture … contemplates a green monument.” White to American Marble Co., May 31, June 13, and June 25, 1889, White Letterpress Books.
25. White wrote Adams October 26, 1889: “It looks very much as if we would have to give up their stone, in which case I should advise returning to our original idea of a rosy porphyry or granite”; White Letterpress Books. The green marble, mined in smaller blocks, was used primarily as a decorative stone for such purposes as ornamental mantels.
26. The trip to Paris occurred not long after Saint-Gaudens’s most recent project, the figure of James McCosh, was installed at Princeton. Saint-Gaudens had told Adams he would return to active work on his tomb sculpture after the McCosh project was completed; Saint-Gaudens to HA, March 21, 1889. HA microfilm. For “the best modern French sculptors,” see William Walton, Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’exposition universelle (Paris: Barrie Frères; Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1889), part 9, 35.
27. The marble monument, first exhibited at the 1885 Salon, was designed for the tomb of Mme Charles Ferry at Parnay (Maine-et-Loire). The replica shown in 1889 was given to the Luxembourg Museum and is now in the Musée d’Orsay. The sculpture was hailed by writer Henry Havard as a masterpiece of its type: graceful, grand and yet meditative—a charming, poetic figure coming to rest after a life of joy and sorrow. See color plate, Walton, Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’exposition universelle. At the fair, Le Souvenir was displayed in the central rotunda, the Gallery of Fine Art.
28. Saint-Gaudens did not display any of his work in Paris in 1889, but he loaned to the U.S. fine arts exhibition the portrait Kenyon Cox had made of him in 1887. After the fair, he wrote Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer of the “wonderful fête success of the exposition.” But he added, “About the art, my impressions are too complex and result in so much vanity that I’ll modestly refrain.” Reminiscences 1:326.
29. White to HA, October 26, 1888, White Letterpress Books.
30. Lewis Iselin, a sculptor-conservator who supervised the making of a 1967 cast from the Adams monument, speculated that after changes and rearrangements to the drapery were made, Saint-Gaudens patted the wet clay with burlap. The warp and woof of the burlap are sometimes in relief and sometimes in intaglio; Lewis Iselin, “The Adams Memorial: A Reproduction,” Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, copy in the Adams Memorial curatorial file, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Saint-Gaudens describes using a similar method in a letter of September 5, 1905, to Abbott Thayer, Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College. Bronzes from the 1967 plaster cast for the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site at Cornish were made for both Cornish and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
31. Reminiscences, 1:335–36.
32. Saint-Gaudens to HA, February 21 and April 23, 1890, HA microfilm.
33. Saint-Gaudens to HA, May 6, 1890, HA microfilm.
34. HA to Elizabeth Cameron, February 6, 1891, HA microfilm.
35. Saint-Gaudens to HA, May 16, 1890, HA microfilm. Saint-Gaudens added, “La Farge saw it the other day and told me he would give you his impression.” In a May 18, 1890, letter to Adams, La Farge indicated that John Hay also saw it at about this time. “I think that the thing is fine,” La Farge declared, but said he was not sure how Adams would feel.
36. La Farge apparently visited Adams later in May to personally discuss his perceptions. La Farge to HA, May 18, 1890, La Farge Family Papers, Yale University Library. La Farge to HA, May 22, 1890, HA microfilm. While La Farge wrote Adams favorably of the sculpture, he was less pleased with the architectural setting. La Farge held a grudge against White’s architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White, for not commissioning work from him, and he may have swayed Adams’s attitude toward White. The tension between La Farge and White erupted nearly twenty years later when La Farge “set off a bomb” with remarks he made while accepting a medal of honor from the Architectural League of New York. La Farge was quoted as telling the assembled audience, “this recognition from the architects comes very late in life,” when it no longer could be useful to his career, and complained that for twenty-two years “McKim, Mead & White never gave me any work. I don’t know why.” “Late for a Medal, Says John La Farge,” New York Times, January 30, 1909, 1. Adams wrote Richard Watson Gilder on February 2, 1909, “Poor dear La Farge has, indeed, at last got in his little knife on Stanford,” in HA Letters.
37. Directing his lawyer to file suit over import fees on some statuettes in 1889, White wrote, “I brought over some copies of antique statuettes. You know the character of work that I do with St. Gaudens, sculpture and architecture together, and I use these models in my work. I entered them as ‘tools of trade’ and the Treasury Dept. refuses to allow them.… Now this is a trivial matter but at the same time, it contains the kernel of the business.” White to lawyer Charles C. Beaman, October 30, 1889, White Letterpress Books. On White’s career, see Wayne Craven, Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
38. White’s life and philosophy are described in Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (New York: Free Press, 1989), and Lawrence Grant White, Sketches and Designs by Stanford White (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1920). White’s personal ideas about grave decoration may be seen in the tombstone he designed for his father’s grave in Rosedale Cemetery, East Orange, New Jersey. It is a beautifully ornamented marble tablet with a shaped cornice on which are carved an open book and wings. The inscription, “THE RIGHT AND SLEEP,” makes clear that the wings stand for sleep in White’s funerary iconography.
39. White to Saint-Gaudens, February 4, 1890, White Letterpress Books.
40. White to Norcross Brothers, April 30, 1890, and White to Saint-Gaudens, May 12, 1890, White Letterpress Books. A similar circle appeared years later in Alexander Stirling Calder’s Henry C. Lea Memorial in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, a seated figure of History with a great laurel wreath behind, completed by 1912.
41. Honorific, upright torches are used on Saint-Gaudens’s Whistler Memorial, 1906–7, for West Point.
42. Saint-Gaudens to HA, February 21, 1890, HA microfilm.
43. “His range of friendships was vast, and his capacity for friendship was remarkable. He cherished friendships and worked tirelessly and indulgently to maintain and strengthen them.… He was, his friend Royal Cortissoz wrote, ‘a very prince of friends.’ ” Baker, Stanny, ix.
44. White to HA, June 24, 1889 [sic]. A copy is retained in the White Letterpress Books. If this letter was sent as written, Adams made a point of destroying it, for it does not remain in his papers with other letters he received from White.
45. White to Adams, July 7, 1890, White Letterpress Books and HA microfilm.
46. White to Norcross Brothers, July 27, 1890, White Letterpress Books.
47. In the present arrangement, there would not be room to place a circle above the figure’s head. Apparently the capstone was not originally included or an additional capstone was considered later. On January 1, 1893, Saint-Gaudens wrote Adams asking for a photo of the memorial, because “I want to settle the top of the monument.” White followed up on January 6, 1893, saying that Saint-Gaudens had insisted that he “arrange the capping of the slab behind the Nirvana” before a planned trip to Europe that month. White wondered, however, whether Adams really wished the addition. HA microfilm. No further correspondence on this issue survives, but the capstone with its small band of egg-and-dart and wheat-sheaf ornament, foreseen in the earlier McKim, Mead & White renderings, does.
48. Adams forbade his literary executor from including illustrations in his Education, commenting, “I have always tried to follow the rule of making the reader think only of the text.” HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, March 1, 1916 in HA Letters.
49. White to Saint-Gaudens, December 10, 1890, White Letterpress Books.
50. The granite was used for the Bunker Hill Monument in the 1820s. Its purity of color and durability made it costly to quarry, so its greatest use was ornamental. See ads for Quincy Granite, Monumental News 24 (February 1912): 187, and (March 1912): 226. Saint-Gaudens decided to have the rock rubbed to darken it rather than have it polished, wishing to retain its naturalistic quality. See Saint-Gaudens to White, undated handwritten note, folder 9:5(s), box SW9, Stanford White personal correspondence, Avery Drawings & Archives, Columbia University; and White to J. F. Manning, April 1891, White Letterpress Books.
