Hiram showed an inherent talent for mechanical work, and was very early made supervisor of Watson’s clockmaking and organ shops. He learned to model figures in wax, and modeled the hands and heads for 12 animated figures to be used on an automatic organ built by Watson, thus almost inadvertently beginning his career as a sculptor. This display of talent immediately attracted the attention of Joseph Dorfeuille,⁴ owner of the Western Museum, an entrepreneur who needed someone with Hiram’s talents to spice up the museum displays.

Powers was soon hired away by Dorfeuille, who commissioned him to do an animation of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, with devils and imps and monsters uttering “unearthly sounds, horrid groans, and terrible shreaks (sic)”. One of Powers’ delights after the show opened to the public was to dress as the Devil and slink along amongst the dimly lit figures of the display, inquiring in a sepulchral voice, “Do you think you smell sulphur?” The very popular show gained a bit of respectability through its policy of admitting clergymen without charge, and a lot of notoriety: several of these clergymen were later found at different times lurking in the dark corners of the display room. These worthies, dressed in their black ministerial cloth, would creep out of their dusky hideaways during the show and attempt to lead the “ignorant and terrified” to the “safety” of the church. One can imagine that the result was either instant salvation or instant heart stoppage.

Hiram later studied under Frederick Eckstein, the son of a very talented French sculptor who had emigrated to Cincinnati from Philadelphia. Eckstein taught him to model in wax, clay, and plaster. Hiram’s older brother, Benjamin, who was the editor of the local newspaper, tutored him in reading and writing during these years—and made sure he updated his social skills as well. Cincinnati, even then known as the “Queen City” and one of the largest inland ports, was quite a town, considering its relative youth—the area was settled in 1788, and the city was incorporated in 1819—and its relative isolation. Among the people with whom Powers consorted were such luminaries as John James Audubon, the Marquis de Lafayette, General William Harrison (later the ninth president, of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”⁵ fame), Nicholas Longworth (soon to be the second-richest man in the country), Mrs. Frances Trollope (before she wrote her acerbic discussion of American manners), and Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the age of 27 Hiram felt he was making a good enough living to marry Elizabeth Gibson, the daughter of a boarding house keeper and a ne’er-do-well alcoholic father, which he did on the first of May, 1832.

About this time, Hiram met Robert Lytle, an Ohio congressman, who took him under his wing. Another friend was the budding lawyer and perennial presidential candidate, Salmon Portland Chase, who, when he later became Secretary of the Treasury, saw to it that Powers was paid in gold for his commissions, rather than in the relatively worthless scrip usually used for government debts during the Civil War. Powers did busts of Stonewall Jackson, John C. Calhoun, John Marshall, and Martin Van Buren, and traveled to Boston to model busts of Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Winthrop. A patron named John Stevens Preston offered to finance a move to Europe, where Hiram could further his career as a sculptor. Hiram returned to Cincinnati from Boston via New York and Woodstock, the last time he was to visit his birthplace, and collected his family for the move to Florence, Italy, where he was to live and work for the rest of his life.

Hiram quickly became a prominent member of the small American colony in Florence, and his studio was soon a stopping point for the great and near-great of Europe, and wealthy and well-known Americans who were “doing the Continent.” Many of his visitors sat for a bust. Some of the great and near-great for whom he executed busts were: Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon’s oldest brother), Mary Ray, an American who became the Comtesse de Courval (and guardian of Jeanne d’Arc’s suit of armor), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, General Phillip Henry Sheridan, Cornelius Vanderbilt (riche, but a bit too nouveau for society—besides, his spelling was atrocious), and Daniel Webster again.

