To Make and Destroy: Sculptures of Anne Whitney

Written by Simone Cambridge
Edited by Nicholas Raffoul

Figure 1: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (1862-64), plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

In the nineteenth century, artists often struggled with depicting the newly emancipated population of blacks in America. Anne Whitney (1821-1915) was one such artist, a female neoclassical sculptor who often depicted narratives concerning contemporary issues [1]. Whitney struggled to depict race in her works Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God or Africa (1862-1864) and Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (1869-1871) [2]. The sculptures were created during shifting concepts of racial difference and gender. The artist, challenged and restricted by Victorian norms, eventually destroyed both works. Luckily, scholars today have access to these works through studio photographs. This paper will discuss these two artworks analysing Whitney’s artistic process, thematic strategy and reasons for destruction. Both sculptures reference America’s newly emancipated black population in subject and the artist draws on the work of other nineteenth century sculptors. I argue that Whitney destroys Ethiopia and L’Ouverture because of the complex changing representational politics and criticism surrounding her work.

In Boston and later abroad in Rome, Anne Whitney was very involved in politics. Her interests included the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and women’s rights. Whitney was a part of several Boston abolitionist groups that were under the influence of local newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison [3]. The condition of the black enslaved woman was essential to Garrison’s cause. He radically argued that true emancipation must allow freedom from slavery and chattel-like marriage. Denouncing these institutions, Garrison welcomed women into his group like Whitney and fellow sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also maintained friendships with radical abolitionists including Wendell Phillips and Angelina Grimké [4]. After a career in poetry, Whitney turned to sculpture and immediately began creating works that expressed her political interests [5]. Ethiopia (Figure 1) and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Figure 2) were direct results of her abolitionist leanings and contemporary political theory influences their theme and form. In 1863 while working on Ethiopia, Whitney attended so many abolitionist meetings that she felt her attendance was leaving her less time for sculpture. The artist’s sculptures reflect her passion for politics but also reflect the complexities of the “normal gaze” in neoclassical sculpture [6].

During a political period where America’s history of almost 400 years of slavery was coming to an end, artists were tasked with using visual tools to imagine a new black, free population. Many sculptors chose to grapple with the issue of slavery including Whitney’s contemporaries William Wetmore Story and Edmonia Lewis. Whitney sculpted a number of black figures, with one commentator noting “I know no artist who has dared to treat the negro as proper subject for art; but Whitney has done it over and over again," [7].  Like other sculptors, Whitney was challenged to form a way to visually understand the black body within neoclassicism. A figure’s social status and narrative were to be revealed by visual signs of gender, sex, class, and race during the process of viewing sculpture [8]. This visual vocabulary was still being created for black bodies in sculpture as they began to be considered figures worthy of high art [9].  Aesthetic constraints of the period shaped how Whitney envisioned Ethiopia and Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the American visual landscape. 

Figure 2: Anne Whitney, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison, (1869-1871), plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

Ethiopia was created in response to the Emancipation Proclamation that had been recently drafted by President Lincoln in 1862 [10]. Ethiopia was modelled to affirm the importance of the moment and its meaning to the formerly enslaved in the consciences of the American people [11]. The life-sized sculpture is an allegory of emancipation represented through the body of a mixed-race woman. The nude woman symbolises black America, blinded by the brightness of emancipated life. Her body reclines slightly as if she has just awoken to the realisation of an important moment in history. Whitney takes her inspiration from Psalms 68:31 that reads “Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out forth her hands unto God.” This often quoted Bible passage was interpreted by black Americans and abolitionists as evidence for prosperous ancient African civilisations and used to refute white supremacy [12]. Ethiopia was modelled in clay, then cast in plaster in 1863, but a marble completed version was never made [13]. The sculpture was exhibited in 1864 at a Boston gallery to raise money for the Union in the Civil War and in 1865 at the New York Nation Academy of Design. 

