The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  [624] HELBAA. A final paragraph added to the 1876 edition reads, “Her last great work, a Colossal statue, the Death of Cleopatra, can be seen in Memorial Hall.” Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

  [625] Alexandria (VA) People’s Advocate, July 1876, 3. quoted by Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis’ The Death of Cleopatra. Myth and Identity,” International Review of African American Art 12, no. 2 (1995): 36–52. Guarnerio illustrated a small boy in a nightshirt resentfully saying bedtime prayers; it won several prizes in Europe. Cf. Christie’s “Sale 8272, lot 79,” Sept. 14, 1995, accessed May 11, 2012, http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=330332.

  [626] James Henry Haseltine and Italian sculptor Enrico Braga also entered Cleopatras; an animated Cleopatra of wax appeared in the Annex. English painter V. C. Prinsip entered a Death of Cleopatra in oil.

  [627] S. P. Leggett, “Woman at the Central Exhibition--- V.” Albany (NY) Sunday Press, Jan. 21, 1877 reprinted in The Death of Cleopatra: A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis ( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878), 49-52. Biblioteca nazionale centrale – Firenze.

  [628] Boston (MA) Daily Traveller, Nov. 17, 1880.

  [629] Although we found no record of her brother’s travel to Philadelphia, 1876 was probably the last time they met. His memoir in Leeson, History of Montana, 1141, reported he had not “been three miles from the city of Bozeman for the past seven years.” A “Publishers’ note” disclosed the research had been collected in late 1883. Based on this date, the last time he ventured more than 3 miles from Bozeman was 1876. This would encourage beliefs that Samuel traveled to meet Edmonia in 1870 in Chicago (as indicated by Whitney, Jan. 14, 1871), in 1873 in California, in 1875 when she disappeared from St. Paul, and finally in 1876 in Philadelphia. Montana area newspapers reported on Edmonia after the Centennial.

  [630] Gay, “Edmonia Lewis.” See also Stylus (pseud.), “Philadelphia Letter,” SFPaA, Aug. 5, 1876.

  [631] John Thomas Dale, What Ben Beverly Saw at the Great Exposition (Chicago: Centennial Publishing Co., 1876): 187-188.

  [632] Gay, “Edmonia Lewis.”

  [633] SFPaA, Aug. 26, 1876, p. 1.

  [634] Maquoketa (IA) Jackson Sentinel, Miscellaneous, Mar. 28, 1889, 6; reprinted Waterloo (IA) Courier.

  [635] 1860 census: William W. Wright (ca. 1814-?) “horticulturalist.”

  [636] Albert Alan Wright (1846-1905), class of 1865, became Professor of Geology and Zoology at Oberlin College.

  [637] Wright to his wife Oct. 15, 1876. Oberlin College Archives, A. A. Wright papers, Box 1.

  [638] Oberlin Review, Nov. 8, 1876.

  [639] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, Random House, 1952).

  [640] Henry McNeal Turner, “To Colored People,” AtlC, Jan. 13, 1895, 3.

  [641] United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition 1876, (Philadelphia, Lippencott, 1877). s.v. “Painting and Sculpture,” by John F. Weir; “Reports on Awards, Group XXVII,” no. 144-186.

  [642] The Centennial recognized Palmer’s portrait of Robert Livingston, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.

  [643] Certificates went to Isabella Gifford of Syracuse, NY, who studied in Florence, Italy, and Montague Handley, an American living in Rome.

  [644] A.C.A.P., “Notes from Philadelphia,” Athenæum 2546, Aug. 12, 1876, 208-209.

  [645] Daily-News, (London, England), “September 1876,” reprinted in The Death of Cleopatra : A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis in Rome, Italy ( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878), 53-54. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale- Firenze.

  [646] J. S. Ingram, Centennial Exposition, 372. Apparently, Ingram interpreted Cleopatra’s large nose as Jewish stereotype.

  [647] Clark, Great American Sculptures, 141-142. Gould did not enter his earlier dying Cleopatra (1873) at the Centennial. If he had, Edmonia’s detractors could have matched them like a pair of colossal bookends and accused her of plagiarism. He presented the queen in similar size, pose, dress, and throne, right breast also bared. Close up, one sees considerable differences in detail. We found no indication that one influenced the other. Richardson, “Death,” suggested Edmonia and others followed a concept well established by Canova. See also Buick, Child of the Fire, 190-200 for more comparisons with Gould.

  [648] Clark, op. cit., 88.

  [649] Taft, History, 153.

