Engineering Contemplation and Conviviality in Turn- of- the- Century America
Melody Barnett Deusner
The following investigation into the late nineteenth- century reemer- gence of the Greco- Roman curved stone bench or exedra in America was prompted by a collision of images. In the first, A Reading from Homer (Fig.
5.1, see insert), an easel painting created by the Anglo- Dutch artist Lawrence Alma- Tadema for New York businessman Henry G. Marquand in 1885, four figures in Classical dress listen with varying degrees of focused attention to a dramatic recitation from the works of the Greek poet, performed by a ges- ticulating, himation- clad and laurel- crowned man perched on the end of a semicircular marble bench by the sea. An archival search for other nineteenth- century American exedrae turned up a second image, an untitled photograph published by the Byron Company in 1898 (Fig. 5.2), in which eight men sit in front of the offices of the New York Herald with their newspapers.
The painting and photograph, created thirteen years and thousands of miles apart, seem only tenuously connected by these benches— one deli- cately carved and ornamented with a lion’s foot, the other straightforwardly utilitarian in its minimalism. Yet they converge in the year 1885, when both the Alma- Tadema painting and the William E. Dodge Monument (of which the Herald readers’ bench forms a part) were installed in the New York sites for which they were designed: in the music room of the new Marquand mansion at Madison Avenue and 68th Street on the Upper East Side (Fig. 5.3), and, two miles to the south, on the triangle of land created by the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Broadway at 34th Street.1
1 The Dodge statue was moved to Bryant Park, New York, in 1939; Hunt’s pedestal and exedra are no longer extant. For a photograph of the complete ensemble in the 1890s, see King 1892, 165.
Fig. 5.2. Men seated in the exedra of the William E. Dodge Monument in Herald Square, New York (Byron Company, 1898).
Museum of the City of New York.
Further probing reveals these locations to be linked by the activities of the architect Richard Morris Hunt, designer of the granite bench and drinking- fountain pedestal for John Quincy Adams Ward’s Dodge statue (whose shadow projects across the photograph’s lower right corner), and of Marquand’s Beaux- Arts mansion. Hunt had visited Alma- Tadema’s London studio at Townsend House, which featured its own marble seat,2 to discuss plans for decorating Marquand’s Greek- themed music room with a custom piano and furniture, including the cushioned Johnstone, Norman & Co. bench that would be placed directly below A Reading from Homer, extending the painted invitation to sit and listen into live human space.
But Marquand’s active shaping of the late nineteenth- century American art world reached beyond commissions for his home to include his pres- idency of (and donations to) the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as his interventions into the city’s monumental landscape. He lobbied for the permanent translation of Stanford White’s Washington Square Arch into marble in 1889– 1890, and served as a founding member of the Municipal Art Society in 1893, which, under Hunt’s leadership, directed private funds toward the beautification of the city through public sculp- ture, mural paintings, and street furniture selected by its committees.3 The first Society competition (juried by Marquand, Hunt, and White, among others) placed murals by Edward Simmons in Manhattan’s new Criminal Courts Building, featuring Justice flanked by allegorical figures arranged on an inscribed Classical bench.4 In 1898, it commissioned yet another three- dimensional exedra, a memorial alcove dedicated to the recently deceased Hunt and installed in the Fifth Avenue- facing wall of Central Park.
What to make of this proliferation of Classical seating and the inter- linked taste- makers promoting it? Written as a critical study of Gilded Age wealth at precisely this moment, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) would seem to explain some of these patterns:
the sponsorship of monuments and murals as public demonstrations of
2 The marble bench or counter at Townsend House was not precisely an exedra; for further consideration of the relationship between the homes of Alma- Tadema and Marquand, see Kisluk- Grosheide 1994 and Deusner 2010.
3 On the Municipal Art Society, see Gilmartin 1995. Bogart (1989) discusses a range of public sculptural projects in New York in this period.
4 Multiple design submissions for the competition featured exedrae; see “Designs of Justice,”
New York Herald, April 21, 1894, 7, for illustrations, including Simmons’s inscribed bench. The inscription does not appear in Simmons’s final painted version as reproduced and discussed in Van Hook 1992.
purchasing power and taste that otherwise might remain less visible if confined within the home. Stylistically, the attraction of Marquand and others of his class to ancient Greek and Roman forms fits easily within a Spencerian paradigm, according to which elite Americans positioned themselves as racially pure inheritors of the highest achievements of the Western world, the most perfect exemplars of an advanced civilization in which cultural and economic accomplishments are mutually constitutive and self- reinforcing (Pyne 1996, 11– 47). One might assume, then, that the exedrae that simultaneously support Reading from Homer and reading from the Herald were simply territorial markers of private taste breaching the boundaries of the parlor wall and flowing out across parks and busy intersections, into country homes and gardens, through the grounds of Worlds Fairs, over the walls of civic buildings, and into the quiet corners of mournful cemeteries, to remake public space in its own image. By the 1920s, the full territory of the nation had seemingly been outfitted with Neo- Antique marble and granite benches, both represented and real, indoors and out.5 But their propagation was neither purely top- down nor unidirectional, and their integration into the geographic and cultural land- scape far from seamless.
