Italy, the Magic Land. Lilian Whiting
took rooms once occupied by the famous Canova. Here he had made under his supervision copies in marble of many of the famous works of the Vatican and the Capitol. The largest collection of these was a commission from Mr. Edward King of Newport, and among them were busts of Ariadne, Demosthenes, and Cicero, and a facsimile of the ‘Dying Gladiator’ which Mr. King presented to the Redwood Library of Newport.
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“During his first winter in Rome he was permitted by the authorities to make a cast of a mutilated bust of Cicero which had long lain in the Vatican. A critic writing from Rome in 1857 says of this bust of Cicero: ‘Mr. Akers obtained permission to take a cast from it; he then restored the eye, brow, and ears, and modelled a neck and bust for it in accordance with the temperament shown by the nervous and rather thin face. He has succeeded admirably. It is the very head of the Vatican, yet without the scars of envious time, and sits gracefully on human shoulders, instead of being rolled awkwardly back upon a shelf.’ This bust is unlike the portrait which so long passed for Cicero’s, but has been identified by means of a medal which was struck by the Magnesians in honor of the great orator during his consulate, and is now the authorized portrait of Cicero. The finest of Paul Akers’s creations executed during his stay in Rome are ‘St. Elizabeth of Hungary,’ which represents the princess at the moment the roses have fallen to the ground; ‘Una and the Lion,’ an illustration of the line in Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’—
‘Still while she slept he kept both watch and ward;’
the head of Milton and the ‘Pearl Diver.’ The ‘Pearl Diver,’ now owned by the city of Portland, represents a youth stretched upon a sea-worn rock and wrapped in eternal sleep. The arms are thrown above the head, and about the waist is a net containing pearl-bearing shells for which he has risked his life. There is no trace of suffering; all is subdued to beauty. It is death represented as the ancients conceived it, the act of the torch-reverting god. This youth, who has lost his life at the moment when all that for which he had dared was within his grasp, suggests Paul Akers’s own untimely death on the eve of his triumph.”
It was from his Roman studio that Mr. Akers wrote to a friend:—
“Yesterday Browning called. He looked a long time at my Milton, and said it was Milton, the man-angel. He praised the wealth of hair which I had given the head, and then said that Mrs. Browning had a lock of Milton’s hair, the only one now in existence. This was given her by Leigh Hunt, just before his death, who had the records proving it to be genuine. The hair was, he said, like mine. He invited me to visit him in Florence, where he would show me the first edition of Milton’s poems, marked to indicate the peculiar accent which the poet sometimes adopted, a knowledge of which makes clear somewhat that otherwise seems discordant. Milton was so great a musician that there could have been no fault in sound in his compositions. He looked over my books; said my edition of Shelley was one which he had corrected for the press, not from a knowledge of the original MS., but from his internal evidence that so it must have been; said Poe was a wonderful man; spoke of Tennyson in the warmest terms. Took up a copy of his own poems published in the United States, and remarked that it was better than the English edition, yet had some awful blunders, and wished me to allow him to correct a copy for me. My head of the ‘Drowned Girl’ caught his eye and interested him. I told him that I had thought of Hood’s ‘Bridge of Sighs.’ He then said that Hood wrote that on his deathbed, and read it to him before any one else had seen it. Hood was doubtful whether it was worth publishing. To-morrow Mrs. Browning is to come; she has been quite ill since she came to Rome, and I have seen her but once. I derive much comfort from the friendship of Charlotte Cushman. She has just gone from here. She has frequent breakfast parties; I have attended but one. Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, Wild, the painter, and myself were the guests. Fields I like much.”
The first works of Mr. Akers were two portrait busts, of Longfellow and of Samuel Appleton. Of his bust of Milton, Hawthorne in the “Marble Faun” has said:—
“In another style, there was the grand, calm head of Milton, not copied from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them, because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly studied and solved in the artist’s mind. The bust over the tomb in Greyfriar’s Church, the original miniatures and pictures wherever to be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work—wherein likewise by long perusal and deep love of ‘Paradise Lost,’ the ‘Comus,’ the ‘Lycidas,’ and ‘L’Allegro,’ the sculptor had succeeded even better than he knew in spiritualizing his marble with the poet’s mighty genius. And this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man.”
Richard Greenough and the painter, Mr. Haseltine, were prominent figures among the early American group of the nineteenth-century artists in Rome. There came Emma Stebbins, who modelled a fine portrait bust of Charlotte Cushman; and Anne Whitney, whose statues of Samuel Adams and of Leif Ericson adorn public grounds in Boston; whose life-size statue of Harriet Martineau is the possession of Wellesley College; and whose “Chaldean Astronomer,” “Lotus-Eater,” and “Roma”—a figure personifying the Rome of Pio Nono—reveal her power in ideal creation.
The name of Harriet Hosmer stands out in brilliant pre-eminence among those of all women who have followed the plastic art. Her infinite charm of personality seems to impart itself to her work, and she has the gift to make friends as well as to call forms out of clay—the success of friendship being one even more permanently satisfying. In her early life as a girl hardly more than twenty, she sought Rome, living with art as her chaperon. Her versatility, her picturesque individuality, and her imaginative power all combined to win sympathetic recognition. Gibson, whose guidance was particularly well adapted to develop her gifts, received her into his own studio and took a deep interest in her work. It was during the period of her early efforts that Hawthorne was in Rome, and she is graphically depicted in his notebooks in her boyish cap at work in the clay. Gibson was an artist, con amore, and Miss Hosmer’s joyous abandon to her art captivated his sympathy. “In my art what do I find?” he questioned; “happiness; love which does not depress me; difficulties which I do not fear; resolution which never abates; flights which carry me above the ground; ambition which tramples no one down.” Master and pupil were akin in their unwearied devotion to art. Of Gibson, whose absence of mind regarding all the details of life made him almost helpless in travel and affairs, Miss Hosmer used gleefully to say that he “was a god in his studio, but God help him out of it!” This glancing sprite of a girl, frightening her friends by her daring and venturous horseback riding; gravitating by instinct to offer some generous, tender aid to the sick, the destitute, or the helpless; the life and light of gay dinners and of social evenings; working from six in the morning till night in her studio, “with an absence of pretension,” says Mrs. Browning, “and simplicity of manners which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with her broad forehead and high aims,” had the magic gift that merged her visitors and patrons into enthusiastic friends; and Mrs. Browning has chronicled the pretty scene when Lady Marion Alford, the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, knelt before the girl artist and slipped on her finger a ring—a precious ruby set with diamonds—as a token of her devotion. Reading Miss Hosmer’s life still further backward, the reader is transported, as if on some magic carpet, to St. Louis, in the United States, where a noble and lofty man, Hon. Wayman Crow—a generous friend, a liberal patron of the arts, a man of the most refined tastes and culture, whose great qualities were always used in high service—first aided Miss Hosmer to the preliminary studies in her art, and whose accomplished and lovely daughters (now Mrs. Lucien Carr of Boston, Mrs. Edwin Cushman of Newport and Rome, and Mrs. Emmons of Leamington, England) were as a trio of sisters to the young artist. And “the flowing conditions of life” bear on this lifelong friendship until a fair young girl, Élise (the daughter of Mrs. Emmons), catches up this sweet tie and as an accomplished and lovely young woman in Roman society, when these “flowing conditions” had come down even into the season of 1906–7, Miss Emmons cherished the fame of Harriet Hosmer and enjoyed the privilege of a constant correspondence with the distinguished artist. So the past links itself again with the present; and who can tell where any story in life begins or ends in the constant evolutionary progress?
Miss