  [650] Judith Wilson, “Hagar’s Daughters,” Bearing Witness (New York: Spelman College and Rizzoli International, 1996): 103. See also Charmaine A. Nelson, “Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra,” in Local / Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, Hants., UK: Ashgate, 2006): 223-244; Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005): 62-63.

  [651] Foner, Reconstruction, 437, 570-572, re Colfax, cites Congress, 2nd session, Senate Miscellaneous Document 48, 1:34-35, 48, 73, 2:207; and Memoirs of Reconstruction, MSS, Matthew C. Butler papers, Duke University. For Hamburg, Dee Brown, Year of the Century, 1876 (New York: Scribners, 1966): 267-83; Joel Williamson, After Slavery in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1965).

  [652] ChRec, Jan. 22, 1874; Mar. 5, 1874; July 9, 1876. As an AME pastor, B. W. Arnett served in Toledo, Cincinnati, and Columbus; he became the first colored man named as foreman of an otherwise white jury, and he was elected to the Ohio State Legislature from a district with a white majority where he authored the bill that repealed the Black Laws of Ohio.

  [653] (Robert M. Douglass, Jr.), “Centennial Exhibition,” by R.D., ChRec, Sept. 28, 1876.

  [654] Sampson, “Doing the Centennial.” Sampson mistook the John Brown bust for Joshua Reed Giddings, a leading bearded abolitionist Congressman.

  [655] W. E. B. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro (1899), 392. Du Bois also observed (p. 177), “[members of the emerging Philadelphia black middle class] shrink from all such display and publicity as will expose them to the veiled insult and depreciation which the masses suffer. Consequently this class, which ought to lead, refuses to head any race movement on the plea that thus they draw the very color line against which they protest.”

  [656] See also Marcia M. Mathews, Henry Ossawa Tanner (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969).

  [657] F. C. L., “Centennial.” Cf. Emma Lou Thornbrough, “American Negro Newspapers, 1880-1914,” Business History Review 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1966): 467-490. The New York (NY) Progressive American newspaper was published in New York City 1871-1887.

  [658] William Peirce Randel, Centennial: American life in 1876 (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co. [1969]): 384-385: “reflecting the notion that art needed the guidance of the rich and the great, as if esthetic judgment grew with a man’s fortune.”

  NOTES FOR 34. THE DEPARTURE OF EDMONIA LEWIS – 1877 to 1878

  [659] The Death of Cleopatra: A Colossal Statue in Marble Executed by Edmonia Lewis in Rome, Italy ( Rome, Italy: Printed by Sinimberghi, 1878). Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale - Firenze. The compilation also included a poem, “Cleopatra Dying,” by Thomas S. Collier. Cf. W.L., “Thomas S. Collier,” The Magazine of Poetry II (1890), 37-38.

  [660] D. P. Seaton, “Travels in Rome,” ChRec, Mar. 28, 1878.

  [661] New York (NY) Age, reprinted by H. R. Butler in “What the Negro is Doing,” AtlC, Oct. 30, 1898. The authors’ inquiries to the Archdioceses of New York, Albany, NY, and Newark, NJ, Archivio Storico del Vicariato, Rome, and a visit to the North American College in Rome did not locate this portrait. Cf. Pat McNamara, “Edmonia Lewis,” Patheos, Catholic Portal, Nov. 1, 2010, accessed July 28, 2011, http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Edmonia-Lewis-Artist-Woman-of-Color-Catholic?offset=1&max=1: “her bust of Cardinal John McCloskey, the Archbishop of New York from 1864 to 1885, may be found at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers.” Sr. Marguerita Smith, archivist, St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, Dec. 7, 2010, says there are no inscriptions whatsoever on the bust of Cardinal McCloske
y attributed to Edmonia Lewis by Dr. McNamara. They have no records of its acquisition.

  [662] Indianapolis (IN) News, Nov. 18, 1878. Cf. NYT, Affairs in Italy, “Dinner to Gen. Grant in Rome,” Mar. 26, 1878.

  [663] For example, Waterloo (IA) Courier, “The Chicago Exposition,” Sept. 11, 1878: “Miss Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptress, has been induced to exhibit her most celebrated work, the colossal statue of ‘Cleopatra,’ so much admired by all connoisseurs at the Centennial exhibition.”

