Image unavailable: BROWERE’S LIFE MASKS OF GREAT AMERICANS BY CHARLES HENRY HART PRINTED AT THE DE VINNE PRESS FOR DOUBLEDAY AND McCLURE COMPANY 1899

Copyright, 1897, 1898, by S. S. McClure Co.
Copyright, 1899, by Doubleday & McClure Co.

TO THE MEMORY OF

JAMES P. SMITH
MINIATURE PAINTER
WHO FIRST DEVELOPED MY TASTE FOR ART
I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME AS A
TOKEN OF GRATITUDE

Proem

“GREAT oaks from little acorns grow.” How big results may flow from small beginnings is typically illustrated by the possibilities of the present volume. It began with the bare knowledge that there was, once upon a time, a man by the name of Browere, who had some facility in making masks from the living face. This was the seed that was destined to expand into the present publication. To tell how this germ grew, would be to anticipate the recital in the following pages; but the lively interest shown by the wide public and by the narrow public, the people and the artistic circle, in the articles upon Browere’s Life Masks of Great Americans, contributed by the writer to “McClure’s Magazine,” has called for a more expanded history of the artist and his work, for which fortunately there is ample material.

To the grandchildren of Browere, who have reverently preserved the works of their ingenious ancestor and generously placed them at my disposal for reproduction, are due the heartiest thanks; and in view of the possibility of the dispersal of the collection, it should be secured, en bloc, by the Government of the United States, and the most important of the life masks cast in imperishable bronze.

Charles Henry Hart.

Philadelphia, October 1, 1898.

Contents

List of Plates

LIFE   MASKS

I

The Plastic Art

THE plastic art, which is the art of modelling in the round with a pliable material, was with little doubt the earliest development of the imitative arts. To an untrained mind it is a more obvious method, of copying or delineating an object, than by lines on a flat surface. Its origin is so early and so involved in myths and legends, that any attempt to ascribe its invention, to a particular nation or to a particular individual, is impossible. Its earliest form was doubtless monumental. Frequent passages in the Scriptures show this, and that the Hebrews practised it, as did also their neighbors the Phœnicians; while excavations have revealed the early plastic monuments of the Assyrians. For more than two thousand years the Egyptians are known to have associated the plastic arts with their religious worship, but, being bound within priestly rules, made no perceptible progress from its beginning; yet these crude monuments of ancient Egypt are now the records of the world’s history of their time.

Associated with architecture from its earliest development, it has, in its narrower form of sculpture, been called, not inaptly, “the daughter of architecture.” Indeed, in the remains of ancient monuments, the two arts are so intimately combined, that architecture is frequently subordinated to sculpture, particularly in the buildings of the middle ages, where they appear as very twin sisters, sculpture often supplying structural parts of the erection.

Among the Greeks the plastic art existed from time immemorial, and among them attained its highest proficiency and skill. That they exceeded all others in this art goes without saying; their familiarity with the human form enabling them to portray corporal beauty with a delicacy and perfection, that no society, reared in any other situation or surrounded by other influences, could ever attain. With them beauty was the chief aim, it having in their eyes so great a value that everything was subservient to it. As has been said, “It was above law, morality, modesty, and justice.” Greek art, as we know it, began about 600 B.C.; but it did not arrive at its perfection until the time of Pericles, a century and a half later, in the person of Pheidias, who consummately illustrates its most striking characteristics—the simplicity with which great efforts are attained, and the perfect harmony which obtains between the desire and the conception, the realization and the execution. The frieze of the Parthenon, which easily holds the supreme place among known works of sculpture, is ample proof of this.

It was a Greek of the time of Alexander the Great, in the century following that of Pheidias, who invented the art of taking casts from the human form. This honor, according to Pliny, belongs to Lysistratus, a near relative of the famous sculptor Lysippus, who made life casts with such infinite skill as to produce strikingly accurate resemblances. The art of making life casts did not, however, come into general use until the middle of the fifteenth century, when Andrea Verocchio, the most noted pupil of Donatello, and the instructor of Perugini and of Leonardo da Vinci, followed it with such success as to lead Vasari, Bottari, and others to ascribe to him its invention. It was this art of taking casts from the human form, so successfully followed in this country, nearly four hundred years later, by John Henri Isaac Browere, that has afforded the occasion for the present work.