No single form, however archaeologically pedigreed or loosely adapted, could have meant the same things in each of these widely differing situa- tions. What were the consequences of connecting the American present to the ancient past by adding this dynamic but potentially unstable interac- tive dimension to sculptural, architectural, and decorative installations?
Without attempting a complete catalogue of American exedrae, this essay returns to the late nineteenth- century moment when enthusiasm for these objects first emerged and their standard configurations were established, in order to frame the conditions that governed their actual use, nonuse, and misuse. It seeks to recover something of their optical parameters and tactile materiality, and to retrace the intersecting circuits of production and consumption in which they were suspended. In looking at this facet of the past, it also aims to elucidate the present, insofar as the challenges and conflicts that birthed these complicated (and in some cases compromised) works of art remain very much with us. Attending to the exedra’s invita- tion to sit and contemplate, look, and debate, we may become attuned to the contradictions and mixed messages inherent in the form— the hopes
5 See McElmurray 2003 for a general chronology of these projects.
and disappointments embodied in these objects, which ostensibly offered rest for the weary, yet were so often wearying.
The Monumental Sofa
The story of American exedrae begins not in the home but on the street, with the bench pedestal designed by Stanford White in collaboration with Augustus Saint- Gaudens for their Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Memorial (1877– 1881). When unveiled in New York’s Madison Square Park, it became the first successfully installed exedra to receive wide- spread attention in the United States (Fig. 5.4).
The high- backed curving bluestone seat atop which Saint- Gaudens’s bronze Civil War hero stands was the result of an extended process of experimentation. Tasked with fulfilling a commission by a committee of New York businessmen and politicians who sought to honor the admiral, Saint- Gaudens calibrated Farragut’s pose and accessories to achieve a careful balance between idealized stoic determination and particularized
Fig. 5.4. Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Memorial, Madison Square Park, New York. Augustus Saint- Gaudens and Stanford White, 1877–1881.
Public Domain.
animated liveliness (Dryfhout 1982, 112), while White reexamined his sketches of Italian Renaissance benches and tried stretching the pedestal’s proportions into more “parabolic, bucolic, or any other kind of olic curves than a Greek temple ever had.”6 Indeed, White’s narrow, vertically elon- gated seat, together with the shallow stylized female allegorical reliefs of Loyalty and Courage that Saint- Gaudens carved along its back, resulted in a wave- like exedra so freely interpreted as to refuse definitive historical or archaeological classification.
Contemporaries generally described White’s exedra as inspired by the Greco- Roman world. Journalist Richard Watson Gilder, who had posed for Farragut’s legs, highlighted its “Classic” and “antique” qualities in his Scribner’s preview of the installation (Gilder 1881, 164). Subsequent art commentary echoed Gilder’s description of White’s base as “a clas- sic elliptic exedra” and worked to define the unusual term for readers.
The exedra was a form, as the critic of the New- York Tribune (probably Clarence Cook) pointed out, “familiar to those of us who have trav- elled . . . along the Street of Tombs in Pompeii.”7 It was familiar, too, to readers of Thomas Henry Dyer’s Pompeii: Its History, Buildings, and Antiquities, which described an exedra as a semi- circular seat “intended to contain a number of persons . . ., or a spacious hall for conversation and the general purposes of society,” whether found in the baths, gymnasia, houses, or burial places of the ancient Greeks or Romans (Dyer 1867, 261). Similarly, publications like William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities— like ruined Pompeii itself— blurred the distinc- tions between these two cultures’ deployments of this seating furniture (Smith 1854, 480), and American commentators made little effort to dis- entangle them in an enthusiastic yet imprecise embrace of the exedra’s Classical associations.
Less archaeological and more imaginative were the texts that attempted to revitalize ancient life through the construction of immersive fictional- ized narratives. In the year of the Farragut’s debut, multiple American publications reprinted a feature called “Social Life among the Ancient Greeks” from England’s Cornhill Magazine, which describes an imagi- nary journey into the past.8 As a stranger, the narrator is welcomed to the
6 Stanford White to Augustus Saint- Gaudens, December 17, 1879, reprinted in Baldwin 1931, 141– 142.
7 “St. Gaudens’s Farragut,” New York Daily Tribune, May 25, 1881, 5.