Whitney uses a visual vocabulary in Ethiopia that attempts to resist popular racial stereotypes. Whitney borrows from William Wetmore Story’s Libyan Sibyl (1861) and Cleopatra (1869) of which both depict figures representative of black Americans [14]. Story depicts black women with facial features indictive of Africa, while avoiding the “grotesque” physiognomy of the “Congo,”[15]. Like Story, Whitney uses allegory and history to situate black Americans in the neoclassic ideal, normally reserved for white bodies [16]. The Libyan Sibyl as a “pre-Christian prophetess” symbolises Africa seeing its future of slavery while Cleopatra, in contemplation of her later suicide, represents the struggle of black people under the status of enslaved [17].  Whitney draws on Libyan Sibyl’s theme of seeing the fate of black America in Ethiopia. The Libyan Sibyl looks “out of her black eyes into futurity and sees the terrible fate of her race,” whereas Whitney’s Ethiopia sees the present period of post-emancipation [18].

Unlike Story’s Libyan Sibyl, Ethiopia is represented as a mixed-race woman, a mulatta with one black parent and one white parent. Whitney uses the racial category of mulatta to place black womanhood in the neoclassical aesthetic where the white female nude took precedence [19].  Whitney used a white nineteen-year-old upper-class New England woman, Elizabeth Howard Bartol, as her model and it is likely that she stylised the sculpture’s hair based on Harriet Tubman [20]. Her use of a white model exposes Whitney’s intentions to situate Ethiopia in proximity of the white female nude. Although a black female figure, Ethiopia is modelled after the white female nude because of its status as the standard of beauty for the nineteenth century neoclassical aesthetic [21]. The mulatta was an extension of the white female nude through miscegenation and the mixed-race body was considered more acceptable and more visually appealing for white audiences, displacing the “full-blooded Negro” female nude [22]. Whitney struggles to depict Ethiopia’s black facial features because of this racial tension. 

Some viewers praised Whitney’s Ethiopia celebrating the sculpture’s “bold magnificence, a wild abandonment, and at the same time a yearning aspiration in the expression of the face that both astonishes and excites a deeper sentiment of admiration.” The commentator further claimed that Ethiopia “positively offends by a voluptuousness amounting almost to a coarseness,” [23].  Another positive review of the sculpture commended the wonderful fusing of “African and Egyptian type of features…without bordering on the more vulgar and broader developments of the African peculiarity.” Others criticized her use of allegory and representation of black physiognomy. The National Academy of Design considered Ethiopia to be too safe, stating “Miss Whitney has only half dared, and between realism and idealism has made a woeful fall,” [24].  The white abolitionist commander of the first southern black regiment, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, privately encouraged Whitney to add more “Africanized features” to Ethiopia, arguing that “it is nothing for her to rise and abnegate her own features in rising; she must rise as God made her or not at all.” Higginson even recommended a new black model to improve the work [25].

Figure 3: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa, (1862–64), detail of the head, plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

Figure 4: Anne Whitney, Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (reworked 1865–66), detail of the head, plaster, destroyed, Photograph courtesy of the Wellesley College Archives, Papers of Anne Whitney.

In response, Whitney remodelled the facial features, hands and feet of Ethiopia from 1865-1866. She gave Ethiopia fuller lips, a wider nose and broader cheekbones in an attempt to depict an appropriate level of blackness (Figures 3 and 4) [26].  Before ultimately destroying the figure in dissatisfaction, she wrote in 1866, “I am not satisfied with the face of the woman. What it has gained in strength of feature, it has lost in feeling and expression,” [27]. Whitney destroyed Ethiopia sometime after 1874 but still considered the work to be “one of the best things [she] ever did.”28

Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (Figure 2) was created after Anne Whitney had modelled and exhibited Ethiopia, while she was trying to launch her public career in Rome [29]. In the sculpture, revolutionary leader of Saint Domingue, Toussaint L’Ouverture, is seated, eyes confronting the viewer. The general is barefoot, indicating his status as an enslaved man, and his bulging muscles suggest a strong, powerful body. Unlike Ethiopia, L’Ouverture’s African decent was made more visually apparent by his tightly curled hair, broad nose, and full lips. The figure is crouched with one hand behind his knee and his other pointing to the ground. The position suggests that L’Ouverture intends to rise or stand up at a moment’s notice. The sculpture was produced in Rome and exhibited in Boston by 1873 [30].

