644. EDMONIA LEWIS MARBLE SCULPTURE, THE BRIDE OF SPRING,
Auction: 2007 FallAmericana:Fine&DecorativeArts, Oct 12&13
marble, signed at base The Bride of Spring, E. Lewis, 1879. Sculpture measures 48" in height and 15" in diameter at base.
[Edmonia Lewis is] “…the most interesting artist working in Europe…She has great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and simple genuine taste.”
--Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (1867, pp. 603-04)
"Some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don't want that kind of praise. I had rather you would point out my defects, for that will teach me something."
-- Edmonia Lewis to Lydia Maria Child (Liberator, Feb. 19, 1864, p. 31)
The recent discovery of a unique, long-lost statue, Bride of the Spring (1879) by the award-winning, internationally acclaimed artist, Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca 1843-ca 1911), is a remarkable one. The identities of a handful of 19th-century African American sculptors are known, and Lewis seems to have been the only female. Lewis created this work at the height of her popularity in Rome, Italy. The fact that there are relatively so few extant works by her that ever come on the market makes this piece all the more significant.
Oral history has it that a hospital (not yet identified) in Cincinnati acquired Bride of the Spring, either from the artist or an exhibition of the statue in the Queen City around 1880. The sculpture may have appeared in shows of Lewis’ work in Indianapolis in 1878-79 and in New York City and possibly Cincinnati in 1879. (Lewis herself was in Chicago in the summer of 1878 and in Brooklyn in December.) After the hospital closed and was demolished, Dr. Byron N. Pittenger (1898-1972), a physician of otolaryngology from Paris, Kentucky, who had done his internship in southwest Ohio, found the sculpture in a railroad salvage yard in Cincinnati and installed the work in an outdoor garden at his home in the mid-1950s. A fellow Rotarian recalled that it was the only sculptural decoration in the backyard. After the physician’s death, his widow, Rosalind Scoggan Pittenger, gave the statue to the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library in the early 1970s. In 2007 art historian Estill Pennington, upon reading the inscription E. Lewis, Roma 1879 on the platform base, alerted the library director about the rarity of the piece.
Born either in Greenhigh, Ohio or Greenbrush, New York, Lewis studied liberal arts at Oberlin College in Ohio in the early 1860s and then apprenticed with sculptor Edward Augustus Brackett (1818-1908) in Boston. Her medallion of John Brown and a bust of Col. Robert Gould Shaw launched her career; she sold over 100 plaster copies of the latter, allowing her to move to Italy in 1865. Her first subjects there were African American and concerned emancipation. She then created several Native American works inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s enormously popular poem, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855). Lewis also produced portrait busts and literary, religious, historical, and mythological pieces. Over forty sculptures by her are in such prestigious collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Fogg Art Museum, Newark Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and St. Louis Art Museum, as well as several university collections and cemeteries.
The Bride of the Spring is a 48-inch, carved white marble statue of a barefoot, slim young woman standing in contrapposto, almost completely swathed in diaphanous drapery and wearing a floral diadem on her head. She lifts her right hand to her left shoulder to adjust the veil covering her face. In her lowered left hand she holds a thick, long garland of roses, five-petaled blossoms, and Easter lilies that wraps around her legs to the foliated plinth behind. Tall, flat iris leaves surmounted by blooms cover the back of her legs. Since the piece stood in an outdoor garden for years, the surface is slightly worn and the facial features are softened. Because the whole figure is swathed, her racial identity is unclear. However, she has long, flowing hair and a small nose and lips, as do the female figures in Forever Free (1867) and The Old Arrow Maker and His Daughter (modeled 1866, carved 1872). Lewis herself was of mixed heritage; her father was a free man of African descent and her mother was from the Mississauga tribe of the Ojibwa Nation.
Bride of the Spring is an idealized classical work that evokes the Roman goddess of flowers, Flora. Flora was originally the Greek maiden, Chloris, who was pursued and raped by Zephyr, who then made her his bride. The sculpture also evokes Proserpine (known in Greek mythology as Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter), the daughter of corn-goddess Ceres. Upon seeing her in a meadow picking flowers, Pluto (Hades, in Greek), king of the underworld, swept her away on his chariot. Ceres begged for her daughter’s return, and Proserpine was permitted to return to the earth each spring. Thus, she symbolizes seasonal change. Ancient Romans called her Cora, the maiden. She played a role in rites of initiation at Eleusis, where she might symbolize the candidate for initiation who suffered death to be reborn and went through Hell to attain Heaven.
Christians view this return to earth as symbolic of death and resurrection. Lewis, a Catholic who attended mass at St. Peter’s in Rome, may have used Christian symbols in this sculpture; the five-petaled blossoms in the diadem suggest the wounds of Christ. Also, red flowers, such as roses, represented the blood of Christ’s passion and white flowers, especially the lily, iris, and rose without thorns, evoke the Virgin’s purity. Lewis said, I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered. For this reason the Virgin Mary is very dear to me (Bullard, 8).
Living in Rome, Lewis was certainly familiar with these mythological and Christian associations, as well as the fact that a bust of Proserpine (ca 1844) by America’s best-known sculptor, Hiram Powers (1805-1873), was one of his most reproduced sculptures. Like Lewis, Powers had strong links to Ohio; he had lived in Cincinnati, 1818-1834, and like her, he expatriated to Italy but settled in Florence. In fact, Lewis credited Powers and sculptor Harriet Hosmer for helping her when she went abroad (Pacific Appeal, Aug. 16, 1873).