8 “Social Life among the Ancient Greeks,” Cornhill Magazine 42:251 (November 1880), 601– 615;
reprinted in America as “Social Life among the Ancient Greeks,” Appleton’s Journal 55 (January 1881), 28– 36; and Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 33:1 (January 1881), 50– 60.
marble benches in the agora, common meeting places for “men of busi- ness or men of leisure” in the market square:
It was here that you heard and discussed the news . . . Here the Athenians realized their common citizenship, and got their common sense. By daily intercourse here, rich with poor, they rubbed down their angles, acquired a public spirit, and by interchange of ideas, controlled by free and sharp criti- cism, developed a public opinion. (Cornhill Magazine 42 (251), November 1880, 608)
Throughout the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, this associa- tion of the exedra with learned yet democratic exchange remained fixed in the American popular imagination: the carved and polished stone bench was envisioned as a place where boundaries between street and home, strangers and friends, old and young, rich and poor, even life and death were “rubbed down” by physical proximity and conversational engagement. Turning from the marketplace to the burial ground (and drawing on his own experiences at excavations in Assos),9 architect and designer Francis Henry Bacon in 1886 described Greek funerary exedrae as places where
Death was made a part of their everyday life; lovers wandered beneath the trees, philosophers sat in the exedra and discussed immortality, the little children took first steps in spelling from the inscribed marbles, and the tired wayfarer went aside to the cool stone seats to rest, while the hurrying, busy feet tramped by over the paved road just below. (Bacon 1886, 856)10
Six years later, Robert Yelverton Tyrell used Victorian analogies to liken Roman exedrae to both university lecture halls and private drawing rooms, and in 1897, an English translation of Maurice Pellison’s Roman Life in Pliny’s Time collapsed the two, conjuring the exedra as a place where “the owner of the house would seek recreation from his business cares, in con- versing with poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers” (Tyrell 1892, 168– 169;
Pellison 1897, 68). In this way, a variety of contemplative and conversa- tional civic, domestic, and funerary Greek and Roman practices became
9 On American excavations at Assos, see Winterer 2002, 163– 170.
10 See Macaulay- Lewis in this volume. Bacon’s brother, Henry, was an American architect responsible for several exedra designs, many of them funerary, in collaboration with sculptor Daniel Chester French; see note 65.
fused into a single idealized (if historically muddled) conception of the democratic public sphere.11
Was this weighty concept one that the American exedra was able to bear? Several essays in this volume continue and advance the project of analyzing the United States and its ongoing self- examination in relation to the Classical world.12 Late nineteenth- century American enthusiasm for the Greco- Roman exedra form constituted a potentially reveal- ing intervention into this sociocultural landscape because it provided a physical platform for nurturing and visualizing a heretofore imagined community of respectfully contemplative, intergenerationally coopera- tive, engaged, and articulate citizens. With an optimism as confident as it was unexamined, Americans gravitated toward a device designed to put democracy on display at a moment when the nature of that democ- racy was disturbingly unclear. Cities— comprised of long- established families, new arrivals from outlying territories, and a global range of immigrants— were increasingly full of strangers. Individuals trying to make their way in this world found collective action to be inconsistently praised and condemned, with strong opposition to both “ring” politics and labor unions voiced by men whose rhetoric of self- sufficient individual accomplishment was actually dependent on their own networks of social contacts and corporate cooperation and consolidation (Trachtenberg 1982; Kasson 1991; Beckert 2001). Whether erected on the street, in the parlor, in the garden, or in the cemetery, American exedrae typically memorialized individual accomplishment while at the same time inviting groups of people to sit face to face, thereby forcing continual renegotia- tions of the relationships between self, community, nation, and history.
Saint- Gaudens and White’s selection of an exedra for the commemora- tive Farragut registers as a nod to its Greco- Roman funerary function; its original placement facing busy Fifth Avenue suggests an attempt to make it part of the public life of the city— hence also, perhaps, the Tribune’s evocation of the tomb- lined approaches to Pompeii.13 The monument com- mittee’s approval of the pedestal indicated that a significant shift had taken
11 See also Stanley 1912. I use “public sphere” as articulated by Jürgen Habermas (1991) not merely to describe a public location of exchange, but because nineteenth- century authors frequently conceptualized ancient exedrae in terms that bear closer resemblance to the modern political situations Habermas outlines than to the Classical world itself.
12 Fundamental work on the reception of antiquity in the United States includes Richard 2009, Malamud 2009, and Winterer 2002 and 2007.