L’Ouverture was a repeated figure in Anne Whitney’s work. Whitney had written about Toussaint L’Ouverture in The Prisoner of St. Joux from her 1859 published Poems and likely returned to the subject in sculpture during her reflections on Ethiopia’s feature [31]. Instead of catering to the demand for “Africanized features” in an original allegory, Whitney turned to a male historical figure to avoid the restrictive aesthetic conventions of the mixed-race female nude [32]. Writing privately, Whitney “It is impossible, I think in art, thus to generalize, or to make an abstract of all possible African types. I should have sought to do the best with what I know of the negro,” [33]. Instead of attempting to merge black physiognomy with the neoclassical white female aesthetic through a half-black, half-white body, Whitney moved to sculpt a “full-bodied Negro” black male body [34]. Whitney’s friend, Wendell Phillips, also had given a speech praising Toussaint L’Ouverture in December 1861, in front of large a Boston crowd [35]. The artist was likely in attendance as the event was promoted in her abolitionist circle and was further inspired to create the sculpture. Nevertheless, the sculpture is never mentioned in Whitney’s letters, but scholars speculate that letters were discarded to hide from her family the fact that she was sculpting a half nude black man [37]. In sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, Whitney did not face the same difficultly situating the black male nude in neoclassicism as during the modelling of Ethiopia. The black male nude had begun to enter American public sculpture in the 1860s, although considered dangerous and racially inferior under dominating norms of white supremacy. The physique of the ideal black male nude became synonymous with the Emancipation Proclamation, conferring on the black man the status of freedom through the masculine body [38].  Whitney draws from John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman (1863), which symbolises black Americans rising to the status of full citizenship [39].  L’Ouverture shares The Freedman’s (Figure 5) seated pose, black physiognomy, and “kinky” hair [40]. Whitney’s figure, however, does not look away from the viewer, wears a pair of trousers, and is slightly touching the ground. Whitney likely knew of The Freedman through her friend, American critic and art collector James Jackson Jarves who was enthusiastic about Ward’s depiction of American history [41]. Despite using the historical figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the sculpture was never completed due to nineteenth century political and social tensions. 

Figure 5: John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, (1863), Bronze, 49.8 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Unlike depictions of powerful black women, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s power as a figure from recent history could not be safely contained by death or allegory due to the appropriation of Haiti’s narrative in contemporary politics [42]. Many Americans considered abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s to be threats to the fabric of racial order [43]. Toussaint L’Ouverture originally was celebrated by abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison as a fearless leader who brought positive change to Saint Domingo by overthrowing ruling white planters. L’Ouverture’s leadership was used as a tool to convince Northern leaders to allow African American soldiers to fight in the American Civil War [44]. Whitney’s L’Ouverture, in his confronting gaze addressing the audience, is suggestive of the revolutionary fervor of 1860s. L’Ouverture is anxious to take his freedom whereas Ward’s Freedman sits in contemplation after his shackles are broken by someone else. 

Both bodies are powerful, but Whitney’s figure eventually would have been considered a dangerous visual statement and a threat to white authority in its ability to inspire black Americans. Later during the Civil War, L’Ouverture was used by abolitionists to convince the American public of the necessity of emancipation. While black enslaved people could become courageous and patriotic, they also were capable of being violent and rebellious. Toussaint L’Ouverture eventually became synonymous with the complete overthrow of white supremacy and ruling social order [45]. After emancipation, L’Ouverture’s narrative was further appropriated to justify a racially oppressive labour system that contributed to the failure of Reconstruction [46]. Whitney’s knowledge of these political changes, through her involvement in the Boston abolitionist community, would have led her to ultimately destroy the sculpture.

There was also the issue of Whitney sculpting the black male enslaved body as a white upper-class woman. The sculpture meant that Whitney participated in the viewing of the body of a partially exposed black male. This would have been socially inappropriate for Anne Whitney as a white upper-class woman in the context of Northern United States. The artist herself may have felt comfortable sculpting a nude black male, but others would have felt differently. Shortly after sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, in 1874 Whitney won a contest for her depiction of Charles Sumner, a New England abolitionist senator. The committee, however, did not think it appropriate for a woman to model a man’s legs and the commission was ultimately awarded to Thomas Ball [47]. Whitney’s figure, although seated and dressed in contemporary trousers, still required knowledge of male anatomy [48]. The sculptor expressed her disagreement to family and friends with the committee’s decision and nevertheless continued to sculpt white men [49]. The sculptor, however, may have been made more aware of the restrictive gender dynamics that still existed with neoclassicism, as she had been made more sensitive to racialized physiognomy while working on Ethiopia. By sculpting Toussaint L’Ouverture, Whitney’s work was not just indexed by gender but also the social politics surrounding the population of newly emancipated black Americans. Thus, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison was eventually destroyed by the artist.

