The Lafayette Park Conservancy is a group dedicated to the preservation and improvement of the heart of Lafayette Square. In 2007, it set about restoring its 22 foot tall monument to Thomas Hart Benton. 2008 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of its creator, Harriet Hosmer, and the 140th year of the statue in the park. Therefore, a program was devised to coincide those anniversaries with the unveiling of a thoroughly refreshed Benton in the park.
A decade ago, the Conservancy celebrated the 150th anniversary year of the monument. Here’s a facsimile of the program. It summarizes the events commemorating Hosmer, intended to raise funds for the Benton project. The weekend was collectively called “Hats Off To Hatty”.
So let’s go back a ways to consider how this all came about. Following Benton’s death in 1858, the State of Missouri chose Lafayette Park to host a monument to him. This was St Louis’s premier city park at the time, so a logical place to put its first publicly commissioned monument. Now we can add some context as to why Hosmer, and why St. Louis. A good story lies here.
Doing well and doing good
Wayman Crow (1808-1885) was a man who, like Henry Shaw, amassed a fortune while still young and enterprising. Also like Shaw, he looked to do more and benefit society along the way. By 1840, he presided over the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and was twice elected to the Missouri state senate.
In 1846, Crow chartered St. Louis’s Mercantile Library, the first library west of the Mississippi River. In 1853, he incorporated Eliot Seminary, which became Washington University and began funding its development. In 1881, Crow founded the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. A benefactor of this sort is essential to have in a fast-developing city. Crow is less known for his role in the career of sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908).
Foundations of a modern woman
Harriet was the daughter of a Watertown, Massachusetts physician. She lost her mother and three siblings to tuberculosis while very young. Her father encouraged her to build strength with vigorous exercise, and she grew adept at rowing, skating, and horsemanship. She also developed, at an early age, an independence unusual for a woman of that time. Harriet traveled by herself up and down the Mississippi River, and has a small mountain in Iowa named for her, having won a race to its top in a wager.
Hosmer was deeply interested in the human spirit and lived in the age of great American transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson, who championed nature and individualism. She dived into art and discovered her fascination with sculpture. This, in a time when carving stone was considered extremely unladylike. She had to work to overcome the limitations imposed on women, and became a trailblazer for it.
But Harriet’s life was not a miserable struggle by any stretch. She had a delightful disposition and demonstrated a consistent ability to charm influential people who then helped her forward. She also maintained an assortment of deep friendships over years and continents of separation.
Her father sent her to an exclusive girl’s school known as “The Hive” at the home of the Sedgwicks, a prominent New England family, in the Massachusetts Berkshires. The house attracted many luminaries of the time, including Hawthorne, Emerson, and Fanny Kemble, an eminent English actress. That combination of creative minds and inspiring scenery must have fired Harriet’s ambitions. Another student and one of her closest friends there was Cornelia Crow, daughter of Wayman Crow.
The Eccentric Doctor McDowell
Wayman understood and appreciated Harriet’s urge to sculpt. He was aware of the barriers that confronted a woman seeking entrance to an established and exclusive community of male sculptors. Carving the human form required that a sculptor have an extensive knowledge of human anatomy. Women, to preserve their delicate natures, were barred from attending medical schools. Overcoming the hurdles to development of her skills required the assistance of another unconventional mind, back in St. Louis. Enter Joseph N. McDowell (1805-1868).
Dr. McDowell began lecturing on the history of man at Kemper College in 1838. He used human skulls in his presentations, and students packed the lecture hall to watch his dissertations. Thin and shrill, with iron-gray hair falling nearly to his shoulders, he was a highly competent teacher, but offbeat in the extreme. By 1847, he began construction of a medical school at 8th and Gratiot Streets. It looked like a fortress; octagonal, three stories tall, with a foundation eight feet thick.
McDowell bought 1,400 obsolete muskets from the US government and stored them in the basement. He procured a pile of scrap brass and had it cast into eight cannons, which he and his students would fire on national holidays. McDowell appeared at these functions in a tricornered hat and brass breastplate, cavalry saber at his side. He would yell “Make Rome howl” and commence with a cannonade. Despite his pronounced eccentricity, he led a solid program of instruction, featuring anatomical dissection.