51. HA to John Hay, June 21, 1891, Fiji, in HA Letters. Adams’s niece wrote that he began the trip “over-taxed and overstrained by sorrow, as well as by his efforts to surmount it.” Adams, Letters to a Niece, 9.
52. Cameron had encouraged Adams to take the South Seas journey and during a brief reunion in London afterward apparently held off his advances. One look at their relationship is Ernest Samuels, “Henry Adams and the Gossip Mills,” in Essays in American and English Literature Presented to Bruce Robert McElderry, Jr., ed. Max F. Schulz, William Darby Templeman, and Charles Reid Metzger (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967), 59–75.
53. HA to Cameron, February 6, 1891, Papeete, Tahiti, in HA Letters.
54. HA to Theodore Dwight, February 10, 1891, Papeete in HA Letters.
55. M. J. Fitzgerald for Norcross Bros. to Stanford White, February 28, 1889, Box SW9, White personal correspondence, Avery Drawings & Archives.
56. Saint-Gaudens to HA, March 13, 1891, HA microfilm. White sent Adams a report that “all accounts … are settled in full” on April 22, 1891, after he and Saint-Gaudens made an inspection visit to the cemetery. White Letterpress Books.
57. Cameron to HA, serial letter beginning March 9, 1891, HA microfilm.
58. John Hay to HA, March 25, 1891, in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary (1908; repr., New York: Gordian Press, 1969).
59. Hay’s description “gave me a regular old-fashioned fit of tears,” HA wrote Elizabeth Cameron in a serial letter beginning May 17, 1891, section quoted is Monday, June 1, HA to Saint-Gaudens, June 23, 1891, Siwa, Fiji, in HA Letters.
60. John Hay to HA, June 4, 1891, HA microfilm.
61. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 2:105–6.
1. A copy of the memorandum of agreement between James B. Richardson and Daniel Chester French, dated December 9, 1889, can be found in the Fairmount Park Art Association Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (#2045), box 10, folder 2, attached to a letter dated January 13, 1893, from French to Charles H. Howell. There is no record of any preliminary meetings between Joseph’s widow, Mary Longfellow Milmore, and Daniel Chester French (hereafter DCF).
2. “I have not the contract by me to refer to, but there were almost no specifications in it as I remember, Judge Richardson leaving everything to me,” French later recalled; DCF to Oscar Milmore, August 4, 1914, Daniel Chester French Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter French Papers-LC). A report in the Chicago Graphic, February 27, 1892, which discusses the casting of the statue in some depth, says, “The sculptor was permitted to choose his own subject and to treat it in his own way.”
3. DCF to William M. R. French, February 27, 1889, French Papers-LC.
4. Margaret French Cresson, Journey into Fame: The Life of Daniel Chester French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), 167–68.
5. “Monthly Record of American Art,” Magazine of Art 112 (July 1889): xxviii.
6. DCF’s biological mother, Anne Richardson French, died when he was six. His father, Henry Flagg French, married his second wife, Pamela Prentiss, in 1859.
7. Michael Richman, “The Man Who Made John Harvard,” Harvard Magazine, September–October 1977, 48.
8. See Cresson, Journey into Fame, 142–47, on the state of Pamela Prentiss French after the death of her husband Henry Flagg French (1813–1885), 142. See letter from Harris Preston, London, December 1st(?), 1885.
9. “Dan signed up for Mercié’s sculpture class several evenings a week.” Cresson, Journey into Fame, 145.
10. “Dan found French more difficult than Italian and he was always a little timorous about using what little he did know. But Pamela spoke easily and was never held back by timidity.” Ibid., 145.
11. William Wetmore Story, Reports of the U.S. Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition (Washington, D.C., 1878), 2:11–14.
12. Saint-Gaudens wrote the Gallaudet Monument Committee that he had not intended his letter on behalf of a M. Ballin to be “prejudicial to Mr. French’s interests.” Undated letter, ca. 1884, French Papers-LC.
13. On the Gallaudet sculpture, see Richman, Daniel Chester French, 63–68. For the DCF quote, see Mary French, Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), 154.
14. On French’s biography, in addition to family memoirs, see Greenthal et al., American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 250–53; Thayer Tolles, American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999); Richman, Daniel Chester French; Richman, “The Early Career of Daniel Chester French, 1869–1891” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1974); and Adeline Adams, Daniel Chester French—Sculptor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932).
15. DCF to William M. R. French, September 2, 1889, French Papers-LC.
16. Ball to DCF, April 26, 1877, Wendell Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard, as cited in Richman, Daniel Chester French, 20n28.
17. “All the work … shall be done in an artistic manner, and with such inscriptions on the base as to names &c as may be required,” the contract added. French later sent a copy of his agreement with James B. Richardson, dated December 9, 1889, to a colleague as an example of a “satisfactory” contract that could be the model for another project. See DCF to Charles H. Howell, January 13, 1893, Fairmount Park Art Association Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
18. Cresson, Journey into Fame, 109. French, Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife, 43.
19. Sarita Brady to DFC, October 19, 1881, French Papers-LC.
20. Ministers from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Concord, spoke at his funeral in his studio. French was married at home, not in a church, and there is no mention of a minister presiding at the wedding ceremony.
21. DCF to Ball, February 11, 1891, French Papers-LC.
22. William Brewster to DCF, July 2, 1883, French Papers-LC. French made a relief portrait of his sister Sarah “Sallie” Bartlett as a final tribute of his affection.
23. DCF to Brewster, October 5, 1890, William Brewster Papers, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. French sent Brewster a photo of the monument on May 24, 1892, so that “you may see what use I made of the wings that you were kind enough to send me. I hope they will meet your approval in general even if you cannot decide at a glance which genus or species of angel in particular they belong to.” He introduced Abbott Handerson Thayer to Brewster; DCF to Brewster May 24, 1892, William Brewster Papers.
24. Thayer to the curator of the Smith College Art Gallery, [1912], typescript, Nelson C. White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
25. Roark, “The Annexation of Heaven,” quote at 12. See also Roark’s “Embodying Immortality: Angels in America’s Rural Garden Cemetery, 1850–1900,” Markers: Journal of the Association of Gravestone Studies 24 (2007): 56–111.
26. The angel is dedicated to Maria Frances Coppenhagen (1838–1869), one of six children of the German-born Arnold Coppenhagen. Chandler Post later called it “the acme” of the artist’s capability “in spiritual expression,” demonstrating Milmore’s ability to conceive an ideal female form “with a real and personal content.” Post, “Martin Milmore,” in Art Studies, Medieval, Renaissance and Modern, 59.
27. In the Chickering monument, the angel holds a torch pointed downward in one hand and lifts the veil covering the eyes of a kneeling Faith, who clutches a cross to her breast. Below a female genius of music is carved in relief holding a laurel wreath in one hand and lyre with broken strings in the other. See “Thomas Ball’s Last Work,” Boston Daily Globe, June 27, 1873, 2. French also certainly knew of Saint-Gaudens’s lost Morgan tomb project, one of whose angels had been reproduced on the title page of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s Book of American Figure Painters (1886). French’s brother, William, had begun his career as a landscape architect and civil engineer, and in that capacity worked on a number of cemetery projects with designer H. W. S. Cleveland, including Evergreen Cemetery in Dunn County, Wisconsin.
28. See Cresson, Journey into Fame, 143, about visits to British artists’ studios. Also see John William Waterhouse’s painting Sleep and Her Half-Brother Death (1874).