A few years after settling into his new life in Florence, Powers began sketching ideas for several “ideal”⁶ busts and statues. Proserpine (the wife of Pluto, the god of the Underworld), the Fisher Boy, a series of statues of Eve (Eve Tempted, Eve Disconsolate), and his greatest work, the Greek Slave. To support his family he executed commissioned busts of the great and near-great (but all wealthy) who visited his studio (though until he became well known he lived for some time on loans from his patron). Seven statues were eventually designed and cut: America; California (allegedly a celebration of the state and its gold, although it is hard to understand how much gold one would be able to mine dressed as she is—in a divining rod) see Figure 1; Eve Tempted and Eve Disconsolate (the first representing the last few seconds before the fatal bite, the latter representing Eve’s sudden realization that she has just pulled a major boo-boo); the Fisher Boy; the Greek Slave (representing a Greek captive taken by the Turks in Greece’s fight for independence) see Figure 2; La Penserosa (the thinker, the planner, the plotter), and The Last of the Tribes (somewhat of a tribute to the original inhabitants of America).

The Greek Slave, regardless of it being dressed only in shackles, was a hit wherever it was shown. It was first unveiled in London, where Queen Victoria put her royal stamp of approval on the statue. Thousands of small reproductions of it were later modeled in porcelain, and sold like naked hotcakes. Americans flocked to see the statue when it was later shown in most of the larger cities in this country.

An exception was Woodstock, Vermont, where very few people saw the statue as the showing happened to be in the middle of the haying season. It’s almost impossible to get a Vermont farmer out of his fields when the hay is ready, even if a controversially naked lady is on display.

Most of Powers’ major United States government commissions came when he was in his fifties. He cut two statues in marble—Benjamin Franklin and George Washington—for which he was extremely well paid, thanks to Secretary Chase. With this new-found wealth, he built his own villa in Florence, with a studio nearby. His wife found this villa somewhat more to her taste than their previously rented quarters, and well-suited to her rising social status. She hobnobbed with the likes of the Nathaniel Hawthorne family (they lived just across the street), Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Russian royalty, and the aristocracy and the wealthy famous and near-famous of America, England, France, and Germany. Her Thursday afternoon “at-homes” were popular and well attended—the daughter of a boarding-house keeper and a drunkard became the hostess of American expatriates in Florence.

After several years of gradually declining health, Hiram Powers died on June 27, 1873, of pneumonia, complicated by a silicosis brought on by breathing marble and plaster dust for almost fifty years. After a nearly 40-year struggle to make a name for himself, at the end he was wealthy and famous, and his studio in Florence, Italy, was a “must stop” for travelers on the Continent. A century and a quarter later, the works of Hiram Powers, Sculp., as he signed himself, are displayed around the world, from Italy to Australia to Puerto Rico. Not too bad for a poor farm kid from Woodstock, Vermont—and a clockmaker’s apprentice whose late-in-life comment to a benefactor was that “Some of my happiest days were spent in Watson’s Clock Factory.”

Bibliography

Wunder, Richard P. Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873 (London: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses: Cranbury, New Jersey; Newark, NJ, 1989). 

Notes and References

1 The Western Reserve is a section of land in northeastern Ohio, which Connecticut reserved when the western lands claimed by the various colonies were ceded to the Federal Government in 1786.

2 Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 4, (October 1954): pp. 282-292.

3 A “loggerhead” is a long-handled tool with a solid metal ball at one end, used to heat wax or tar in lieu of an open flame. In this sense, it connotes a person with a room-temperature IQ—of whom a modern Vermonter might say, “The lights are on, but there’s no one home.”

4 Because of the unsettled orthography of the times, this name is spelled either Dorfeuille, or D’Orfeuille.

5 Interestingly enough, this campaign song was composed by another clockmaker, Alexander Coffman Ross, for the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” presidential campaign. Ross worked in Zanesville, OH.

6 An ideal bust or statue is one which represents an idealized figure, rather than one modelled from life. Canova’s Amor and Psyche and Michelangelo’s David are ideal figures.

About the Author

Donn Haven Lathrop retired from the U.S. Navy as a Training Devicesman Chief Petty Officer. An electronics specialist, he taught and worked with electronics, and electro/hydraulic systems applied to helicopter flight and weapons systems simulators, including the very first digital computer-driven helicopter simulator, and later wrote specifications for the procurement of state-of-the-art helicopter simulators.

Donn is the author of numerous articles for the Bulletin. His primary interest is in the history of clocks and of their makers, with a particular emphasis on the New England states.