A Missouri state law, passed in 1835, made the removal of bodies from graves, for sale or dissection, illegal. An infraction was classified as a misdemeanor, and some teaching hospitals, like McDowell’s Medical College sought to outflank the law by targeting the gravesites of slaves, transients, and the indigent whom few would miss. McDowell allegedly conducted sorties by night to raid paupers’ cemeteries.
Legal or not, McDowell never seemed particularly troubled by his odd, ever-growing odder reputation. He drew large crowds to his school’s commencement exercises, and could hold an audience rapt with his addresses. Dr. Warrren Outten, a surgeon who attended Cathedral Male Free School (now CBC) next door in the 1850’s recalled:
“Dr. McDowell was to each and every student a marked and wonderful character. His intensity and tendency toward profanity, his swaggering and independent bearing made him interesting, awesome, and peculiar”.
Joseph McDowell’s unique combination of skill and eccentricity made him an appropriate person to break the established mold by letting a woman attend his school. In fact, Wayman Crow anticipated this, and helped Harriet enter McDowell’s anatomy course in 1850. Like nearly everyone, McDowell delighted in having her around. He gave Harriet each day’s syllabus in advance so she could study in greater depth. She graduated with the knowledge of anatomy and physiology necessary to anyone serious about modeling a human form in stone.
When in Rome
At the age of 22, again with the assistance of Wayman Crow, Hatty (as he and many called her) moved to Rome. Writing at the time of her departure, “I am soul bound and thought bound in this land of dollars and cents.” She now embraced a European world that imposed fewer limits. This is consistent through Harriet’s life. For example, she deliberately and early rejected the idea of marriage, writing:
She corresponded often with Wayman Crow back in St. Louis. In fact, his daughter collected and published Harriet’s correspondence in 1912. She noted; “To no one else did she write so freely and consecutively of her life and work abroad, as to her early friend, Mr. Wayman Crow.” She referred to him endearingly as “Pater.” This remained a special and lifelong relationship.
To say that Hatty took to Rome is an understatement. She expressed in 1854 being “merry as a cricket and happy as a clam.” In Rome, she was the sole student of famed English sculptor John Gibson. Hatty shared a house with the most celebrated actress of her day, Charlotte Cushman. They attracted wealthy and famous travelers, much like Gertrude Stein did in Paris seventy years later. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Eliot, Sir Benjamin Guinness of Dublin, The Empress of Austria, The Queen of Naples, American Admiral Farragut and General Sheridan, Hans Christian Anderson, J.P. Morgan, William James and many others enjoyed the hospitality of the women’s parlor in Rome. Through it all, Hatty was, according to James, “the life of every party,” and a central player in the ever-shifting community there. She became lifelong friends with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, frequently exchanging letters and poetry with them.
Elizabeth wrote: “A great pet of mine and Robert’s, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly emancipated female”.
Hatty usually dressed like a man, rode horses unescorted, and issued her opinions freely. Growing to champion the developing cause of women’s rights. She wrote:
“I honor every woman who has strength enough to step outside the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another; strength enough to stand up and be laughed at, if necessary.”
Harriet Hosmer
In 1854, she achieved a career breakthrough, with a sculpture of Shakespeare’s Puck. It was replicated thirty times and provided her with financial independence. She created a studio in Rome, where she worked for thirty years. Many of her works were of tragic women from classical myth. Her masterpiece, Zenobia In Chains sold for $400,000 in 1859. The wealthy and famous of Europe bid for copies of her work. In her own lifetime, she became the world’s preeminent female sculptor.
Hosmer’s Benton takes his place
So it was a big deal indeed, when, in 1860, the Missouri Legislature awarded the commission for a statue in bronze, honoring Thomas Hart Benton, to Harriet Hosmer. Her patron Wayman Crow was on the approval committee, and he was ecstatic. So was Hatty. In June of that year, she wrote:
“I may say that I don’t think I have ever been half so tickled before. Think what a start it gives me, what a thing to have a public work! And above all, how rejoiced I am that it will be in St. Louis.”