II

The Plastic Art in America

BEFORE entering upon the subject of Browere and his life masks, it seems proper, if not actually necessary, to take a survey of the development of the plastic art in that part of America now embraced within the limits of the United States, prior to the time of Browere, so as to understand what influences may have been exerted upon him in the direction of his career. This becomes the more important from the fact that while there have appeared in print, from time to time, numerous references to this subject, not a single consideration of the topic, known to the writer, has presented the facts with that accuracy without which all deductions must be in vain. From the present consideration the plastic work of the aborigines is necessarily excluded, as it belongs to another and very different department of study; this having to do with a branch of the fine arts, and that with a phase of archæology.

Prior to the war of the Revolution, while there were among us several painters exercising their art, both those of foreign and those of native birth, no note has come down of any modeller or sculptor in our midst, save one—a very remarkable woman named Patience Wright. It may be that we had no need for the sculptor’s art. We were mere colonies without call for statues or for monuments. It is true there was the leaden figure of King George, on the Bowling Green, in New York; but it came from the mother country, and soon furnished bullets for her rebellious sons. Likewise came from across the ocean the odd bits of decoration intended as architectural aids in the building of old Christ Church, in Philadelphia, and of a few other noted buildings. But our first practitioner of the plastic art was, as has been said, a woman.

Patience Lovell was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, of Quaker parentage, in 1725, and died in London, March 23, 1786. When twenty-three she married Joseph Wright, who, twenty-one years later, left her a widow with three children. She had early shown her aptitude for modelling, using dough, putty, or any other material that came in her way; and, being left by her husband unprovided for, she made herself known by her small portraits in wax, chiefly profile bas-reliefs. In 1772, she sought a wider field for her abilities by removing to London, where for many years she was the rage, not only for her plastic work, but for her extraordinary conversational powers, which drew to her all the political and social leaders of the day. By this means she was kept fully advised as to the momentous events transpiring relative to the colonies; and being on terms of familiar intercourse with Doctor Franklin (whose profile she admirably modelled, it being afterward reproduced by Wedgwood), she communicated her information regularly to him, as shown by her numerous letters preserved in his manuscript correspondence.

Mrs. Wright had a piercing eye, which seems to have penetrated to the very soul of her sitters, and enabled her to read their inner-selves and fix their characters in their features. Of her three children, one daughter married John Hoppner, the eminent portrait-painter; another, Elizabeth Pratt, followed her mother’s profession of modelling small portraits in wax; and the son, Joseph, we shall have occasion to mention on a subsequent page. Some idea may be gathered of the meritorious quality of Mrs. Wright’s work from the fact that she modelled in wax a whole-length statue of the great Chatham, which, protected in a glass case, was honored with a place in Westminster Abbey. Although Patience Wright never aspired to what is recognized as high art, still her abilities were of a high order, and her career is a most interesting one to follow and reflect upon, as she was the first native American, of American parentage, to follow the art of modelling as a profession. Her knowledge must have been wholly self-acquired, and in an environment not conducive to the development of an artistic temperament.

Mrs. Wright is not known to have essayed sculpture, or to have worked in any resisting material, so that the first native American sculptor was William Rush. He was born in Philadelphia, July 4, 1756, being fourth in direct descent from John Rush, who commanded a troop of horse in Cromwell’s army, and, having embraced the principles of the Quakers, came to Pennsylvania the year following the landing of William Penn. From the emigrant John Rush was also descended, in the fifth generation, the celebrated Benjamin Rush, physician and politician, and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The father of William was Joseph Rush, who married, at Christ Church, Philadelphia, September 19, 1750, Rebecca Lincoln, daughter of Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield Township, now in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. She was of the same family as Abraham Lincoln, the martyr President of the United States. I am thus minute in tracing the ancestry of William Rush, in order to establish and place upon record, beyond a question or doubt, that he was the first American sculptor by birth and parentage, and thus set at rest, the claim, so frequently made, that this honor belongs to John Frazee,[1] a man not born until 1790.