29. See undated French-language newspaper clippings, 1892 scrapbook, French Papers-LC.
30. See Jane Dillenberger, “Between Faith and Doubt: Subjects for Meditation,” in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, Joshua Taylor et al. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 142, and Richard Murray, http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/vedder/rubaiyatmain.html. Vedder’s image also appeared as a painting in two instances and in other forms.
31. Kastenbaum, Death, Society, and Human Experience, 55.
32. DCF to Ruckstuhl, The Art World, New York, October 10, 1917. French said he learned of the Greek quotation from classics scholar Harriet Fenton, who visited his family’s home in Concord when he was a youth. Years later he asked her for the source, but she said she had forgotten it. DCF to Rev. Elwood Worcester of Emmanuel Church, Boston, June 9, 1927, French Papers-LC.
33. Paul Gardella, American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 12.
34. Roark, “Annexation of Heaven,” 19.
35. At the same time, Gardella noted, angels, which had previously been predominantly depicted as male or androgynous figures, began being interpreted as female guardians. Gardella, American Angels, 74–75, 69, for The Gates Ajar, and 85 for the gender shift of the angels. For an example of the serialization and mention of the Angel of Death in The Gates Ajar, see “Our Boys and Girls: As Allegory—the Silver Thread of Love,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1889, 7.
36. Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience, 446–47, also talks about the longtime desire to see life as a “journey.” Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Constantino Brumidi’s 1865 fresco in the Capitol dome is entitled The Apotheosis of Washington.
37. For critical mention of the parallel with Lefebvre, see undated French-language newspaper clippings, 1892 scrapbook, French Papers-LC.
38. “Summer in Rome,” Daily Evening Transcript, August 25, 1876, 4.
39. DCF wrote to Mrs. G. R. Streeter, Hammond, Indiana, on March 6, 1914: “The sphinx in the relief of ‘Death and the Sculptor’ was introduced because of the significance of the sphinx which is usually interpreted as mystery. In this case the mystery of life and of death. It was a coincidence that Martin Milmore, in whose memory the relief was made, sculptured for a Soldier’s monument in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge a colossal sphinx which some regarded as his best work.” French Papers-LC. He also noted in a letter to Adeline Adams, February 7, 1931, “He [Milmore] had already made a war memorial in the form of a sphinx which was created in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.” French Papers-LC.
40. Thomas Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), 5; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 164, 181.
41. DCF to John M. Goetchius, December 28, 1926, French Papers-LC.
42. Faust, This Republic of Suffering.
43. Scrapbook 29 #253, French Papers-LC. In the sketch, the sphinx is still in its earlier form, facing forward and incomplete.
44. Taft, The History of American Sculpture, 320.
45. For instances of the sphinx in popular culture, see “Spectres on the Stage,” Boston Daily Globe, September 14, 1884, 9; “A Startling Stage Sensation” and “The Stage in New York,” Boston Daily Globe, July 3 and September 23, 1874; and “An Optical Illusion,” Boston Daily Globe, May 28, 1888. Scribner’s Magazine, December 1875, opens with a sphinx, taken from the first plate of Charles Stuart Welles’s Tour of the Nile.
46. See Scott C. Allan, “Interrogating Gustave Moreau’s Sphinx: Myth as Artistic Metaphor in the 1864 Salon,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 1 (Spring 2008), www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring08/39-spring08/spring08article/110-interrogating-gustave-moreaus-sphinx-myth-as-artistic-metaphor-at-the-1864-salon.
47. For “privileged insight,” see Kastenbaum, Death, Society, and Human Experience, 87.
48. Contract with E. Gruet Jeune, Fonderie de Bronze d’Art, 44 bis, avenue de Châtillon, Paris, December 8, 1891, for 10,000 francs, the model to be delivered to his studio and the bronze “soit à l’atelier soit au Salon.” French Papers-LC. The Milmore monument was the only sculpture French had cast outside the United States, suggesting that he recognized its importance for his career. He also mentioned a significant savings that made up for the cost of shipping and duties.
49. French wrote his brother on November 29, 1891, “I am finishing the Milmore. I shall not model the sculptor over as I expected to. It is a better figure than I thought and I shall content myself with remodeling the head and hands.” French Papers-LC.
50. DCF to William M. R. French, January 5, 1892, French Papers-LC.
51. DCF to Anne Keyes in Chicago, May 17, 1892, French Papers-LC.
52. Thomas Ball, My Fourscore Years (Los Angeles: Trecavalli Press, 1993), includes on 34 the text of his letter to DCF on March 23, 1894.
53. For “ten stroke,” see DCF to William M. R. French, February 3, 1893, New York, French Papers-LC. DCF also wrote on November 18, 1892, to Pamela Prentiss French: “I have had a great time getting the Milmore bronze set up in the new gallery of the Fine Arts Society for the Soc. Am. Artist’s exhibition. The doors were too small to admit it and the architect had them enlarged and then the chandaliers [sic] were too low and they had to be taken down and I have done little else in the last week, but attend to the thing.”
54. It was also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1893. It was installed in the cemetery in August 1893, according to Richman, Daniel Chester French, 75. An 1893 installation was confirmed by Pamela Narbeth Mellberg, archivist for Forest Hills Cemetery, letter to the author, August 11, 2005.
55. DCF wrote to Charles Hutchinson, president of the Art Institute of Chicago, on September 28, 1894, that the original bronze of “Death and the Sculptor” might come on to the market, and asked if the museum would want it for $12,000 to $15,000, AIC archives, Hutchinson file. DCF wrote his brother, William M. R. French, on October 28, 1894, that he had “failed to come to an understanding with Judge Richardson about the Milmore.” French Papers-LC.
56. French asked the Milmore family’s consent for the four casts for U.S. museums and added, “I am wavering about sending one to London.” DCF to William M. R. French, January 22, 1894, New York, French Papers-LC.
1. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), 248, provided this description of a period visitor’s perception.
2. The inscription reads: “Elizabeth Boott Duveneck / Born in Boston U.S. April 13th A.D. 1846 / Died in Paris March 22D A.D. 1888.”
3. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 29, 58, 62.
4. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 144.
5. In ibid., 163, author Josephine Duveneck, who was Frank Duveneck’s daughter-in-law, states that the artist returned to the church at the end of his life. “There was a little ceremony in his hospital room,” she writes, “and his sister joined at the same time. I think Duveneck felt that this might represent consolation for her, whose whole purpose in life would be lost in his going.” His sister survived him by only a few days, however.
6. “An Artist’s Grief: How It Finds Expression in Cold Bronze,” Cincinnati Times Star, July 7, 1891.
7. “Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit!” Macduff says, for example, in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act 2, scene 3.
8. Gisants were created in the medieval and Renaissance periods, and a revival occurred in the nineteenth century. Scholars have cited Jacopo della Quercia’s fifteenth-century tomb of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca, which had been admired by John Ruskin and Edith Wharton and reproduced in casts in Florence and in prints, as a precedent for the Boott tomb; see Dinnerstein, “From Private Grief to Public Monument,” 206. For nineteenth-century French examples such as Henri Chapu’s model for the tomb of the duchess of Orléans and others at Dreux, see Antoinette le Normand-Romain, Mémoire de marbre: La sculpture funéraire en France, 1804–1914 (Paris: Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1995).
9. Dinnerstein, “From Private Grief to Public Monument,” 204, suggests that Browning’s tomb in Florence might have inspired a desire by Francis Boott to support a similar one for his daughter.