In late 1861, a plaster cast of the Benton model was sent to Munich, where it was recast in bronze by the Royal Foundry. The American Civil War then interfered with any further move to ship and install the monument, until 1867.
Meanwhile, Dr. Joseph McDowell, who was thoroughly pro-slavery and eventually secessionist, donated his cannons to the Confederacy, and moved to Memphis. Perhaps in the spirit of good riddance, his medical school/fortress was turned into a prison for war criminals. At one time it confined 1,300 inmates as the Gratiot Street Prison. Today it is gone, and the site is a parking lot for Nestle-Purina. McDowell died in 1868, and is (securely) buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery.
In that same year:
“Old Bullion” was a reference to Benton; a longtime senatorial advocate for hard currency. And in reply, along with a bust of Crow she shipped to him:
Art History and Modern Perceptions
So in the end, we have this magnificent monument made possible through the workings of the State of Missouri, a local philanthropist, a renegade sculptress, and maybe even a madman. In an excellent recent book about Hosmer, Kate Culkin makes the argument that Hatty was, beyond her skills as an artist, the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time, among the right people.
I might counter that this is the result of many intersections involving great times and famous people. Hatty was intuitive enough to steer a steady course toward exactly what she felt most compelled to do. Henry James stated Hosmer “was, above all, a character, strong, fresh and interesting, destined, whatever statues she made, to make friends that were better still even than these at her best.”
Of course, the perception of something as art lies in the appreciation of one’s own sense of it. Hatty herself was greatly appreciated by those around her, and whether it affected their perception or appreciation of her craft is really secondary. Andy Warhol’s works reside in exclusive galleries for much the same reason, perhaps representing an appreciation of Warhol as of his art. Artists often have patrons. True art survives the years.
A final thought on this 5’2” dynamo named Hatty. She recognized early that her efforts were unusual and could be misinterpreted. As mentioned, she spoke out forcefully for the rights of women. Later on, she befriended Susan B. Anthony, and the cause of women’s suffrage. One last excerpt from her letters to Wayman Crow:
Perhaps Hatty’s wandering ghost is having a good time seeing “what has been going on” 150 years later. Something to consider, the next time you pass the Thomas Hart Benton statue in Lafayette Park.
Many thanks to research sources, including:
Harriet Hosmer Letters And Memories – Edited by Cornelia Crow Carr; Moffat, Yard & Co; 1912
Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography; Kate Culkin; University of Massachusetts Press; 2010
Missouri’s Mad Doctor McDowell; Cosner & Shannon; History Press; 2015
St Louis Post-Dispatch at stltoday.com Article by Jane Henderson; October 25, 2015; http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/book-blog/when-body-snatching-came-to-s-st-louis/article_22da7cff-e391-5adf-9e63-4755069e04d2.html
The Harvard Square Library; http://HarvardSquareLibrary.org/biographies/harriet-hosmer
Brittanica.com
New England Historical Society; http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/harriet-hosmer-pioneering-woman-artist/
The Lafayette Square Marquis; March – July 2008; with special thanks to Carolyn Willmore who wrote and edited most of the articles dealing with the re dedication events.
The Tracy Family History; http://www.thetracyfamilyhistory.net/co_62_prison.htm for an interesting perspective on Dr. McDowell.
Good job, Mike!
Another great story!!! THX!!!
A great winding story with a cast of curious and eccentric characters, producing a product that has stood and been admired for over 150 years. Nothing could go wrong here, eh. I’m sure you could have done another 3-400 pages.
Thank you for doing all this research and connecting the disparate dots. A good story well told, Mike.
But why: “There is the East, there is India.”? Surely he had more cogent quotes than that.
Ha! Stay tuned, Duke; I have an essay to specifically address your concern. And a seemingly valid concern at that – “Old Bullion” is facing 270 degrees west while saying “There is the East” – like someone off-stage fed him the wrong line. We will sort this out.