Rush served in the army of the Revolution, and it was not until after peace had settled on the land that he seems to have turned his attention to art. He soon became noted for the life-like qualities he put into the figureheads, for the prows of ships, he was called upon to carve, and so noted did these works become, that many orders came to him from Britain, for figureheads for English ships. The story is told that when a famous East Indiaman, the Ganges, sailed up that river, to Calcutta, with a figure of a river-god, carved by Rush, at its prow, the natives clambered about it as an object of adoration and of worship. Benjamin H. Latrobe, the noted architect, in a discourse before the Society of Artists of the United States, in 1811, says, speaking of Rush: “His figures, forming the head or prow of a vessel, place him, in the excellence of his attitudes and actions, among the best sculptors that have existed; and in the proportion and drawing of his figures he is often far above mediocrity and seldom below it. There is a motion in his figures that is inconceivable. They seem rather to draw the ship after them than to be impelled by the vessel. Many are of exquisite beauty. I have not seen one on which there is not the stamp of genius.”

Rush was a man of warm imagination and of a lively ideality. These are shown by his figures symbolical of Strength, Wisdom, Beauty, Faith, Hope, and Charity, carved by him for the Masonic Temple; by his figures of “Praise” and “Exaltation,” two cherubim encircled by glory, in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church; and by his “Christ on the Cross,” carved for St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church. His best-known work is his whole-length statue of Washington, carved in 1815, from recollection, by the aid of Houdon’s bust, which it closely resembles, now in the old State-house, or Independence Hall, Philadelphia. Another noted work of his, from Miss Vanuxem, a celebrated Quaker City belle, having posed for the model, is the graceful figure of a nymph, with a swan, located upon a rocky perch opposite the wheel-house at Fairmount water-works, Philadelphia.

Beside carving in wood, Rush modelled in clay, and his portrait-busts have always been recognized as truthful and satisfactory likenesses. The bust most commonly seen of Lafayette is his work. William Rush died in the city of his birth on the seventeenth day of January, 1833; and considering the era in which he lived and its uncongenial atmosphere, his achievement is most noteworthy and commendable.

Twelve days after the birth of Rush, Joseph Wright came into the world, inheriting from his mother her artistic temperament. At sixteen he accompanied the family to England, and received instruction from Benjamin West and from his brother-in-law, Hoppner. He returned to America late in 1782, bringing a letter of commendation from Franklin to Washington. In 1783, he painted a portrait of Washington from life, at Rocky Hill, New Jersey, and the next year was permitted to make a cast of Washington’s face, which is said to have been broken irreparably in removing from the skin,—a story the veracity of which may be akin to that in regard to Browere’s mask of Jefferson, hereafter to be told. However this may be, Wright made a bust of Washington, for which Congress paid him “233⅓ dollars,” and also modelled in wax a laureated profile portrait of Washington, which is of both artistic and historical value. Wright died in Philadelphia, during the yellow fever epidemic of December, 1793, and his bust, by his friend Rush, whom he is said to have instructed in clay modelling, belongs to the Academy of the Fine Arts, at Philadelphia.

Patience Wright, her son Joseph, and William Rush are the only native Americans that we know to have worked at the plastic art during the period we have limited for this review; and thus John Frazee, who claimed to be, and therefore is commonly credited with being, the first native American sculptor of American parentage, need not be considered; for he was only two years old when Browere was born, and therefore can have had no part in influencing Browere’s career.

