William Rimmer
William Rimmer
1816 - 1879
American sculptor, painter and writer of English birth. His father Thomas Rimmer, from the time of his youth in France and later in England, believed himself to be the younger son of Louis XVI and rightful heir to the throne of France after the death of his older brother in 1789. Although the validity of Thomas’s claims cannot be verified, three generations of the Rimmer family carried this belief.
William Rimmer arrived in America in 1818 and never returned to Europe. Brought up in poverty, he spent most of his life eking out a living for himself and his large family and was virtually unknown as an artist until he was 45. He was essentially self-taught in most of his diverse activities, including painting and composing music. A learned anatomist, Rimmer practised medicine in the Boston area from the late 1840s to the early 1860s, and, through his study of art anatomy, he fashioned a personal grammar of form in which the male nude became a metaphor for themes of heroic struggle (see fig.). In addition to lecturing on art anatomy in Boston, New York, Providence and other East Coast cities during the 1860s and 1870s, he served as director of the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union in New York from 1866 to 1870. He published two highly illustrated and important books—Elements of Design (1864) and Art Anatomy (1877)—and taught several of the next generation’s major artists, notably John La Farge and Daniel Chester French. Rimmer’s art and writings also evince his awareness of contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific areas of investigation, including photography, physiognomy, phrenology, typology, comparative anatomy and Darwinian thought. His books and teaching earned him many admirers; during the 20th century, two of the most enthusiastic have been the sculptors Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941) and Leonard Baskin.
Only about two-thirds of Rimmer’s approximately 600 known works have been traced, and the quality of most of those that survive is high. Fewer than a quarter of his works were commissioned, and he was not well paid even for such works as his only surviving public monument, the granite statue of Alexander Hamilton (1865) on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and the 81 drawings for Art Anatomy (1876; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). His gypsum statuette of a Seated Youth (‘Despair’, 1831; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) was reputed to be the first nude sculpture in the USA, although it was not generally known until 1882, when it was published by Truman Bartlett in his study of Rimmer. This sculpture looks back to figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, perhaps known to Rimmer through prints, and anticipates such works as Carpeaux’s Count Ugolino and his Sons (1863) and Rodin’s The Thinker (1880). With his Head of a Woman (c. 1859; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.) and bust of St Stephen (1860; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.), Rimmer was probably the first American sculptor to create granite carvings for other than utilitarian purposes.
In Rimmer’s finest sculptures—the Seated Youth, St Stephen, the Falling Gladiator (plaster, 1861; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), the Dying Centaur (plaster, 1869; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), the Fighting Lions (plaster, c. 1871; untraced; bronze, 1907; New York, Met.) and the plaster Torso (1877; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.)—the primary emphasis on plastic, non-allusive form as well as the exploration of powerfully expressive anatomy, dynamic composition and animated surfaces foreshadow Rodin’s work and fitly embody Rimmer’s repeated statement that ‘anatomy is the only subject’ (Bartlett).
Rimmer’s painted work reflects the influence of English genre painters such as Charles Robert Leslie and American artists such as William Morris Hunt. His well-known Flight and Pursuit (1872; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) and Sunset/Contemplation (1876; Detroit, MI, Manoogian priv. col.), which shows his brief but significant use of the Luminist mode, rank Rimmer with Washington Allston and Albert Pinkham Ryder. However, far from being derivative, most of his works show a creative assimilation of their divergent thematic and formal sources.
Rimmer generally used a limited number of hues sharing a common tonal range of earth colours, and his paintings are often characterized by delicate colours and subtle atmospheric effects created by a thin application of paint. The occasional absence of a middle ground in his compositions gives them a compressed and ethereal quality. The most adverse result of his technical ignorance has been the darkening of bitumen and concomitant surface deterioration of his paintings. Rimmer’s supposed royal heritage provided the source for many of his most powerful and imaginative paintings as well as the recurring themes and motifs of Promethean hubris, exile, thwarted ambition, confrontation, gladiators and soldiers.
Rimmer was once seen predominantly as an enigmatic and isolated artist, but scholars are increasingly placing him within his own times, while recognizing his special achievements. Although an amateur in many respects, he was the most gifted sculptor of his generation in America, a painter of compelling and evocative images and a powerful and imaginative draughtsman. [Jeffrey Weidman. "Rimmer, William." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T072186.]
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