Born:
1805
Vermont

Died:
1873

Biography:
The most successful American sculptor of the nineteenth century, Hiram Powers was born in Vermont in 1805 to a dirt poor family of farmers.  His early working life was widely varied-from apprenticing with a clockmaker to fashioning wax automatons for a popular museum.  His success at wax modeling led him to sculpture, and with very little training he won several commissions for portrait busts of American politicians and socialites.  To solidify his training, he moved to Florence, Italy, in 1837.  There he began to master his craft and to build a reputation and clientele among American and English travelers.  He remained in Florence for the rest of his life. 

While he continued to create portrait busts, Powers became known as a sculptor of ideal figures.  The bust of Psyche was the third of these.  Commissioned by Bostonian Ignatius Sargent in 1848, it was completed the following year.  During the next fifteen years, the sculptor made nine copies in marble and three in plaster.  This example is apparently the original marble, purchased by a relative of the Codman family from the sale of Sargent’s art works in 1868.  The bust came to SPNEA through the Codman family and ornaments the drawing room of SPNEA’s Codman House in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Psyche, symbolized by the butterfly (seen on the hair of Powers’s sculpture), personified the human soul.  In classical myth, Cupid fell in love with Psyche’s beauty while Aphrodite jealously tormented her; eventually Cupid’s love prevailed, and Psyche was immortalized.  Powers’s image of Psyche is a classical evocation of female beauty, and as such had great appeal in the nineteenth century.  However, as successful as his ideal busts were, Powers’s greatest success came with a full-scale sculpture of the Greek Slave.   This statue, of which Powers eventually made six copies, was supposedly seen by more people than any other American work of art in the nineteenth century.  In England, it was displayed at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, and in the next few years the sculpture toured American cities from Boston to New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit. 

The story of the Greek Slave had great appeal in Victorian America.  The figure represented victims of the Greek War of Independence (1821-32), when Greek women, Christian women, were enslaved by the Turks and sold in Turkish markets.  The parallels o f the Greek Slave to American slavery were not lost, either on the abolitionists or the anti-abolitionists.    The figure, as Powers saw her, although nude, rose above her captivity with an inner strength and calm brought on by her belief in God.  As Powers wrote:

As there should be a moral in every work of art, I have given to the expression of the Greek slave what trust there could be still in a Divine Providence…with utter despair for the present mingled with somewhat of scorn for all around her.  She is too deeply concerned to be aware of her nakedness.  It is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed, and she bears it all as Christians only can.

For a culture notoriously prudish, this was a daring image-the first nude female figure to be widely accepted by the American public.  It was so popular that thousands of copies of it sold in bronze and plaster and, like SPNEA’s, in Parian, a type of lightly glazed porcelain that imitated marble.

Named after the Greek island Paros, a source of classical marble, Parian was invented in England around 1845.  Parian’s success at imitating marble meant that for the first time middle-class homeowners could furnish their homes with affordable high-quality copies of sculpture.  The wholesale cost of a Parian bust was between $2.50 and $3.00; a marble sculpture would have cost hundreds of dollars.  Parian figurines and ornamental vases were enormously popular from the 1840s until the 1880s, when arts and crafts proponents declared them out of favor.  These tastemakers argued that materials should be “honest.”  Parian, the success of which was based on its ability to mimic another material, was considered dishonest. 

That many middle-class homeowners chose to own copies of the Greek Slave is at first surprising.  Even Henry James wondered about “the Greek Slave, so undressed, yet so refined, even so pensive, in sugar-white alabaster, exposed under little domed glass covers in such American homes as could bring themselves to think such things right”.  But in fact, in an age when Americans were struggling with a deeply divided nation and mind-numbing change brought about by industrialization and immigration, and when women, in a supposed march toward progress, were increasingly moved out of the public sphere and into the confines of the home, the Greek Slave, with its conflicting messages of powerlessness and empowerment, spoke to Victorian Americans in just the way that art, at its best, can.

Carlisle, Nancy.  Cherished Possessions, A New England Legacy.  Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003.