The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (13 page)

Figure 8. Edmonia’s passport application, 1865

The passport application sworn by “M. Edmonia Lewis” on August 21, 1865, gives her height as four feet, birth as “on or about” July 4, 1844, at Greenbush (now part of Rensselaer), NY, and her age as twenty. The inconsistency of age and date suggests she filled out the form before her birthday and signed it, in the presence of witnesses, later. A larger image may be found at http://edmonialewis.com/passport.htm.

According to Edmonia’s proud brother, Secretary of State William H. Seward provided letters of introduction to ministers in Paris and Florence. Mrs. Chapman probably wrote to European friends as well. Many new challenges, such as foreign languages and customs, faced her. She had studied French in school (and likely spoke it as a child in Canada) – but not Italian.

Leaving America was a terrifying prospect. She might never return. She worried about her last unsold copy of
Shaw,
on display at a newspaper’s offices. To Wendell Phillips, she had the air of one settling her estate as she begged a favor of him. Phillips showed his amusement as he wrote to the wife of Rev. J. T. Sargent on Edmonia’s behalf:

Dear Madam: You know my benevolence. Well, it is therefore I hasten to inform you of your great fortune.

Most people leave legacies when they die.

But you know … when good Yankees die, they go to Paris. Well, one of your friends, starting for Paris, seems to have imagined that she was dying. At any rate, she acted as if dying and left you a legacy. This is it: “When you come to Boston go down with a strong porter to the Commonwealth rooms and you’ll find there the bust of Colonel Shaw.”

Edmonia Lewis,
starting for Europe, said to me: “That dear, good woman, I do love her. I want her to have it. Give it to her as my legacy.”
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Years later Edmonia reflected, “I was practically driven to Rome.”
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“My first thought was for my poor father’s people, how I could do them good in a very small way.” – Edmonia Lewis, 1866

Bold phrases might well describe the young woman who sailed for Europe on August 26, 1865.
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None bore the power that “colored sculptor” had at the time. Outrageous or transformative, it was an oxymoron. It defied common wisdom, bringing either a scowl or a smile. To some, it offered new hope – to others, only trouble. For white supremacists, who girded their ideals of the “evident design of the Creator”
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with patriotism and bolstered them with quack science, it overrode the laws of nature: a dangerous precedent. It flatly contradicted their arch-theorist, who emphasized on the eve of Lincoln’s reelection, “No one ever heard of a negro sculptor or painter.”
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To reporters, it meant news and a break with the cliché link between “colored” and crime.

Edmonia’s budding celebrity gained a life of its own. Squibs that announced her sailing and reported her commissions escaped the niche of the
Boston Liberator,
the
Freedmen’s Record,
and the
New York National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Fresh-laid rails carried the news, some printed by steam-driven rotary presses, to greatly expanded readerships. Syndication served national news to rural weeklies. From the
Boston Evening Transcript
and the
New York Times
all the way to the white readers of the
Stephens Point Wisconsin Lumberman
and the colored readers of the
Petersburg (VA) Index,
newsmen spread the word.
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Edmonia had never enjoyed such wide support as she did at that moment. “My enthusiasm increased day by day, and I began to feel that I was going to enter the sphere for which I was designed,” she recalled.
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The atmosphere of Europe, where her race was neutral, must have magnified the effect.

The journey to Italy was daunting, even by standards of the day. Following good advice, she took time out to sample London and Paris before heading to Italy. The record indicates no patience for slow boats and sightseeing. The most direct route, and the most arduous leg of her trip, crossed the Alps. Trains terminated in the foothills. Beyond, two horses and eight mules dragged a carriage (similar to a stage-coach but larger), poetically named a “diligence,” for a grumbling ten hours to an altitude of 6,354 feet. The high passes and hairpin turns were once traveled by the armies of Julius Caesar. At the change from rail, one might discover carriages were overbooked, leading to an unexpected layover. A crowded economy class flight from New York to Rome today is quicker and arguably more comfortable. The railroad tunnel did not open for another six years.