10. James to Boott, July 14, [1893], in Edel, Henry James Letters, 1883–1895, 417–18.
11. The bronze at Elizabeth Boott Duveneck’s gravesite was cast in 1892. For the marble version, see Greenthal et al., American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 209–13. Duveneck told others that he sank into despair after touching up the features of Lizzie’s face on the marble monument; he feared he might have ruined the stonework prepared by Italian workmen, but found later that he had not; see accounts by Howard Walker and Julius Rolshoven as cited in Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 127, and in Mary Alexander, “Cincinnati Artist Returns to Place Where He Painted Many Noted Canvases,” July 9, 1925, clipping, Duveneck scrapbook, Cincinnati Art Museum archives. William Couper, Thomas Ball’s son-in-law and eventual partner, arranged for the block of marble.
12. Duveneck gave the marble to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1912 after Francis Boott’s death. Boott may also have contributed financial support to the casting of the original cemetery bronze.
13. Henry Lee to Francis Boott, March 12, 1895, Frank Duveneck Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Duveneck Papers, AAA).
14. Extract from Ella’s letter [presumably Ella Lyman], September 1891, Duveneck Papers, AAA.
15. Duveneck, Frank Duveneck, Painter-Teacher, 127. After Lizzie’s death, Francis Boott lived with his sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near William James, with whom he shared a close friendship. When Boott passed away in 1904, James wrote the address for a memorial service held for him; see ibid., 125. A music competition at Harvard University was endowed in Boott’s honor. Boott’s own remains were cremated and buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery beneath a simple marker; see “Funeral of Francis Boott,” Boston Daily Globe, March 4, 1904, 5; and Boott, Recollections of Francis Boott, 57–58. Although a number of sources state that his wife, Elizabeth Lyman Boott, who died in 1846, and their infant son Frank, who was born in 1845 and only lived a few months, were buried at Mount Auburn, the cemetery has no record of their gravesite.
16. Taft, The History of American Sculpture, 526.
17. The cast that Duveneck gave to the Cincinnati Art Museum is usually considered the original plaster. Duveneck gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a plaster, cast from the Cincinnati version, in 1917, and the Metropolitan had it cast in bronze in 1927 by Gorham Manufacturing Company. The Metropolitan then donated its plaster (no longer extant) to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. At least three other known plasters are believed to be no longer extant: a plaster made in 1898 for the Art Institute of Chicago from the Boston marble, and plasters at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San Francisco Art Association. The Yale University Art Gallery owns a plaster (1990.17.1) of “unknown provenance.” Paula B. Freedman, A Checklist of American Sculpture at Yale University (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1992), 59.
18. On Burd, see Constance M. Vecchione, “Memorial Art in North American Churches, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Some Sources, Styles, and Implications” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1968), figs. 85 a, b. The sculpture of Robert E. Lee, designed by Edward Valentine, was completed in 1875. Similarly, Elizabet Ney designed a gisant of General Albert Sidney Johnston, a Texas war hero. It was completed in 1903 and placed in an Austin cemetery, where it rests inside an iron enclosure in the form of a Gothic chapel. Moses Ezekiel designed two figures at Cornell, Mrs. Andrew Dickson White (1889) and Jennie McGraw Fiske (1908). See Ezekiel, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian, ed. Joseph Gutmann and Stanley F. Chyet (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 411, figs. 62, 63, 65.
19. See, for example, the effigies of Dr. Morgan Dix by Isidore Konti in Trinity Church, New York; Bishop Horatio Potter by Konti and Henry Codman Potter by James Earl Fraser, both in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York; and Father Brown by J. Massey Rhind in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, as cited in Francis Hamilton, “Contemporary Tomb Figures,” International Studio, October 1925, 23–27. Also see Bela Pratt’s recumbent effigy of Bishop Henry A. Neely created for the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Luke in Portland, Maine, 1904; Monumental News, 1905, 739–40. See Diana Strazdes, “Tomb Effigy of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck,” in The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914, ed. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992), 371.
20. See Sadakichi Hartmann, “Ecclesiastical Sculpture in America,” Catholic World 77, no. 462 (September 1903): 760–67, and “Ecclesiastical Statuary,” Monumental News 13, no. 9 (September 1901): 511.
21. DCF to Duveneck, August 4, 1895; DCF to Frank B. Duveneck, March 25, 1926; both in French Papers-LC.
22. Duveneck to Francis Boott, December 20, 1896, Duveneck Papers, AAA. Duveneck did work together with Barnhorn on two commissions for portrait sculptures for Harvard University, a bust of president Charles W. Eliot and a bronze seated portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
23. For the quote, see Henry Turner Bailey, “The Lenten Season, 1910,” typed transcript in Duveneck scrapbook, Cincinnati Art Museum archives. Two of Duveneck’s oil studies for the mural’s composition and another for the Crucifixion are in the museum’s collection. Sketches in a decorative frame are also in the Good Samaritan Hospital, Cincinnati, where Duveneck was cared for during his final illness.
24. “Notables at Funeral of Duveneck,” clippings, Duveneck Papers, AAA, reel 1151, frames 726–28. The Cincinnati Art Museum installed a memorial display: a portrait of the artist, surrounded by his paintings and directly facing its plaster cast of his monument to Lizzie.
25. Royal Cortissoz, American Artists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 160.
26. On the Mother of God Cemetery memorial, see Mary L. Alexander, “Work of Two Masters Are Reflected in This Memorial,” May 13[?], 1926, clipping, artist files, Cincinnati Art Museum. Gatherings continue each Memorial Day, according to the Cincinnati Art Club website, www.cincinnatiartclub.com/20301.html#duveneck.
27. The inscription on the Crucifixion is in German: “Ich bin du Auferstehung / und das leben ++ Jon 11–25” (I am the resurrection and the life). Barnhorn, who traveled in Italy and studied in Paris for five years after working with Duveneck on his wife’s memorial, spent his remaining career in Cincinnati, sculpting and teaching. When a retrospective exhibition was held in 1934, Cincinnati newspapers declared him the greatest ecclesiastical sculptor of his era. He made a number of other cemetery memorials, including the Burkhardt Memorial in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery, also known as Grief (1908). See Mary Alexander, “The Week in Art Circles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 14, 1934, 8; Mary Sayre Haverstock et al., Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000), 49–50; Retrospective Exhibition of Sculpture by Clement Barnhorn, January 16–February 11, 1934 (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1934); and artist’s file, Cincinnati Art Museum.
28. The bulk of the rest of his estate, including his interest in his late wife’s fortune, was left to his two grandsons, and other amounts to siblings, nephews, and nieces. See “Duveneck Will Is Copied,” clipping, Frank Duveneck Papers, AAA, reel 1151, frame 774.
29. Frank Duveneck, 1848–1919, Cincinnati Museum Association, 1919.
1. From 1903 to 1931 French played an influential role at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which with its Rogers Fund began to acquire contemporary sculpture; Thayer Tolles, “A History of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Sculpture Collection,” in American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, xvi-xxii.
2. A version of the head from the Adams monument was apparently exhibited briefly in New York in 1900 as Nirvana; see Catalogue of Works by Members, Students and Instructors of the Art Students’ League of New York (American Fine Arts Society, May 10–19, 1900), no. 503, where it was listed as “loaned by Mrs. Tonetti” (Mary Lawrence Tonetti, who had been a student and assistant to Saint-Gaudens). A photograph of the Adams Memorial was shown at the 1898 Champs-de-Mars Salon as part of the major Paris display of Saint-Gaudens’s body of work, and other photos circulated in the media. The closing date for the blockbuster Saint-Gaudens memorial exhibition was extended twice, and the catalogue was reprinted twice. Saint-Gaudens had had a regular interaction with the Metropolitan over the years, contributing some objects, memorializing fellow artists, and using the collection as a resource; see Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum, 50–54.