13 The monument was moved back to accommodate the widening of Fifth Avenue in 1909; then, in 1934, the disintegrating bluestone base (now at the Saint- Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, NH) was replaced by a granite duplicate and relocated to the center of Madison Square Park, where it remains today.
place in the American understanding of the form since 1863, when Hunt had proposed installing curved semicircular stone benches in the grand Beaux- Arts plazas with which he planned to mark three of the entrances to New York’s recently constructed Central Park (Kowsky 1986). Though accepted by the Committee on Statuary, Fountains, and Architectural Structures, his gateway plans were heavily criticized and ultimately quashed by the park’s original designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the latter of whom complained that such exedrae were tainted by despotic historical associations “with people merely waiting, etc. etc.— The imperial style presumes that people wait, wait, hang around and provision is made for clients, courtiers, subordinates, lackeys.”14 Such associations flew in the face of Olmsted and Vaux’s vision of the park as natural space extending its restorative benefits to all New Yorkers.
Although Olmsted did envision public parks as places of conversation—
exhibiting the tenor of “a familiar domestic gathering, where the prattle of the children mingles with the easy conversation of the more sedate”— he apparently discounted Hunt’s exedrae as instruments for achieving this fireside ideal (Olmsted 1870, 77).
By 1881, then, democratic associations had begun to displace these despotic ones.15 Olmsted himself granted Saint- Gaudens his choice of site for the monument: Madison Square Park, a location that the sculp- tor recalled as a Union bivouac during the Civil War, and thus a fitting location for a Union officer (Tharp 1969, 136). The Farragut project belonged to the postwar boom in commemorative monuments erected by a nation seeking signs of closure after its most devastating conflict, many of which were Classical in their conceptualization and/ or Neoclassical in form.16
But these markers were not only civic landmarks and sites for pri- vate pilgrimage; they were central features of annual Decoration Day (later Memorial Day) observances organized by the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans’ groups. Each year on May 30, uniformed regiments paraded through American cities and cemeteries and dignitar- ies delivered orations to massive crowds, as profusions of spring flow- ers were placed in honor of the dead, in wreaths and garlands draped upon their gravestones and monuments. Installed after these traditions
14 Calvert Vaux to Clarence Cook, June 6, 1865, in the Frederick Law Olmsted papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, quoted in Kowsky 1986, 83.
15 See Nichols’s paper in this volume.
16 On the building boom of memorials using Classical tropes or iconography, see Savage 1997. On this trend in New York City, see Macaulay- Lewis 2016.
had been in force for over a decade, the Farragut served as an annual site for these activities alongside other New York memorials to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Marquis de Lafayette.17 Unlike the solid masonry bases that support those sculptures, however, the Farragut exedra gestures toward participation in Decoration Day rituals through its inclusion of raised seating, which loosely evokes in permanent form the temporary grand stands and rostra erected along Fifth Avenue and other parade routes each spring.
But what of its use throughout the rest of the year? Among witnesses to the Farragut’s unveiling, the Tribune observed that here, in White’s exedra, “the visitor may sit, and, as the rushing river of life goes by, may turn and give a thought to the good man and brave soldier whose image stands above him.”18 Such was the contemporary conception of public parks and their monuments as components within a didactic landscape addressed to a receptive and malleable populace. At the dedication cere- monies, Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt announced, “In the midst of the haunts of busy men, intent on worldly and mere material pursuits, let it stand for all time to illustrate the nobler and higher aims of life.”19 The dialogic quality of philosophical discourse associated with ancient exedrae was here replaced by a monologic visual sermon. The artist D.
Maitland Armstrong spoke more revealingly than he knew when he wrote to his friend Saint- Gaudens, “You have preached a small sermon on truth, honor, courage, and loyalty, that will do more good than all the reason- ings of philosophers.”20
Though lacking this didactic tone, art historical analyses of the Farragut similarly highlight interactivity as the strength and success of Saint- Gaudens and White’s pedestal design (Dryfhout 1982, 29 and 112;
Tolles 2003, 196). But as our illustration indicates, and as visitors today can experience for themselves, it is not actually possible to see Farragut in any detail while seated in the exedra, despite the fact that Saint- Gaudens
17 In addition to Blight’s (2004) analysis of these traditions, see contemporary coverage in, for instance, “Observance of Decoration Day,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, June 10, 1882, 247.
On the renewed cultural importance of unifying, patriotic spring floral parades and processions in the late nineteenth century, see Lippincott 1990, 7– 39. As Lippincott demonstrates, Alma- Tadema provided a template through which Victorians could envision their ceremonial connections to ancient forebears. His role in shaping how Americans understood their relationship to the past vis- à- vis the exedra form is discussed below.
18 “St. Gaudens’s Farragut,” New York Daily Tribune, May 25, 1881, 5.
19 “Unveiling the Statue,” New York Times, May 26, 1881, 8.
20 D. Maitland Armstrong to Augustus Saint- Gaudens, n.d., reprinted in Saint- Gaudens 1913: I, 266.