There were, however, two foreigners who certainly did exercise a decided influence upon art in America, and cannot properly be omitted from any consideration of the causes that helped the plastic art onward in these United States. Both of them were men of commanding ability and importance in sculpture. One was the eminent French statuary Houdon, who visited this country in 1785, to prepare himself to produce his famous statue of Washington; and the other, the not much less able Italian, Giuseppe Ceracchi, who came here, in 1791, for love of freedom, and lived among us about four years. Ceracchi’s plan for an elaborate monument to commemorate the American Revolution, which was warmly taken up by Washington and members of the cabinet, and received the consideration of Congress, made his artistic proclivities better known, and gave the subject a wider range than the limited scope of Houdon’s work. Yet the influence of both these eminent devotees of the plastic art left, without doubt, a strong impression upon the minds of the people—an impression constantly refreshed by the sight of their works, which helped to create a healthy atmosphere for the development of a taste among us for the plastic art.

III

John Henri Isaac Browere

John Henri Isaac Browere, the son of Jacob Browere and Ann Catharine Gendon, was born at No. 55, Warren Street,

New York city, November 18, 1792, and died at his house opposite the old mile-stone, in the Bowery, in the city of his birth, September 10, 1834, and was buried in the Carmine Street Churchyard. He was of Dutch descent, one of those innumerable claimants of heirship to Anneke Jans, through Adam Brouwer, of Ceulen, who came to this country and settled on Long Island, in 1642. Adam Brouwer’s name was really Berkhoven, but the name of his business, Brouwer or Brewer, became attached to him, so that his descendants have been transmitted by his trade-name, and thus, as is often the case, a new surname introduced. His second son, Jacob Adam Brouwer, or Jacob son of Adam the Brewer, married Annetje Bogardus, granddaughter of Reverend Edward Bogardus and Anneke Jansen (corrupted to Jans); and among the most persistent pursuers of the intangible fortune of Anneke Jans has been the family of Browere.

John Browere was entered as a student at Columbia College, but did not remain to be graduated, owing doubtless to his early marriage, on April 30, 1811, to Eliza Derrick, of London, England. He turned his attention to art and became a pupil of Archibald Robertson, the miniature-painter, who came to this country from Scotland, in 1791, with a commission from David Stuart, Earl of Buchan, to paint, for his gallery at Aberdeen, a portrait of Washington. Later on, Archibald Robertson, with his brother Alexander, opened at No. 79, Liberty Street, New York, the well-known Columbian Academy, where, for thirty years, these Scotchmen maintained a school, for the instruction of both sexes in drawing and in painting, and where Vanderlyn, Inman, Cummings, and other of the early New York artists, profited by their training. At the present time, when miniature-painting is again coming into vogue, it is interesting to reflect that the letters which passed between Archibald Robertson in this country, and his brother Andrew in Scotland, form the best treatise that can be found upon the charming art of painting in little. These letters, after having remained in manuscript for the better part of a century, have recently been given to the public, in a charming volume of “Letters and Papers of Andrew Robertson,” edited by his daughter, Miss Emily Robertson, of Lansdowne Terrace, Hampton Wick, England.

Determined to improve himself still further, Browere accepted the offer of his brother, who was captain of a trading-vessel to Italy, to accompany him abroad; and for nearly two years the young man travelled on foot through Italy, Austria, Greece, Switzerland, France, and England, diligently studying art and more especially sculpture. Returning to New York, he began modelling, and soon produced a bust of Alexander Hamilton, from Archibald Robertson’s well-known miniature of the Federal martyr, which was pronounced a meritorious attempt to produce a model in the round from a flat surface. Being of an inventive turn, he began experimenting to obtain casts from the living face in a manner and with a composition different from those commonly employed by sculptors. After many trials and failures, he perfected his process, with the superior results shown in his work.

Browere’s first satisfactory achievement was a mask of his friend and preceptor, Robertson, and his second was that of Judge Pierrepont Edwards, of Connecticut. But the most important of his very early works was the mask of John Paulding, the first to die of the captors of André; and this mask, made in 1817, was followed later by masks of Paulding’s coadjutors, Williams and Van Wart; so that we owe to Browere’s nimble fingers the only authentic likenesses we have of these conspicuous patriots of the Revolution.