3. On February 1, 1908, at the end of a second trial, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental institution.
4. Reminiscences, 2:354–55.
5. The death mask, held by the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, has been exhibited publicly only once, in a show entitled Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A Personal Retrospective in 2007 at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site Picture Gallery, according to curator Henry Duffy.
6. See “Funeral Services Held over the Ashes of Saint Gaudens,” Boston Herald, August 8, 1907. Lydia Parrish’s account of the service is described by Burke Wilkinson in his Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), which cites “Mrs. Parrish’s unpublished diary, courtesy of the late Maxfield Parrish, Jr.” The Stevenson prayer was included on the St. Giles monument in Edinburgh, Scotland.
7. Saint-Gaudens’s ashes had initially been placed in a brick vault in nearby Ascutney Cemetery in Windsor, Vermont. The temple was originally designed by Henry Hering as the central stage piece of the pageant; it was carved in marble in 1914 from a design by William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White. Other family members are also buried there, including Augusta, their son, Homer, and Augustus’s brother Louis. On the pageant, see Henry Duffy, “A Masque of ‘Ours’ or the Gods and the Golden Bowl,” Friends of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Newsletter, Spring 2005, 1–5. On the tomb, see Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 312.
8. This line is used in Franz Liszt’s Trois odes funèbres.
9. George B. McClellan, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” Putnam’s & the Reader 4 (August 1908): 569–73.
10. Adams also later consented to Mrs. Saint-Gaudens’s request that a bronze head of the Adams Memorial in her possession, fashioned from the original plaster, be included in further retrospectives in other cities. Saint-Gaudens gave a bronze version of the head to his architect friend Daniel Burnham; see Cynthia Mills, “Casting Shadows: The Adams Memorial and Its Doubles,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 6–9. On other heads, realized or proposed, see Mills, “The Adams Memorial and American Funerary Sculpture, 1891–1927,” 210–17 and 248–51nn4, 15, 18.
11. Edward Robinson to HA, November 5, 1907, HA microfilm. HA to Robinson, January 22, 1908, in HA Letters. Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1908), no. 64.
12. See Royal Cortissoz, “Art Exhibitions: The Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Museum,” New York Tribune, March 3, 1908; and Glenn Brown, Memories (Washington, D.C.: W. J. Roberts Co., 1931), 504–5, 543–44.
13. The Washington Herald ran massive coverage of the exhibition opening and disagreed with Cortissoz about the effect of the white plaster, which it called even “more impressive than the original” bronze. “The reproduction in plaster has a touch of mystic lightness that really seems to add to its beauties.” “Bears Native Stamp,” Washington Herald, December 16, 1908, 9. The sculpture was “given a room to itself, secluded and set off as nearly as possible as it is in Rock Creek Cemetery” in the later retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago; “Saint-Gaudens Memorial Exhibit in Chicago,” Monumental News 21 (September 1909): 681.
14. John Dryfhout to curator Richard Wunder, March 23, 1967, curatorial file, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
15. Near the end of his life, French played a key role in commissioning a gilded bronze cast of the Duveneck tomb for the Metropolitan’s permanent collection.
16. An Exhibition of American Sculpture, March 1918 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1918), cat. nos. 22, 26, 80, 81.
17. “Exhibitions of Art in Great Variety: Art at Home and Abroad, New York Times, March 17, 1918, 88.
18. Adeline Adams, “Contemporary American Sculpture,” Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 13, no. 4 (April 1918): 81–82.
19. Hamilton, “Contemporary Tomb Figures,” 26.
20. A 1919 cast was commissioned of the Amor Caritas. French helped to influence the acquisition of a number of Saint-Gaudens’s works, with his last acquisition being Saint-Gaudens’s Diana; Tolles, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 57–58.
21. Frank Duveneck’s “very beautiful and sensitive” memorial “makes one wish that your father had done more in sculpture,” French commented in a letter to the artist’s son, Frank Boott Duveneck, April 24, 1926, Duveneck Papers, AAA.
22. DCF to Abbott Handerson Thayer, March 27, 1916, Abbott Handerson Thayer Correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
23. “Notables at Bier of Daniel C. French,” New York Times, October 12, 1931, 20. Richman, Daniel Chester French, 205. The working model of The Genius of Creation remained in the studio after it was made in 1914. For an account of a memorial exhibition of DCF’s work held in 1932 at Grand Central Galleries, see “Art in Review/Memorial Exhibition of Work by Daniel Chester French,” New York Times, June 8, 1932, 22.
24. William M. R. French is buried in Mount Greenwood Cemetery, Chicago. DCF was at his bedside when he died in 1914. See “French Funeral Set for Tomorrow,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 4, 1914, 2. “Will,” as his brother called him, was remembered for having popularized art in Chicago through the Art Institute, which he had led from its inception.
25. See Catalogue of the Exhibition of the National Sculpture Society under the Auspices of the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore, April 4 to April 26, 1908.
26. “For Better Types of War Monuments: Address before Convention of American Federation of Arts by Adeline Adams,” Monumental News 30 (November 1918): 482.
1. “Death Mask of Gen. Grant Completed,” New York Times, January 6, 1896. The mask was taken in 1885.
2. “The McKinley Death Mask,” New York Times, November 19, 1901. For the payment to Pausch, see “Fees for McKinley Doctors,” New York Times, March 11, 1909, 6.
3. Pausch’s business stationery included the heading at upper left: Eduard L.A. Pausch, / (maker of President McKinley death mask.) / Figure and Ornamental / .. Sculptor .. / Plaster models and casts / of all descriptions.” At upper right it listed studios in Buffalo, New York, and Westerly, Rhode Island. See Pausch to Edwin Elwell, August 11, 1903, Elwell Collection of American Sculptors’ Letters, Thomas R. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
4. One such bronze cast of the Lincoln life mask taken by Leonard Volk is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Masks of several individuals remain in the collection of the Saint-Gaudens estate, according to curator Henry Duffy, who has found evidence that Saint-Gaudens and artist Will Low also took a death mask of General Sherman in New York.
5. Eduard L. A. Pausch to Edwin Elwell, July 15, 1903, Elwell Collection of American Sculptors’ Letters. Pausch, who had lived in Connecticut and in Westerly, Rhode Island, settled in Buffalo after the fair.
6. These films, re-created from paper prints deposited with the U.S. Copyright Office, are available today via the Library of Congress American Memory project online or the library’s Motion Picture & Television Reading Room. The Edison Company’s Edwin S. Porter later filmed a dramatic reenactment of the execution of Leon Czolgosz. See Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 184–90.
7. Roxanne Nilan, “The Life & Times of a Victorian Lady: Jane Lathrop Stanford,” Sandstone & Tile (Stanford Historical Society) 21, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 3–14.
8. See “The Cemetery Robbery,” New York Times, November 9, 1878, A1, and daily front-page articles on the break-in at St. Mark’s Church graveyard through November 21.
9. See Barbara Lanctot, A Walk Through Graceland Cemetery (Chicago: Chicago Architecture Foundation, 1988), 52–53.
10. Ibid., 18. The Pullman monument was designed by Solon Spencer Bemen, the architect of the company town of Pullman.
11. “Jay Gould’s Body at Rest: Placed in the Mausoleum at Woodlawn Yesterday,” New York Times, December 7, 1892.
12. “The Mackay Mausoleum,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1896, 8.
13. “Will of H. A. Lozier: Cleveland Man Who Died Here Suddenly Left over $1,000,000,” New York Times, June 19, 1903, 9.