  [664] Chicago (IL) Daily Inter-Ocean, “The Exposition,” Sept. 26, 1878: “Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor, who is exhibiting her “Cleopatra” and receiving any amount of rudeness and insult from boors who will not believe that such a beautiful creation could come from colored fingers. They should learn to think more of this article and less of the epidermis;” Moses (pseud.?), letter to the editor, Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, Sept. 27, 1878:

  I was attending the Centennial Exposition one year and was engaged most of the time in the Memorial Hall. I then had the pleasure of seeing Miss Lewis’ ‘Cleopatra’ when it first was unveiled to the public as a piece of art but it having failed to impress the American people as a work of divine inspiration, a cry was soon heard of insults, personal abuse, yes, even to knock-downs, and instead of creating the sympathy intended, it only won disgust from the artists. The statue was condemned for is historical inaccuracy, for according to Roman history, Cleopatra died on a rug instead of sitting upright in the ‘old arm-chair.’

  I have written this in a friendly spirit toward Miss Lewis, for I am a person who prefers a black skin to a black heart (that is borrowed from Emerson), but I think it poor revenge for an artist to be all the time accusing the American people of rudeness, ill manners, etc., etc., in order to cover up the defects of poor artistic abilities.

  [665] BDET, Sept. 16, 1878, etc.

  [666] DKJ, Oct. 21, 1878. This article was one of several that claimed Edmonia was born in Maine – confusing her with Mary Augusta Lewis who married Rev. Johnson, head of the Howard Orphanage, and who would welcome Edmonia to her home. See also Bath (ME) Daily Times, Sept. 20, 1873; DKJ, “A Famous Sculptress,” Jan. 5, 1905; New York (NY) Age, reprinted in H. R. Butler, “What the Negro is Doing, AtlC, Oct. 30, 1898, and excerpted Southern Workman and Hampton School Record, Dec. 1898, 253.

  [667] WoJ, Concerning Women, Oct. 12, 1878.

  [668] ChT, House of the Good Shepherd ad, Nov. 3, 1878. See also Encyclopedia of Chicago, s. v. “House of the Good Shepherd.”

  [669] Indianapolis (IN) News, Nov. 18, 1878, Excerpted in WoJ, DKJ, Boston (MA) Globe, Emmetsburg (IA) Palo Alto Reporter, Bristol (PA) Bucks County Gazette, Placerville (CA) Mountain Democrat, Detroit (MI) Free Press and perhaps other papers into 1879. Indianapolis (IN) Sentinel, Nov. 26, 1878, reported the presentation of the bust to Rev. Townsend. Francis C, Stout, historian, Bethel AME Church, Indianapolis, Nov. 9, 1998, indicated they have no record of the bust.

  [670] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), chap. 20. Topsy, a wild, uncivilized slave girl, said, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” Edmonia also seemed to reflect Topsy in 1866, when she told the Athenæum interviewer, “[I] was declared to be wild – they could do nothing with me.”

  [671] ChT, Nov. 17, 1878.

  [672] ChT, obituary, May 22, 1879; ChT, May 24, 1879; Chicago (IL) Times, May 24, 1879; SFPaA, “Funeral of Hon. John Jones,” June 7, 1879.

  [673] NYT, “Reception to Miss Edmonia Lewis,” Dec. 26, 1878; New York (NY) Tribune, “A Memorial Bust of John Brown,” Dec. 27, 1878; Daily Witness (Montreal, PQ, Canada), “Unveiling John Brown’s Bust,” Dec. 27, 1878; Newark (NJ) Daily Advertiser, Dec. 27, 1878; NYT, Dec. 29, 1878.

  [674] Henry Highland Garnet, Memorial Discourse. Address to the House of Representatives, Feb. 12, 1865, also called “Let the Monster Perish.”

  [675] NYT, Dec. 29, 1878, was reprinted in the Burlington (IA) Hawk-Eye and SFPaA; excerpted in Springfield (MA) Daily Republican, Petersburg (VA) Index-Appeal, Titusville (PA) Morning Herald, and WoJ.

  [676] In 1955, Rosa Parks set off a storm of protest when the police arrested her for refusing to obey Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, AL. Parks, who stood 5’ 3” tall, claimed Native-American as well as African-American and white blood.

  NOTES FOR EPILOGUE I – Post Scripts and Traces. 1. ISHKOODAH’ and EDMONIA

  [677] Basil H. Johnston, telephone, Jan. 28, 1991, suggested Edmonia’s Chippewa name was Ishkoodah´ – a name later confirmed by Edmonia’s hand (Figure 47).

  [678] Daniel E. Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1998), 311-312; Frances Densmore, “Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 44 (1928), 222; Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 69.

  [679] Daniel Wilson, “The Artistic Faculty in Aboriginal Races,” in Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (Montreal, Dawson Bros., 1886), III 65-117. Wilson described Anne Whitney’s Africa Awakening and misattributed it to Edmonia. See also Payne MSS, 522.

  [680] Richard Rhodes, University of California, Berkeley, to author July 12, 2010.

