Edmonia Lewis was a Neoclassicist, but her work explored issues of race and gender before these
were even concepts.
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| The Death of Cleopatra, 1876, Edmonia Lewis, courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum. |
The first school of American women sculptors arose,
paradoxically, in Italy, around Massachusetts-born Harriet Hosmer. These women
went to Rome to take advantage of trained carvers and craftsmen and
the access to pure white Carrara
marble. Along with their male peers, they mined the rich vein of Neoclassicism. America
was wealthy and the monument business was booming.
For women artists, there was the additional advantage of
breaking away from the social strictures of home. Carving stone is hard
physical work, considered uniquely unfeminine in the culture of the time.
Not that they escaped completely. There were plenty of conventional
men among the expatriates. Henry James famously
described them as “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at
one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white, marmorean flock.”
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| Edmonia Lewis, c. 1870, courtesy National Portrait Gallery. |
“One of the sisterhood,” James continued, “was a negress,
whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was
the pleading agent of her fame.” Ouch.
He was referring to Edmonia Lewis, who is
now considered the first prominent American female minority artist. Devoutly Catholic,
she created many religious works, much of which are lost. Her oeuvre also included portrait busts and classical
themes.
Lewis was born in Greenbush, Rensselaer County, New York, in 1844. Her
father was of Haitian descent and her mother was Mississauga
Ojibwe and African. Lewis was orphaned by the age of nine and adopted
by two aunts who lived near Niagara Falls and sold souviners to tourists. At
age 12, she was sent to a Free Baptist abolitionist school in central New York,
and went from there to Oberlin
College. After a childhood of absolute freedom, the strictures of civilization
were uncomfortable.
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Old Arrow Maker, 1872,
is nominally an illustration of a passage from the Song of Hiawatha by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s also an evocation of Lewis’ own childhood.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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“Until I was twelve years old I led this wandering life,
fishing and swimming and making moccasins. I was then sent to school for three
years… but was declared to be wild—they could do nothing with me,” she
recollected.
At Oberlin, she was accused of poisoning two friends with
an aphrodisiac, a nod to her Haitian background. From that point, she was a
marked woman. Another accusation, of stealing, prevented her graduation and she
moved to Boston to take up training in sculpture. Again, her relationship with
her mentor and teacher, Edward Augustus
Brackett, broke down into acrimony.
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Lewis’ Portrait of
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, c. 1866, was
one of the sales that enabled her to leave Boston for Rome. Courtesy Museum of
African American History.
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Meanwhile, she was lauded as a success in the Abolitionist
press, bringing commissions and attention before she was fully prepared to deal
with them. She left for Rome and a new start.
At the height of her popularity in the ‘60s and ‘70s, her
studio was frequented by visitors fascinated by her charm and exotic clothing
and background.
Lewis’ most celebrated sculpture was the monumental Death of Cleopatra, created for the 1876
Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Cleopatra killed herself after the death
of her lover and ally, Mark Antony. In the 19th century imagination,
she was Africa, he was Europe.
The public was accustomed to depictions of the dying queen
as regal, calm and composed. Lewis’ depiction is of a sprawling, inelegant woman,
on her throne, in the throes of death. As she did so often in her work, she was
quietly looking at issues of race and gender in a novel way.