The crooked old flagstone streets of Florence likely reminded her of wandering, lost, in Boston. Florence was otherwise strikingly different. Much older and sunnier than any New England city, its day turned on a custom alien to Yankee ways. Italians worked no afternoons. They closed shop and napped while the sun baked away – even in cooler months. More important, she found no “nigger hill.”

She signed in at the fine hotel recommended to her and then hurried to the United States legation. Florence was the seat of the government of the newly united kingdom of Italy.

She carried a note of introduction from Annie Adams Fields, the wife of the
Atlantic Monthly
editor, to her sister, Lissie Adams, who lived and studied painting in Florence.
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Miss Adams should have some good advice.

The U. S. minister concurred. A New England intellectual who owed his appointment to Lincoln, George Perkins Marsh was an advocate of voting rights for colored Americans. He and Edmonia likely spoke of Boston and people they knew in common.

She discovered that Mr. Marsh and his wife lived at her hotel. Aha! Another example of equality to share with her brother. Finally, she asked for directions to Miss Adams.

The minister countered by asking his aide to guide her.

At the door, Edmonia handed her note to a maid who said something in Italian: please wait, according to her guide. Minutes later, the maid returned, handed back the paper, and shut the door without a word. It was a clear dismissal, a rejection: You are not welcome here.

Surprised and humiliated in front of Marsh’s aide, Edmonia fumed. Her new sense of acceptance evaporated in the face of American bigotry. Consumed with emotion, she fired off bitter letters accusing Miss Adams of refusing to see her because she was colored.

Marsh was equally shocked. He fretted over Edmonia’s distress. “Never mind! You will find good friends here,” he told her.
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He brought her to sculptors Thomas Ball and Hiram Powers (who was a friend of his from childhood), assuring her of good rooms and work space. Going beyond normal diplomatic hospitality, he quietly paid her hotel bill.

Thomas Ball made her feel welcome. A bearded, folksy giant of a man – a genial, humming sort – he had just returned from Boston where she had made history with her portrait of Shaw. He knew Brackett, and surely something of her story. He, too, was self-taught. On the passing of his father, he had supported himself by singing in churches and copying portraits. When his first busts won acclaim, he turned to sculpture in earnest.

The Vermont-bred Hiram Powers, who wore a dressing gown under his apron, a Turkish cap, and slippers even in the street, often smoked a cheap cigar. In 1854, Powers’ original sponsor had introduced him to Robert Scott Duncanson, an African-American landscape painter, with high praise.

Like kindly uncles, they blessed the young artist with useful gifts and advice. Powers sent her a molding block. He also advised her about the arrangement of her studio. Later, he instructed her on the use of wires to keep the clay from collapsing. Ball made her some tools and likely gave her practical pointers. In modeling, he liked to advise, “The firm touch is the only right one…. The thumb should press the clay with an uncompromising gouge, to carry out what the eyes have first determined upon, – no niggling or trembling!”
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It was not as easy as Ball made it seem. But his use of simple terms and homespun rules could be provocative: “Always remember that every bit of clay added is a step forward, every bit removed is a step backward.”
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Although from slave-holding Kentucky, Joel Hart was also very friendly. Starting as a tombstone carver, he taught himself portraiture. When he needed money, he made another copy of his famous life-size portrait of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay and sold it to some American group for ten thousand dollars. The original took thirteen years. His
Woman Triumphant
took thirty.

Edmonia knew making copies was how sculptors prospered. She had done it with plaster in Boston. But how, she asked, should she make copies in marble? Several orders from Boston needed attention. Her new friends likely discouraged her from trying to carve them without help. Marble is different, much heavier and more difficult to form, than wet clay or plaster of Paris. She could hire skilled artisans rather cheaply and study their methods.