14. Van Rensselaer, Art Out-of-Doors, 237–39.
15. Moore, The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, 57–59.
16. Mark Bennitt, ed., History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis: Universal Exposition Publishing Co., 1905), 717–18, 720.
17. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1884) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
18. See, for example, “Hypocrite,” New York Times, June 7, 1887, 4; and “Vaudeville,” New York Times, March 28, 1909, 8.
19. “Puns on Tombstones,” New York Times, August 27, 1899, 21.
20. On changing attitudes about inscriptions, see Arthur W. Brayley, History of the Granite Industry of New England (Boston: National Association of Granite Industries of the United States, 1913), 127–31.
21. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1.
22. Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Norman Hapgood, May 24, 1906, Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College.
23. Boris Emmet and John E. Jueck, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears Roebuck and Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). Sears Roebuck & Co., Tombstones and Monuments (Chicago: Sears Roebuck & Co., 1902), 1.
24. Tombstones and Monuments, 15, 38, 50. On marketing, see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Makings of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
25. Tombstones and Monuments, 62. Sears sent letters to undertakers urging them to keep the firm’s catalogue on hand and suggest its value; see “Firm Changes and Other Trade News,” Monumental News 29, no. 6 (June 1917): 346.
26. “Thinks Tombstone Too Costly,” New York Times, July 13, 1899, 4.
27. Charles Bianchi & Sons advertisement, Granite, Marble and Bronze 23, no. 6 (June 1913): 21.
28. See undated catalogue, Memorials: The Smith Granite Company, Westerly, Rhode Island.
29. For a good listing, see Brayley, History of the Granite Industry of New England.
30. “Firm Changes and Other Trade News.”
31. Out-of-Door Memorials: Mausoleums, Tombs, Headstones, and All Forms of Mortuary Monuments (New York: Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company, 1898), n.p.; Tiffany Studios Memorials in Glass and Stone (New York: Tiffany Studios, 1913), n.p.
32. Out-of-Door Memorials, n.p.
33. Ibid.
34. Coffman, “Silent Sentinels,” 184.
35. Ibid. catalogues his memorials.
36. Of course, Tiffany had long been making stained-glass windows, and many were adapted for mausoleums or chapels. The windows were the topic of Elizabeth de Rosa, “Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Development of Religious Landscape Memorial Windows” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995).
37. Tiffany Studios Memorials in Glass and Stone, n.p.
38. Coffman, “Silent Sentinels,” 141.
39. See, for example, Tiffany Studios Memorials in Glass and Stone, n.p.
40. On the Rabboni sculpture, see Mills, “The Adams Memorial and American Funerary Sculpture,” 308–20.
41. “The ability to produce, to perceive, to discern, and to appreciate authentic art became one mark of an authentic self,” writes Barry Shank, “a self that signaled its coherence and integrity at least in part through cultural habits, beliefs, and behaviors that were meant to … indicate a cultural superiority that was predicated on this self’s ability to rise above the desires and tastes produced in mass culture and…[remain] untouched by economic determinations.” Shank, “Subject, Commodity, Marketplace: The American Artists Group and the Mass Production of Distinction,” Radical History Review 76 (Winter 2000): 25–26.
1. Saint-Gaudens’s Lincoln, Shaw, and Sherman Memorials topped the list; see “The Best Art in America,” Art and Progress 4 (June 1913): 1007–9; and “Our Greatest Monuments,” Monumental News 25 (August 1913): 549.
2. Lorado Taft, “Daniel Chester French, Sculptor,” Brush and Pencil 5, no. 4 (January 1900): 151.
3. “Boston Public Monuments (Continued),” Monumental News 25, no. 7 (July 1913): 491.
4. On Clemens’s print, see Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, 4 vols. (1912; repr., New York: Chelsea House, 1980), 3:1351. For the Thistle prints, see Thistle Publications: Office Catalogue of Works of Art Reproduced from Eleven Leading Galleries of the United States and Many Private Collections (Detroit: Detroit Publishing Co., 1912).
5. See, for example, Curtis & Cameron, The Copley Prints (Boston, 1902).
6. “The Convention of Cemetery Superintendents, Washington D.C.,” Monumental News 17 (November 1905): 752–54. For the delegates’ schedule, see Association of American Cemetery Superintendents, Proceedings of the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents (Park and Cemetery Press, 1905), 49.
7. “It Shocks the Rector: Henry Adams Places a Figure of Despair over the Grave of His Wife,” Boston Herald, July 9, 1891.
8. HA to Richard Watson Gilder, October 14, 1896, and HA to Homer Saint-Gaudens, January 24, 1908, in HA Letters. There have been many reports that Samuel Clemens coined the name “Grief.” That claim has never been documented, though Clemens did visit the memorial in 1906.
9. HA to Elizabeth Cameron, April 16, 1900 in HA Letters.
10. See Jane Aser, ed., The Ladies and Gentlemen’s Etiquette Book of the Best Society (London: S. Low, Son & Co., 1881), 40, 46, 88.
11. John E. Monk, “Sculpture, Romance, Gossip,” Albany Evening Journal, August 8, 1907.
12. HA to Edward Robinson, November 6, 1907 in HA Letters.
13. Augusta Saint-Gaudens to HA, November 11, 1908, HA microfilm.
14. Brewster to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, December 17, 1908, HA microfilm.
15. On Agnus, see Baltimore: Its History and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1912), 81–84; “Gen. Felix Agnus Dies at Age of 86 at His Home,” Baltimore Sun, October 31, 1925, 26; National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White & Co., 1898) s.v. “Agnus, Felix,” 1:200; and Dawn F. Thomas, The Green Spring Valley: Its History and Heritage (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1978), 1:133–36.
16. Brewster to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, December 21 and 23, 1908, Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College. Brewster asked McKim, Mead & White to obtain estimates for the stone work for a duplicate monument.
17. “Sculptors Indignant,” New York Tribune, February 6, 1909, 14. This account of the Agnus Memorial was first published in Mills, “Casting Shadows.”
18. For correspondence with Adams on the copyright issue, see Brewster to HA, January 30, February 5, 17, and 20, 1909, HA microfilm; and Brewster to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, February 19 and 26, 1909, Saint-Gaudens Papers, Dartmouth College. The design was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C., in the name of Augusta Saint-Gaudens on January 16, 1909.
19. The suit named J. Frank Salter of New London, Connecticut, doing business as John Salter & Son in Groton. See “Among the Sculptors,” Monumental News 22 (November 1910): 805. The portrait of Agnus appears to have been made by Henry Baerer.
20. See Study Commission on Maryland Folklife, Final Report of the Study Commission on Maryland Folklore (Bethesda, Md., 1970), 16; and George C. Carey, Maryland Folklore (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1989), 93–97. Baltimore newspaper articles have included “Teenagers’ Visits Irk Cemetery Officials,” Evening Sun, January 16, 1950; “Black Aggie: Legend Grows around Cemetery Statue,” Evening Sun, September 7, 1966, C1; and “Black Aggie Gone, not Forgotten,” Evening Sun, September 16, 1976, C1.
21. The 2,400-pound sculpture, shipped to Washington in 1967, was assigned accession number 1967.139, the gift of Louise Leser, in the Eduard Pausch curatorial file at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. General Services Administrator Terence C. Golden first considered placing it in one of the Blair House gardens. On the GSA installation and adjacent historic buildings, see Daniel B. Krinsley, “An Unexpected Rendezvous at the Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square,” Cosmos: Journal of the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C., 1998, 107–20.
