Abstract
In the fall of 1896, the well-respected architect Charles F. McKim made one last addition to his recently completed Boston Public Library. He donated a bronze statue for the interior courtyard fountain, and unwittingly he set off a major civic battle. For more than a year, controversy raged as opponents fought to expel the statue from the city and supporters fought just as ardently to keep it. Denounced as “debauched,” “vice-ridden,” a memorial to “reckless abandon” and “the worst type of harlotry,” McKim’s gift was a three-quarter life-size female nude in mid-skip holding a cluster of grapes in one hand and a young child in the other (fig. 11.1). McKim had envisioned it as the perfect complement to his Renaissance, palazzo-style building. Set on a pedestal in the courtyard pool, the work would unify architectural structure and open space (fig. 11.2). But within a year, the statue was banned from Boston and McKim’s artistic vision abandoned. This essay addresses how a seemingly innocuous bronze statue succeeded so effectively in not just dividing Boston society but galvanizing class interests.
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Notes
Rev. James Brady, “Dr. Brady Breaks Loose,” Newark Advertiser November 1896, exact date unclear, Frederick MacMonnies Papers, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA) roll D245, fr. 130. See also Boston Globe 23 November report in the scrapbook of newspaper clippings, January 3, 1895 to January 25, 1897, Trustees Library, Boston Public Library. MacMonnies’ papers and the Boston Public Library’s scrapbook of newspaper clippings contain a wealth of contemporary commentary on the Bacchante controversy.
Thomas Russell Sullivan, Passages from the Journal of Thomas Sullivan, 1891–1903 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917) 188–89.
The remarks by the president of the library trustees, Frederick Prince, are quoted in Walter Muir Whitehill, “The Vicissitudes of Bacchante in Boston,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954) 449.
Library, Boston Public Library. For the opposing views, see “At Intervals,” Boston Evening Transcript October 22, 1896, 6 and the letter of H. L. Warren, August, 1896, Correspondence File of the Boston Art Commission, Boston City Hall.
The seven-stanza poem, “The Bacchante’s Plaint” appeared in New York Town Topics June 10, 1897, Frederick MacMonnies Papers, AAA roll D245, fr. 80.
See Royal Cortissoz, “Some Imaginative Types in American Art,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 91 (1895) 174. Cummings in “Chasing a Bronze Bacchante” details the various reproductions and reductions made of the statue.
Saint-Gaudens’s letter to Paul Bion is cited in Charles Meltzer, “Frederick MacMonnies— Sculptor,” Cosmopolitan 53 (1912) 210. Similar compliments appear in letters to the Art Commission, July 21, 1896 and June 26, 1896, Correspondence File of the Boston Art Commission, Boston City Hall.
Kathryn Greenthal in Augustus Saint Gaudens: Master Sculptor (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985) 42
Dancing Faun; The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American Collections Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson, eds. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with George Braziller, 1980) 308.
See Whitehill, “Vicissitudes of Bacchante in Boston,” 445, and the Boston Traveller clipping from December 11, 1896 in MacMonnies Papers, AAA, roll D245, fr. 64.
These figures are cited in Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980) 177.
This group, for example, had less august family lineages, maintained fewer ties to Harvard, and had fewer affiliations with Boston’s exclusive social clubs. For a detailed discussion of the status and background of key opponents and supporters, see Julia B. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) 45–47.
Robert Grant had his protagonist make this comment in his novel The Chippendales (New York: Scribner’s, 1909) 365.
Boston Evening Record November 16, 1896, Frederick MacMonnies Papers, AAA, roll D245, fr. 125. See also the Boston Post November 16, 1896, 5.
Josephus N. Lamed, “The Freedom of Books,” Why Do We Need a Public Library Library Tract, no. 1 (American Library Association, 1902) 18.
See also Joseph L. Harrison, “The Public Library Movement in the United States,” New England Magazine n.s. 10 (1894) 709–22
Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920 (New York: Free Press, 1979)
Rosemary Ruhig Du Mont, Reform and Reaction: The Big City Public Library in American Life (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990)
Jeff Weintraub, “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Frederick Crunden, “The Public Library and Civic Improvement,” The Chautauquan (1906) 336.
Mariana G. Van Rensselaer, “The New Public Library in Boston: Its Artistic Aspects,” Century Magazine 50 (1895) 262.
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 95.
See also Jon M. Kingsdale, “The ‘Poor Man’s Club’: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,” American Quarterly 25 (1975) 472–89
Ruth Bordin in Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981)
John S. Blocker. Jr. in American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989)
Crunden, “The Value of a Free Library,” The Library Journal 15 (1890) 80.
Barbara L. Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance (Middle-town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).
On the subject of home values, see also Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Boston Globe 1 January 1892, cited in Whitehill, Boston Public Library: A Centennial History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 153.
See, for example, H. C. Merwin, “The Irish in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly 77 (1896) 289–99 and “The Foreign Elements in Our Population,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine n.s., 6 (1884) 765. While in Boston the Irish did not tend to translate their political power into economic or occupational achievement, statistics suggest that second-generation Irish did do better than their parents
Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) 130–35.
For an ethnic breakdown of the population, see Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) 148–49.
Blodgett’s estimate presumably includes first- and second-generation Irish as well as third and fourth generations. As James Connolly comments in The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 217, n. 4, census data from the period show that the number of first- and second-generation Irish alone totaled 41.7 percent of the city’s population in 1885; adding third and fourth generations to that would greatly increase the percentage.
Letter to Samuel Ward, July 14, 1897, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton 2, eds. Sara Norton and Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913) 254.
Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe, Barrett Wendell and His Letters (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1924) 145.
Greg Reibman, “The Bacchante That Got Left Behind,” Artnews (1992) 40. Renovations to the courtyard and pool then needed to be completed before the statue, a casting from the original, which remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, could be installed.
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© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
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Rosenbaum, J.B. (2010). Ordering the Social Sphere: Public Art and Boston’s Bourgeoisie. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_12
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