She could hardly believe what was happening. America’s leading sculptors were helping her! Not only that! More than the bright sun or local customs, legions of public carvings made a blinding contrast to the cold cityscape of Boston. Images were bigger, better, and far more expressive than the lonely bronze
Franklin
that had set her resolve.

Speaking of
Franklin,
works by the Florentine giants – Michelangelo, Donatello, Cellini and others – must have confirmed all she had felt at that magical encounter in Boston two years before. She saw marvels such as the 18-foot tall
Perseus;
the bas-reliefs on the bell tower of the Duomo; and the great bronze doors of the Baptistery.

At the time, local art lovers were excited about the
Rape of Polyxena,
by Pio Fedi, the “last Italian naturalist” of the Romantic school of sculpture. When unveiled in Dec. 1865, his colossal reflection on an earlier style quickly upstaged Giambologna’s equally striking
Rape of the Sabine Women
(Figure 25) and other masterpieces in the Loggia die Lanzi.
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The complexity of multiple figures, spiral composition, and modeling of fine details must have aroused her intense interest. It proved what vitality was achievable. Sketching would have helped her understand the conception. Touching would inform her about execution. Insights would simmer until her skills were ready.

The artists she met loved to discuss what they saw. They criticized towering masters as easily as they might fault a novice. To sort out their differences of opinion required more viewing on her part, more thought, and more listening. While such critical attitudes might have worried her at first, they could free her from the awe that first clouded her approach to art. All art could not be perfect. She would have to learn to make such distinctions herself.

In Ball’s studio, she likely saw a
bozzetto
(small clay model) of a freed slave and President Lincoln. Conceived upon the news of the assassination, it depicted the Emancipator standing over a colored man who crouched deferentially on one knee, broken chains dangling from his wrists. Finding no acceptable model in Florence, Ball had used mirrors to cast himself as the freed slave. He found a colored model later.
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His vision, however, was more about Lincoln the benefactor than the kneeling man and his liberation. More important, he had seized the moment and had done something that she dreamed of doing.

As a woman, she could instinctively visualize Emancipation across lines of gender as well as color. Her Richmond memories were still fresh. She contemplated a powerful synthesis. Restlessly, she sketched, patching together clay models. Her best idea required two figures – a mother and child. The classic “Madonna” combination (in abundance in Florence) fit an American theme of personal importance.

This was her first image of a symbolic ideal, an emotional celebration of liberty and a rebuff to defenders of slavery who needed to deny the humanity of motherhood in bondage. It was her first real work in Italy and an expression of her years listening to sermons by Revs. Finney and Keep at Oberlin. This was how she could testify as a colored artist and a woman. Freedom was especially meaningful to mothers who saw children sold and who had lived with that fear. Wasn’t selling babies the greatest evil? Anti-slavery women said so. Freed women said, No one will sell our children ever again. Amen.

Stimulated by her new friends and enlightened by Italian art, she created another bust of Robert Gould Shaw. She mentioned it in a letter to Child, hoping for admiration and approval. The result was only consternation.
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In the meantime, Edmonia’s complaint reached the Fields in Boston and upset them. They wrote to sister Lissie in Florence at once. She responded directly to Edmonia, explaining that two houses shared the same number. No one had called at her door. She had sent no one away. She graciously urged, Please call again. Thanks to the agonizing slowness of transatlantic mails, the tempest took months to resolve.

After helping to correct the misunderstanding, Mrs. Child wrote to Mrs. Fields, hedging her bets with a strong dose of bias while complaining of “American prejudice.”

I hope the artists in general will be able to so far divest themselves of American prejudice as to give Edmonia a fair chance to make for herself such a position as she may prove herself entitled to. Of course, any attempt to force her, or any one else, above the level of their nature will prove unavailing, but assuredly all obstructions ought to be removed. Considering her antecedents, I think she has done wonderfully well, thus far, and I sympathize, as you do in her energetic efforts to rise above depressing circumstances.
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