Lewis likely observed Bernini’s Rape of Prosperine (1621-1622) at the Galleria Borghese, and she might have been familiar with Giovanni Maria Benzeni’s Zephyr Dancing with Flora (1870). Other sculptural sources for this statue in Europe were the marbles, the Farnese Flora (rediscovered ca 1532), a figure in the Versailles garden (1661-1756), also bearing a floral diadem and garland, and Odoardo Fantacchiotti’s Flora (1854), as well as terracottas of Flora, including the figural couple, Zephyrus and Flora (1799), and a bust of the goddess by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1770). Previously Lewis had drawn and sculpted other mythological subjects, including Urania (1862; muse of astronomy and astrology), Hygeia (1871-72; goddess of health), and Poor Cupid (modeled 1872, carved 1876).
Lewis’s vision of this bride is unique. It differs from all of these in that the entire figure, save the hands, hair, and feet, is swathed in diaphanous draperies. This fact, coupled with her relaxed posture, the solidity of the form with arms pressed close to the chest and side, the closed lips, and the look of pensive contemplation on the woman’s face as she cocks her head to her left slightly--as well as the almost defensive or shielding gesture of the right arm upraised across her body--suggests a sense of self-containment and isolation. There is little negative space--only a small opening where the garland arcs around the right leg. It is as though this tightly swaddled body is just awakening to the possibilities of spring and a new relationship. Tension is evident in the contrast between the beautifully carved folds of cloth and sensuous curves of the youth’s firm body, and the white marble that evokes chastity, morality, and purity in sentiment. It is also apparent in the clinging fabric that simultaneously hides the flesh and retains a sense of mystery, and yet reveals and, indeed, accentuates the body and face. Veiled faces and busts were popular subjects with 19th-century Italian sculptors who used the motifs to demonstrate tour-de-force carving.
The quality of material here is not of the highest caliber often seen in the work of Powers, who carefully chose pure, sparkling blocks of Carrara marble and highly polished the sculptured surfaces so that flesh would appear meltingly soft or velvety. By contrast, this piece is more porous and chalky, appearing more ethereal and ghostlike in its shrouds than real. The surface has been dulled and granulated by rain and frost, and now softly glows. But the veining of the stone in this instance heightens the somber, even melancholy, mood of the piece, with one gray streak trickling from the left eye down to the jaw like a tear. This detail strengthens associations with Proserpine, who was forcefully abducted and made to be Pluto’s wife.
Lewis had previously depicted women in subordinate positions with men, as in the kneeling female and standing male in Forever Free, and the seated daughter and her father in The Old Arrow Maker. But this bride is not shown with a man nor is she submissive. While one might argue that she demonstrates Victorian qualities of the Cult of True Womanhood in her apparent piety and virtue, she is neither domestic nor submissive. (It is tempting to read the work as somewhat autobiographical, with allusions to the unconventional life that Lewis led, her heritage of slavery, and her independence as she forged a new identity and life in a foreign land, only to return to her native country several times, in 1871, 1873, 1876, and 1878.) Although perhaps trapped by her situation and almost smothered by her wedding attire, this bride is not passive. She does not kneel or sit, but stands erect and stoically, ready to face what is before her, as an immortal being.
Sources
Ambrosini, Lynne D. and Rebecca A.G. Posage. Hiram Powers: Genius in Marble. Cincinnati, OH: Taft Museum of Art, 2007.
Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists From 1792 to the Present. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Blodgett, Geoffrey. "John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862" in Journal of Negro History, Vol. 53 (July, 1968): 201-218.
Buick, Kirsten P. "The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography" in American Art, Vol. 9. (Summer 1995): 5-19.
Bullard, Laura Curtis. “Edmonia Lewis,” Revolution, Vol. 7 (April 20, 1871): 8.
Burgard, Timothy Anglin. "Edmonia Lewis and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Images and Identities" in American Art Review, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1995): 114-117.
Commire, Anne, editor. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Waterford, CT: Yorkin Publications, 1999-2000.
Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. "Mary Edmonia 'Wildfire' Lewis." in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists In Nineteenth-Century America: From the Collections of the National Museum of American Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985.
Lewis, Jo Ann. "An Afterlife for 'Cleopatra'" in The Washington Post (June 10, 1996): B1.
Nelson, Charmaine. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Richardson, Marilyn. "Edmonia Lewis" in Harvard Magazine, Vol. 88 (March-April 1986): 40-41.
Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, c1984.
Wolfe, Rinna Evelyn. Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble. Berkeley, CA: Muse Wood Press, 1998.
Wreford, Henry. "A Negro Sculptress,” The Athenæum, Vol. 39 (March 3, 1866).
Websites:
Edmonia Lewis: First Internationally Acclaimed African American Sculptor - website dedicated to her, with bio-chronology, links to photographs of her works, and more
Cleopatra: Lost and Found - virtual tour of Edmonia Lewis' works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Testmanent to Bravery - PBS transcript of interviewer Charlayne Hunter-Gault, with museum curator George Gurney and art historian David Driskell, on the art and legacy of Edmonia Lewis, August 5, 1996.
Edmonia Lewis - African-Americans in the Visual Arts: a Historical Perspective, on Long Island University website
This essay is from Theresa Leininger-Miller, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Cincinnati, specializing in 19th-20th c. art. Author of New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934 (Rutgers, 2001) and many essays, she is currently working on two monographs, concerning sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962) and daguerreotypist J.P. Ball (1825-1904).
(EST $100000-$200000)
Provenance: Ex Bourbon County Public Library
Condition: Softened from years of outdoor installation, some veins showing, minor crayon residue on floral wrap. Base is slightly darkened.
Price Realized: $138,000.00
Price includes buyer's premium.