22. According to the cemetery lot and grave index, Charles E. Meding acquired the lot on July 24, 1906. Son Charles Meding Jr., twenty-seven years old, died in 1906, and the father died in October 1918. My thanks to Rosemary Lanes of Princeton Art Services for pointing out this monument and to Paterson historian Howard Lanza for discussing it with me.
23. At age eighty, he returned to the Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, summer home he and Clover had built. Afterward he began speaking about Clover with Aileen Tone, a young woman who served as his companion in his last years, according to Harold Dean Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), cii. Cater interviewed Tone, who said Adams told her, “My child, you have broken a silence of thirty years” after she asked him about Clover.
24. HA to Moreton Frewen, July 2, 1913 in HA Letters.
25. The plaster of the Adams Memorial remaining from the casting process burned in a fire at Cornish, but later casts of the head survived because Saint-Gaudens had made one as a gift for his friend Daniel Burnham and it was recast by Augusta Saint-Gaudens. Mrs. Saint-Gaudens had the head in her possession copyrighted on November 4, 1908; see Copyright Office records, Library of Congress. After the Black Aggie debacle, a casting of the whole figure in the cemetery was permitted in the late 1960s so that one could be displayed at Cornish and another at the Smithsonian to replace the pirated copy. The bronze in Cornish is displayed outside in a landscaped setting, and the one at the Smithsonian American Art Museum against a photographic backdrop of a cemetery.
26. See Sarah Burns, “Populist versus Plutocratic Aesthetics,” in Inventing the American Artist: Art & Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), esp. 300–304.
27. Helen B. Emerson, “Daniel Chester French,” New England Magazine, n.s., 16, no. 3 (May 1897).
28. “Daniel Chester French, Sculptor,” Munsey’s Magazine 19, no. 2 (May 1898): quotes at 235–36, with engraving of Milmore, 234.
29. Charles Caffin, American Masters of Sculpture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913), 62.
30. The Metropolitan Museum of Art formally accepted the marble sculpture in 1926. A copy of the Wachs poem is included in the museum’s curatorial file.
31. Preston Remington, “The Angel of Death and the Sculptor,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, July 1926, 162.
32. Lorado Taft, Brush and Pencil 5, no. 4 (January 1900): 151.
33. Adams, Daniel Chester French, Sculptor, 27.
34. Baldwin & More advertisement, Monumental News 21, no. 9 (September 1909): 728. The Kavanagh advertisement appeared in Monumental News on several occasions, including 23, no. 12 (December 1911): 922.
35. DCF to Ralph H. Jones Company, attention Earl R. Trangmar, French Papers-LC.
36. Walton, “A Higher Quality in Funerary Monuments,” second page of article.
37. See undated newspaper advertisement beginning, “Genoa may have its Campo Santo—but the Nation’s Capital has its Rock Creek Cemetery,” vertical files, Historical Society of the District of Columbia. The ad appears to be from the Evening Star sometime after March 1941. Also Rock Creek Cemetery, 1933 promotional brochure.
38. Washingtoniana collection, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, D.C.
39. DCF to Oscar Milmore, August 4, 1914, perhaps a draft of an unsent letter because a different letter was sent on August 5: “It is true that Judge Richardson was not satisfied with the stone work, but in view of the fact that the expenses of the monument, not counting my own time as anything whatever, were almost equal to the whole sum that I received for it, he finally accepted it. Later, at my own expense, as I knew that the work was not standing as the architect and contractor assured me it would, I made a new top, and made other changes, for it.” The August 5 letter suggested that arrangements could be made for the Milmores to retain ownership if the monument were moved. DCF to Oscar Milmore, August 4 and 5, 1914, French Papers-LC.
40. The November 1, 1943, date is listed on lot cards in the Forest Hill Cemetery archives. The bodies of the Milmores were also moved to the new site.
1. The monument was mentioned frequently after Story’s death on October 7, 1895, when it was pictured in Cosmopolitan magazine.
2. Jane Stanford (hereafter JS) to May (Mrs. Mark) Hopkins, February 25, 1884, Stanford Family Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. (hereafter Stanford Papers).
3. Leland Stanford Jr., born in 1868, died on March 13, 1884, at age fifteen years ten months.
4. “The Stanford Mausoleum,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1888, 6.
5. “The Stanford Tomb,” article from the San Francisco Chronicle reprinted in Scientific American, Architects and Builders Edition, May 1889, 75. Stanford had originally included $100,000 in his will for erection of the mausoleum, but that clause was deleted before his death since the mausoleum had already been completed.
6. Robert Caterson monument company catalogue, Woodlawn Cemetery Archives, the Bronx, New York.
7. “The Stanford Mausoleum,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1888, 6.
8. For the quote about the death mask, see Couper to JS, August 12, 1890, Stanford Papers. The death mask, cast in plaster from a wax facial mold, is in the Stanford University Archive, L44.2.1998.
9. Couper to JS, September 9, 1891, Stanford Papers. Couper sent the bill of lading for the shipment to San Francisco by way of New York on September 25, 1891. He first sent a photo of a small model so that “you may see the character of the Sphinx I propose to make,” July 17, 1890. Carol M. Osborne, Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art, 1870–1906 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Museum of Art, 1986), 58. JS later traveled to Egypt to visit the source of their inspiration.
10. For “our loved one,” see, for example, JS to Andrew D. White, May 19, 1901, Stanford Papers.
11. JS to May Hopkins and Mrs. Park, May 15, 1889, Stanford Papers.
12. On their vision for the university, see O. L. Elliott, Stanford University: The First Twenty-Five Years (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1937), 11–12, and Gunther W. Nagel, Iron Will: The Life and Letters of Jane Stanford (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford, Calif., rev. ed. 1985), 41.
13. The painting by Astley David Montague Cooper, Mrs. Stanford’s Jewel Collection, 1898, is in the collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
14. JS to David Starr Jordan, September 5, 1899, Stanford Papers. “I realize fully at this late day that education of the brain is not all that God exacts from us. The soul life and high moral sense must be awakened and book learning is not all that is required,” she wrote David Charles Gardner on February 26, 1904; quoted in Nagel, Iron Will, 186.
15. Robert C. Gregg et al., Stanford Memorial Church: Glory of Angels (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Alumni Association, 1995).
16. JS to Andrew White, May 19, 1901, Stanford Papers. “On the 21st of June Mr. Stanford will have been gone from earth-life eight years.” Another inscription in the church states, “Earth grants joys that are great; but transplant such joys to Heaven … and they grow to a magnitude beyond the comprehension of earth mind.” The Larkin Mead statue was first placed in a prominent position on the campus and only later moved near the mausoleum.
17. Nagel, Iron Will, 120.
18. JS to May Hopkins, talking about next Saturday, March 9, box 3, folder 18, Stanford Papers.
19. See Gregg et al., Stanford Memorial Church for details of church decoration.
20. JS to Mrs. David Starr Jordan, wife of the university president: “I am sending my comforters … these books I now dare to send. My secret long cherished loving words that led me to love God as I never loved him before. He called my dear ones from earth life to Heaven … Dec. 6, 1901.” Inscription, Stanford archives. Ernest Warburton Shurtleff, The Shadow of the Angel (Boston: L. Prang & Company, ca. 1895).
21. Shurtleff, Shadow of the Angel, 1, 3.
22. This is just one of a number of paintings commissioned before and after his death. See also Félix Chary’s Leland Stanford Jr., Aged 15 Years, 1884, with a broken column, in the Cantor Center at Stanford University.
23. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv.
24. Osborne, Museum Builders in the West, 39.
25. JS to Andrew White, May 19, 1901, Stanford Papers. The statues of the apostles were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and were not replaced.
