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The Influence of Robert Browning on the Art of William Wetmore Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Frank R. DiFederico  and
Julia Markus
Frank R. DiFederico
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Julia Markus
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Extract

William Wetmore Story (Fig. 1), lawyer, poet, and sculptor, was born in Salem, Mass., in 1819. As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century expatriate sculptors, he lived and worked in Rome, and he died in Vallombrosa in Tuscany in 1895. Story's friendship with Robert Browning was a crucial factor in his development as an artist; and during the 1850's, under the influence of the then still relatively unknown Browning, Story altered his approach to both poetry and sculpture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 1 , January 1973 , pp. 63 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

NOTES

1. The principal sources for the life and works of William Wetmore Story are Phillips, Mary E., Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1897)Google Scholar, and James, Henry, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903).Google Scholar Documents relating to the friendship between Story and Browning can be found in Browning to His American Friends, ed. Hudson, Gertrude Reese (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965).Google Scholar Quotations from Browning's poems are drawn from The Works of Robert Browning, ed. Kenyon, F. G., Centenary Edition, 10 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1912).Google Scholar The major portion of this paper was presented as a talk at the annual College Art Association meeting in New York on 25 Jan. 1973.

2. Browning to His American Friends, p. 3.Google Scholar

3. Letter to Miss Haworth, E. F., in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Kenyon, F. G. (New York: Macmillan, 1897), II, 419.Google Scholar

4. Critic, 18 (16 05 1891), 265.Google Scholar

5. Browning to His A merican Friends, p. 37.Google Scholar

6. Review of Graffiti d'ltalia by Story, Fortnightly Review, NS 5 (1 01 1869), 118–19.Google Scholar

7. Story, , Poems, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), I, 167.Google Scholar

8. The statue was modeled in 1864–65 (Phillips, , p. 296Google Scholar; Browning to His American Friends, p. 151Google Scholar). It was repeated at least three times and replicas can be found in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and in Goldsmiths' Hall, London. It should be noted that the daggers in both the New York and Salem copies are broken.

9. Poems, I, 141.Google Scholar

10. In a letter to James Russell Lowell dated 11 Feb. 1853 (James, , I, 256Google Scholar; Browning to His American Friends, p. 272Google Scholar), Story mentions that the Arcadian Shepherd Boy will be his next work. In August of the same year, he informs Lowell that he managed to finish it “by strenuous working before the summer heat” (James, I, 265). See also the Boston Public Library Annual Report (1858), p. 35.Google Scholar

11. Calmette, Joseph, Francois Rude (Paris: H. Floury, 1920), p. 144Google Scholar; Eaton, Daniel Cady, A Handbook of Modern French Sculpture (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918), p. 173.Google Scholar

12. Hawthorne, , Notes of Travel, Greylock Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), III, 205.Google Scholar

13. Story, , Nature and Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1844), p. 48.Google Scholar

14. In an unpublished and undated letter of Story to Enrico Nencioni in the Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, Story describes how he learned that Hawthorne had written about the statue of Cleopatra: he comments that one day he found a group of English people in his studio admiring Cleopatra while one of them read aloud from The Marble Faun.

15. Thorp, Margaret Ferrand (The Literary Sculptors [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1965], p. 42)Google Scholar remarks that “the features and gestures of Story's figures expressed passions and emotions it was interesting to watch and analyze.… The laymen liked this kind of drama in his statues.” She considers Story's “romantic-dramatic quality” one of his contributions to American art.

16. According to Phillips, (pp. 296–97)Google Scholar, Story executed three replicas of the earlier and two replicas of the later Saul.

17. 6th ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871), p. 404.

18. Grace Greenwood (pseud, of Sara Jane [Clarke] Lippincott) describes the physiognomy of Jews in the Roman ghetto in a similar fashion in Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), p. 203.Google Scholar For general discussions of the attitudes of Story's contemporaries toward Jews, see Higham, John, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 43 (1957), 559–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Wilson, Edmund, “Notes on Gentile Pro-Semitism,” Commentary, 23 (1956), 329–35.Google Scholar

19. Phillips, , p. 297.Google Scholar

20. Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memoirs, ed. Carr, Cornelia (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), p. 336.Google Scholar

21. A particularly good example of the “pudicitia” type of female statue is the Lady from Delos in the Athens National Gallery. See Lawrence, A. W., Later Greek Sculpture (London: J. Cape, 1927), Pl. 72.Google Scholar

22. “Alcestis,” trans. Lattimore, Richmond, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond, Euripides (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959), III, 52, 1.1143.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 52, 11. 1144–46.