A New Letter of Hiram Powers
By THOMAS B. BRUMBAUGH*
"Make me as I am, Mr. Powers, and
be true to nature always, and
in everything," Andrew Jackson
reportedly told the sculptor. Hiram
Powers (1805-1873), born in Vermont,
trained as a young man in
Watson's clock factory in Cincinnati,
and later employed by
Dorfueille's Western Museum, scarcely
needed such advice; for on
the road to making High Art he had also
been a maker of writhing
wax figures controlled by automatic
insides for Dorfueille's model
Hell, the too faithful realism of which
caused numerous female
spectators to faint in horror. In a
hitherto unpublished letter written
to an unidentified friend, Benjamin T.
Reilly, Washington, D. C.,
from Italy in 1839, we see this
ingenious Yankee stonecutter, later
to be the most famous American artist of
the nineteenth century, at
the beginning of an energetic,
ambitious, and rather homesick second
year in Italy. He had gone to Florence
by way of Washington in
1837, modeling Jackson and Webster and
taking along the clay
versions to be cut in "pure
Carrara" marble. Although the celebrated
nude "Greek Slave" was his
"masterpiece," the portrait busts, his
"marble photographs," brought
him great wealth and admiration
and were probably his best artistic
productions. Even Horatio
Greenough, sculptor-founder of the
American "school" in Italy
twelve years before Powers' arrival, was
one of the "private
individuals" eager to have a bust
made at this time. Powers' lack
of formal education, for which he
apologizes in this letter (his com-
petitor Greenough was a Harvard
graduate), was later to become
an advantage, for his matter-of-fact
manner and Yankee ability to
tell a good story helped put at ease
Americans new to the effete
business of patronizing art.
* Thomas B. Brumbaugh is a member of the
department of fine arts at Emory
University.