Browere wrote verse and painted pictures in addition to his modelling, and, in the spring of 1821, made an exhibition at the old gallery of the American Academy of the Fine Arts, in Chambers Street, New York, which called forth the following card from his early instructor, Robertson, who was one of the directors of the Academy. It is interesting, notwithstanding the unconscious partiality one is apt to have for a former pupil, and is addressed:

It was left, however, for “The Nation’s Guest” to lift Browere’s art into prominence. At the request of the New York city authorities, Lafayette permitted Browere, in July of 1825, to make a cast of his face. This was so successful that from this time on, Browere was devoted to making casts of the most noted characters in the country’s history, who were then living, with the purpose of forming a national gallery of the busts of famous Americans. He intended to have them reproduced in bronze, and devoted years of labor and the expenditure of much money to the furtherance of his scheme. He wrote to Madison: “Pecuniary emolument never has been my aim. The honor of being favored by my country biases sordid views.” In 1828 he wrote to the same: “I have expended $12,087 in the procuration of the specimens I now have.” These included masks of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and later was added that of Van Buren; Charles Carroll of Carrollton; Lafayette; De Witt Clinton; Generals Philip Van Cortlandt, Alexander Macomb and Jacob Brown; Commodore David Porter; Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey; and Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush of Pennsylvania; Justice of the United States Supreme Court Philip Pendleton Barbour; and the great commoner, Henry Clay; Doctors Samuel Latham Mitchill, Valentine Mott, and David Hosack; Edwin Forrest and Tom Hilson, the actors; Charles Francis Adams and Philip Hone; Thomas Addis Emmet and Doctor Cooper of South Carolina; Colonel Stone and Major Noah, of newspaper notoriety; Dolly Madison and Francis Wright; Gilbert Stuart, Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart; and other personages favorably known in their day, but who have slipped out of the niche of worldly immortality, so that even their names fail to awaken a recollection of themselves. Such is the mutability of fame.

The time, however, was not ripe for the public patronage of the Fine Arts. There was, too, a feeling abroad that it savored of monarchy and favored classes, to perpetuate men and deeds by statues and monuments. Another cause that hampered Browere was the lack of protection accorded to such works. He complains to Madison: “I regret to say that as yet no law has been passed to protect modelling and sculpture, and therefore I have been hindered from completing the gallery, fearful of having the collection pirated.” So disheartened did he become with the little interest shown in his project and the work he had accomplished for it, that at one time he contemplated visiting Panama, and presenting the busts of the more prominent subjects to the republics of South America, in order to incite them to further efforts for freedom. Finally he was forced to abandon his scheme of a national gallery, owing to want of support, and the direct opposition—“jealous enmity,” Browere calls it—of his brother artists, the old American Academy faction led by Colonel Trumbull, and the new National Academy followers led by William Dunlap.

They maligned his pretensions because he was honest enough to call his method for accomplishing what he attempted “a process.” Surely, judging from results, it was superior to any other known method of obtaining a life mask, and it seems most unfortunate that his “process” has to be counted among “the lost arts”; for neither he nor his son, who was acquainted with both the composition and the method of applying it, has left a word of information on the subject. When the public press attacked Browere and his method for the rumored maltreatment of President Jefferson, he replied: “Mr. Browere never has followed and never will follow the usual course, knowing it to be fallacious and absolutely bad. The manner in which he executes portrait-busts from life is unknown to all but himself, and the invention is his own, for which he claims exclusive rights, but it is infinitely milder than the usual course.” That his method of taking the mask was accomplished without discomfort to the subject is fully attested by the number of persons who submitted to it, as also by the many certificates given by Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Lafayette, Gilbert Stuart, and others to that effect.

In the following letter from Browere to Trumbull it will be seen the writer does not attempt to conceal his feelings of resentment: