Hiram Powers
Hiram Powers
1805 - 1873
American sculptor. He grew up in Cincinnati, OH, and his career as a sculptor began when he created animated wax figures for a tableau of Dante’s Inferno at Dorfeuille’s Western Museum in Cincinnati, where he was supervisor of the mechanical department. He learnt to model clay and make plaster casts from Frederick Eckstein (c. 1775–1852). The portrait busts he created of his friends attracted the attention of the wealthy Nicholas Longworth, who financed trips for Powers to New York in 1829 and to Washington, DC, in 1834, when he sculpted President Andrew Jackson (marble, c. 1835; New York, Met.). Powers’s strikingly lifelike bust, classicized only by the drapery, brought him commissions from other Washington luminaries, including John Marshall (marble, 1835; Washington, DC, US Capitol), Martin van Buren (marble, 1837; New York, NY Hist. Soc.) and John Quincy Adams (marble, 1837; Kinderhook, NY, Columbia Co. Hist. Soc. Mus.)
Powers departed for Italy with his family in 1837, leaving the USA permanently. In Florence he continued to produce portrait busts such as that of Horatio Greenough (1805–52) (marble, 1838; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), a compatriot sculptor also living in Florence. Powers also began making idealized works imbued with noble sentiment, with subjects taken from religion, history or mythology. He achieved remarkable success with such work: his bust Proserpina (marble, c. 1839; Florence, Pitti) was reproduced about 50 times. With only the most rudimentary training in anatomy, Powers began his first life-size figure in 1838, Eve Tempted (plaster version, 1841; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.). This was followed by other full-length works such as Fisherboy (marble, 1841; New York, Met.), which depicts a nude boy, leaning in Praxitelean contrapposto on a tiller as he holds a conch shell to his ear.
Also in 1841, Powers began the work that became the most famous sculpture of the period and that established his reputation. The Greek War of Independence inspired the full-length marble Greek Slave (original, Raby Castle, Durham; version, c. 1843, New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.). It depicts a Greek maiden who has been captured by the Turks and forced to stand naked in the slave market. Her pose is reminiscent of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, a copy or engraving of which Powers may have seen. A locket, evocative of lost loved ones, and a crucifix are conspicuously sculpted on a support to the figure. Powers wrote an explanatory commentary, which was also intended to dispel objections to the statue’s nudity, a major issue for the 19th-century public. As an ardent Swedenborgian, he stressed that the slave’s faith in God shielded her and kept her from shame. The proclamation of the Rev. Orville Dewey, a noted Unitarian minister, that the girl was not naked but sheltered in a vesture of holiness, was also cited. The Greek Slave, which also reflected the growing anti-slavery feeling in America, was exhibited to great critical acclaim in London in 1845, where the original marble was bought by William, 7th Baron Barnard, and appeared again in 1851 at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace and in Paris at the Exposition Universelle in 1855. The statue toured American cities in 1847, attracting huge crowds and large revenues, and inspiring articles and poems, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Hiram Power’s Greek Slave’ (Poems, London, 1850). Powers’s generation believed that modern sculpture, imbued with Christian sentiment, was superior to Classical statuary, which simply paraded pagan beauty. The success of the Greek Slave was thus due more to its literary and philosophical associations than to its artistic merit. Powers became the most famous American sculptor and was likened, by his contemporaries, to both Phidias and Michelangelo. Six marble copies of the Slave were sold (versions exist in public collections at Newark, NJ, Mus., see fig.; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.; New York, Brooklyn Mus.; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), as well as smaller versions and busts.
Powers built an improved pointing machine with a movable joint for ease of operation, developed a plaster compound which could be modelled as an alternative to clay, and invented files and rasps (which he patented in the USA) to smooth the finish of this compound. He also developed a special finishing process for the fine-grained Serravezza marble from the quarry near Carrara, which, when finished, gave a close approximation to the porosity of human flesh. This became a hallmark of his work and won him wide public and critical acclaim.
While the Greek Slave was on tour, Powers modelled America (plaster version, 1848; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), which he intended to embody the creed of the United States and which he hoped would be purchased by the US Government for the Capitol. When it was not, Powers’s bitterness led him to reject an offer in 1853 to submit a pedimental sculpture design for the new extension on the Capitol. In 1859 Powers was awarded two federal commissions for over life-size marble statues of Benjamin Franklin (1862) and Thomas Jefferson (1863) for niches in the Senate and House wings. There was controversy in this period over whether figures should be portrayed in contemporary dress or in a historical costume such as a toga: Powers had executed a statue of John C. Calhoun (1844–50; destr.; marble bust, Raleigh, NC Mus. A.) dressed in a toga, and a statue of Daniel Webster in contemporary dress (bronze, c. 1858), now outside the State House, Boston. The latter had been criticized because the clothes appeared baggy, but in his federal statues Powers succeeded in representing modern attire that did not distract.
Powers continued to create portrait busts and more ideal works, selling many replicas until the end of his life. The Civil War seriously curtailed the demand for white marble statuary in America and when buying resumed, patrons preferred naturalistic bronze pieces and Powers’s reputation languished. His final full-length work, Last of the Tribe (1872; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), depicts a semi-nude American Indian girl running and looking backwards over her left shoulder. Powers was America’s most famous Neo-classical sculptor and did much to establish American sculpture at home and abroad. [Lauretta Dimmick. "Powers, Hiram." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T069122.]
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