Anne Whitney, a female American neoclassical sculptor, struggled with the changing nineteenth century politics of representation and criticism surrounding her works Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God or Africa (1862-1864) and Toussaint L’Ouverture in Prison (1869-1871). She depicts contemporary issues that attempt to provide a visual vocabulary for newly emancipated black Americans. In Ethiopia and L’Ouverture, the artist is challenged and restricted by artistic and societal norms. Her frustration with the limits of Victorian society ultimately leads to the destruction of both works that scholars today recover through photographs. Nevertheless, Whitney contributes to the American visual landscape during a period where black people in America were increasingly emerging as the subjects of high art.

Endnotes

1. Margaret Farrand Thorp, “The White, Marmorean Flock,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2 (1959), p.159.

2. Melissa Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteeth-Century Rome, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) p.157.

3. Melissa Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2006), p.84. 

4. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

5. Whitney’s Lady Godiva was sculpted in 1962 as a feminist response to accusations of female sculptors being unable to sculpt their own work. See Elizabeth Rogers Payne, “Anne Whitney: Art and Social Justice,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 12, no. 2, (Spring 1971), p.245-260.

6. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

7. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

8. Charmaine A. Nelson, “Introduction: Toward a Black Feminist Art History,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.xiii.

9. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

10. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89.

11. Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., “Art of the Antislavery Movement,” Courage and conscience: Black & white abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington, Indiana: For the Boston Athenaeum by Indiana University Press, 1993), p.47.

12. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.90.

13. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.157.

14. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.86.

15. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.88.

16. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.88.

17. Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing the Body: Reading Blackness in William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.143-158.

18. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.87.

19. Charmaine A. Nelson, “’So Pure and Celestial a Light’: Sculpture, Marble, and Whiteness as a Privileged Racial Signifier,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.68-72.

20. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89; Payne, “Anne Whitney,” p.245-260.

21. Nelson, “’So Pure and Celestial a Light,’” p.68-72.

22. Charmaine A. Nelson, “The Color of Slavery: Degrees of Blackness and the Bodies of Female Slaves,” The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.127; Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.165-166.

23. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.160; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.90-92 

24. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

25. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

26. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92; Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.129 

27. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” 162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

28. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.89; Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.157.

29. Nancy J. Scott, “‘Dear Home’: a sculptor's view from Rome, 1867-71: the unpublished letters of Anne Whitney.,” Sculpture Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, p.19.

30. Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32

31. Anne Whitney, “Prisoner of St. Joux,” Poems, (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1906); Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32

32. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92-94

33. Dabakis, “Antislavery Sermons in Stone,” p.162; Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.92.

34. Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.127.

35. “Wendell Phillips: Dear Home, The Letters of Anne Whitney,” Wellesley College Archives (date of late access 15 April 2019) http://omeka.wellesley.edu/whitneytranscribe/collections/show/65

36. Matthew J. Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War : The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p.77-82.

37. Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.32

38. Michael Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 15, non. 1, (March 1992), p.25-29.

39. Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him,’” p.30.

40. Nelson, “The Color of Slavery,” p.127.

41. Scott, “‘Dear Home,’” p.31; Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him,’” p.30.

42. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.87.

43. Dabakis, “Ain’t I A Woman?,” p.85.

44. Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.77-85.

45. Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.99-111.

46. Clavin, “A Second Haitian Revolution,” p.116.

47. Eleanor Tufts, “An American Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Woman Be Allowed to Sculpt a Man?,” Art Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, (Spring 1992),  p.51-55.

48. Janet A. Headley, “Anne Whitney’s ‘Leif Eriksson’: A Brahmin Response to Christopher Columbus,” American Art, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 2003), p.40-59.

49. Tufts, “An American Victorian Dilemma,” p.51-55.