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Hiram Powers
1805-1873
"Greek Slave" - Parian Porcelain - 1852, Staffordshire, England
| Powers’ 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. |