  [681] E. M. Ruttenber, Footprints of the Red Men. Indian Geographical Names (n.p.: New York State Historical Association, 1906), 189-190. “The Delawares called them Sankhikani or ‘The fire-striking people.’”

  [682] Oberlin College. Annual Catalogue … for the year 1861-62 (1861), 27, changed Edmonia’s entry from Mary E. Lewis to M. Edmonia Lewis; it was her third year. See also Child to Theodore Tilton, May 27, 1866, in Selected Letters, 460-461.

  [683] U. S. census, 1850. Of twenty-three Edmonias marked “black,” “colored,” or “mulatto,” nearly all appeared in Virginia or Kentucky. Cf. U. S. census, 1860, shows the Highgate family in Syracuse, NY. See also Sterling, We Are Your Sisters, 294-305. Edmonia Highgate was born in 1844 to Charles Highgate and his wife Sarah. She was principal of a colored school in Binghamton, NY, before becoming a teacher of freed slaves at the age of 20. After years of teaching and lecturing, she died in 1870.

  NOTES FOR 2. ROME AND LA DOLCE VITA

  [684] Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, chap. XIV.

  [685] Story, referring to Canova's Venus in the Pitti Palace, Florence, quoted in Jan Seidler Ramirez, “The ‘Lovelorn Lady:’ A New Look at William Wetmore Story,” American Art Journal 14 (1982): 32-41.

  [686] NYT, May 17, 1873. See also James, William Wetmore Story, II, 81-84.

  [687] John L. Idol, Jr., and S. Eisiminger, “Hawthorne Sits for a Bust by Maria Louisa Lander,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 114 (1978): 207-212; Rubenstein, American Women Sculptors, 63, 1858. See also SIRIS.

  [688] Hawthorne, Apr. 15, 1858, to William Ticknor, quoted in Idol and Eisiminger, “Hawthorne Sits for a Bust;” See also Carol Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913), 214-215.

  [689] John Rogers, letter Dec. 14, 1858, quoted in Rubenstein, American Women Sculptors, 59.

  [690] J. Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, II, 182-183.

  [691] Sherwood, Hosmer, 213-215.

  [692] Sherwood, Labor, 130.

  [693] Wikipedia, “Emma Stebbins,” accessed Nov. 11, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Stebbins. “According to Central Park historian Sara Cedar Miller, Emma Stebbins received the commission for the [Angel of the Waters, 1873] as a result of influence from her brother Henry, who at the time was president of the Central Park Board of Commissioners. Henry's motivation, Miller believes, may have been an unsuccessful attempt to induce her to return to New York and break up with Cushman, a relationship that to Henry was a source of embarrassing gossip in New York.”

  [694] J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 288.

  [695] Noted, for example, by Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 45.

  [696] Sherwood, Hosmer, 124; Culkin, Hos
mer, 37. Cf. Louisa May Alcott, Diana & Persis, ed. by Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Louisa May Alcott, Journals (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 211-212. Alcott never finished Diana & Persis. One of its central characters is a sculptor who rejected her sexual nature in the pursuit of professional success. Louisa May Alcott never married.

  [697] ChT, “A Genial Gathering,” Aug. 20, 1873. See also ChT, Mar. 12, 1875, described Jones’s Ray Street home and history as he celebrated his 30th year in Chicago.

  [698] See also Charmaine A. Nelson, “Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra,” in Local / Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 223-244, note 11; Sherwood, Hosmer, 260. Cf. Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 165-168, 175, 179-180, etc., took an opposing view, that Edmonia was a lesbian, and then (306, note 173), lacking confirmation, complained of “closeting.” See also New York (NY) Tribune, “A Memorial Bust of John Brown,” Dec. 27, 1878, “She is small of stature, and modesty promoted her to sit on a front seat in the church, leaving the platform to her husband [sic!], to Dr. Garnet, the Rev. [J.] S. Atwell, who presided, and Charles Douglas[s], the son of Frederick Douglas[s] and ex-Consul to San Domingo.” This unique spousal reference was likely an error.

  [699] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Oct. 28, 1867, Whitney MSS.

  [700] William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (London: Grant Richards, 1902): I, 294. See also 299-300.

  [701] Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Oct. 28, 1867, Whitney MSS.

  NOTES FOR 3. SPITE

  [702] SFDEB, Personal Items, Feb. 8, 1872, repeated in Weekly Salt Lake (UT) Daily Tribune, Folio: a Monthly Journal of Music, Drama, Art and Literature, New Orleans (LA) Picayune, American Missionary, and SFDEB. See also SFDEB, Personal Items, Apr. 5, 1873; repeated DKJ, Monroe (WI) Liberal Press.