Hiram Powers 1805-1873

Acquired by the present owner, 1886

Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, 2 vols. Newark, Delaware, 1991, pp. 139-141, 172, 244, 256, 276, 305, 320-321, 331, 333 (vol. I); 207-211, illustration of another example p. 207 (vol. II) 

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Lauded as America's foremost neoclassical sculptor of the nineteenth century, Hiram Powers achieved extraordinary public success during his lifetime. Despite his international popularity, Powers' oeuvre consisted of only fourteen full-length statues, fourteen ideal busts, and less than two hundred portrait busts of America's political and social luminaries. The artist began modeling George Washington, his third ideal bust, around 1838 and produced various marble examples from 1844 until his death in 1873. Though his studio continued to execute the Washington bust for years after the artist's death, the decline in their quality when compared to the superior craftsmanship of the busts created during Powers' lifetime attests to the strict controls the artist maintained.

Most of the sculptural representations of Washington produced over the past two centuries exhibit the pervasive influence of the work of the illustrious French artist Jean-Antoine Houdon, who traveled to Mount Vernon in 1785 to make wet clay life models and a plaster life mask of the iconic statesman and military commander. Powers was not immune, and even acquired a cast of Houdon's bust of Washington, which may have come from a replica in the Boston Athenaeum or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Like Houdon, Powers depicted a mature Washington with his hair swept back in a queue and his face subtly worn by time and age. Such naturalism was of particular interest during Powers' era, a period when Jacksonian America mostly favored the authentic over the idealized. Powers drapes Washington in the deep folds of a classical garment, consistent with the popular tradition of casting Washington in the same heroic light as the Roman warrior Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus who selflessly served his country then gave up power to return to his farm. Although Washington was America's secular saint who linked the young nation to a glorious classical past, Powers sought to represent the mortal behind the deified public image.  Through this delicate balance between the real and the ideal, Powers' George Washington succeeds in capturing the nobility of a figure who was at once man and living myth.