26. JS to Mrs. David Starr Jordan, March 25, 1899, Stanford Papers.
27. San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 1899, 10. The newspaper said he had lived principally with Mrs. Stanford during his illness.
28. See “Beautiful Statue of the ‘Angel of Grief’ on the Stanford Campus,” Sunday Examiner Magazine, March 10, 1901, n.p. Rita Jamison, “The Many Sorrows of an Angel,” Sandstone & Tile (Stanford Historical Society), 18, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 5.
29. JS to Susan M. Harvey, July 15, 1893, on black-bordered paper, Stanford Papers. “Alone! All alone! My acheing bleeding heart cries, but I look afar and see the joy beyond in the Fairer Land, Father and Son together.” For “lonely bleeding bruised one,” see JS to Bishop and Mrs. Newman, 1893, n.d., Stanford Papers.
30. “Beautiful Statue of the ‘Angel of Grief.’ ”
31. See “Originality in Monuments,” Monumental News 13 (July 1901): 394.
32. She had bought sculptural works by the Americans Randolph Rogers, Hiram Powers, and Joseph Mozier as well as by contemporary Italians.
33. Just before her death in Hawaii, Mrs. Stanford claimed that she had been poisoned. The possibility that she died of poisoning has been seriously discussed; see, for example, Robert W. P. Cutler, The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
34. Osborne, Museum Builders in the West, 40–41. Underwood & Underwood issued a stereograph of the ruined Stanford angel after the earthquake.
35. On Teich, see Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas Online, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fte05. On his angel in Scottsville, Texas, see Carol Morris Little, A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 411. The reproduction is in Frank Teich, Miscellaneous Memorials We Executed and Erected, a promotional and sales catalogue of Teich’s Studio of Memorial Art, Llano, 1926, Archives, Llano County Historical Museum, Llano, Texas.
36. “Peter Youree,” entry in A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, ed. Glenn R. Conrad, 2 vols. (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Society, 1988), 2:868. Mrs. Youree’s family was from Scottsville.
37. Suzanne Turner et al., Houston’s Silent Garden: Glenwood Cemetery, 1871–2009 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 158.
38. The Hooper replica, apparently made by the Boston firm of Kavanagh Brothers, was prominently pictured by photographer Harry A. Bliss in his influential Memorial Art, Ancient and Modern (Buffalo, N.Y.: Harry A. Bliss, 1912). While Bliss did not recognize its connection with Story’s creation in Italy, he called it a representation of “Grief,” saying, “Grief could hardly receive a more appropriate interpretation than is shown in the beautiful kneeling figure of the Hooper memorial, its face buried in its arms.” In modern times, the Hingham Cemetery adopted a side view of the monument on its stationery.
39. Such angels are found in, among other locales, Dallas’s Grove Hill Cemetery; Calvary Cemetery in Grayson County, Texas; Green-Wood and Woodlawn cemeteries in New York City; Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, N.Y.; Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, Calif.; Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis; Oakland Cemetery in Little Rock, Ark.; Chapel of the Chimes in Hayward, Calif.; Friendship Cemetery in Columbus, Miss.; and Highland Cemetery, Covington, Ky.
40. See, for example, Evanescence (“Odes of Ecstasy”), Nightwish (“Once”), and the Tea Party (“The Edges of Twilight”).
41. William Wetmore Story, The Proportions of the Human Figure (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 42.
42. Lilian Whiting, Italy, the Magic Land (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), 217–18. William H. Gerdts, “American Memorial Sculpture and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome,” in Jaffe, The Italian Presence in American Art, 145.
43. William Wetmore Story, “Under the Rose,” Boston Daily Globe, September 1, 1896, 6.
44. Mrs. Cresson to Fletcher, May 4, 1956; Chesterwood Archives, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her count seems exaggerated. According to Richman, Daniel Chester French, 79n23, the version at the Art Institute of Chicago was destroyed in 1949. The Boston version went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a model for carving in marble, then to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1926. The version in St. Louis was broken up in 1945, and a similar fate apparently met a cast on loan to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, but no record exists of when that plaster was destroyed. DCF also wrote of arranging a model for a Concord, Massachusetts, school.
45. Casts in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Lincoln, Nebraska, are no longer extant.
46. See Metropolitan Museum of Art, Special Committee to Enlarge Collection of Casts, Report of Committee to Members and Subscribers, February 1, 1892, which includes the text of “Why the Metropolitan Museum Should Contain a Full Collection of Casts,” a statement published by the committee in March 1891. Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications, accessible at http://cdm16028.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15324coll10/id/2273. The period after completion of the Adams and Milmore Memorials was the height of cast collection in new American museums.
47. See Alan Wallach, “The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art,” in Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 38–56.
1. HA to Florence Boardman Keep, November 27, 1911, in HA Letters. Mrs. Keep sought Adams’s advice about memorialization after the death of her husband, Frederic, in June 1911.
2. Reminiscences, 2:354.
3. Background and analysis by Homer Saint-Gaudens in Reminiscences, 2:323.
4. Ibid., 2:354.
5. On the Baker monument, see also Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 301.
6. Sources on Baker’s life and philosophy include: Albert Bigelow Paine, George Fisher Baker: A Biography (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1920); entry by N. S. B. Gras in Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1:44–45.; National Cyclopaedia 23:75–76; and interview by Georgette Carneal, New York World, August 12, 1923. Also see obituary, “George F. Baker, 91, Dies Suddenly of Pneumonia; Dean of Nation’s Bankers,” New York Times, May 3, 1931, A1, 28. Paine, George Fisher Baker, 149, 168–69.
7. See Kathleen McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity & Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 61–62.
8. See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 9.
9. On the Hubbard Memorial, see Cynthia Mills, “Dying Well in Montpelier: The Story of the Hubbard Memorial,” Vermont History 68, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2000): 35–57.
10. Advertisement by Gorham Galleries, Arts and Decoration 7 (March 1917): 277.
11. “The New Mien of Grief,” Literary Digest 52 (February 5, 1916): 292.
12. Sloane, The Last Great Necessity, 159–90.
13. Adeline Adams, The Spirit of American Sculpture (New York: National Sculpture Society, 1923), 55–56. I rely here on the ideas about the waning of Beaux-Arts sculpture in America by Daniel Robbins in his essay “Statues to Sculpture: From the Nineties to the Thirties,” in 200 Years of American Sculpture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976), 113–59.
14. Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Robbins, “Statues to Sculpture.”
15. Robbins, “Statues to Sculpture,” including 137–38.
16. A number of sculptors had worked on military cemeteries abroad as well. Manship, for example, was chosen by the American Battle Monuments Commission to create monuments following both world wars. They are located respectively in the American Cemetery at Thiaucourt, France, and the military cemetery at Anzio, Italy. Sculptors provided bronze doors for mausoleums as at New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Many of these artists were immigrants, and monuments in the interwar period were an eclectic mix.
17. Augustus Lukeman, “A Sculptor Talks about Cemeteries.” American Cemetery 6 (July 1934): 7–9. I am indebted to Blanche Linden for pointing out this article.
18. Edward F. Bergman, Woodlawn Remembered: Cemetery of American History (Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1988), 4–5. Russell Lynes, An Intimate Portrait of the Good Old Modern (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 119–20.
19. H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 339–40, 473, 503.
20. Lorena Hitchcock, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1962), 89–92. See Philip Hamburger, “Mrs. Roosevelt, Eight Feet Tall,” New Yorker, October 24, 1994, 54–60.
21. Alexander Woollcott, When Rome Burns (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 303–6.
22. Charles Constable, ed., The Letters between Bernard Berenson and Charles Henry Coster (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993), 254.