William Wetmore Story

LC name authority rec.: n50048713

LC Heading: Story, William Wetmore, 1819-1895

Story, William Wetmore (12 Feb. 1819-7 Oct. 1895), sculptor and writer, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Story, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Harvard law professor, and Sarah Waldo Wetmore, the daughter of a prominent Boston judge. During his formative years spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Story was exposed to the vibrant intellectual communities of Harvard College (now University) and antebellum Boston, and he pursued a variety of creative pastimes while simultaneously preparing to enter the family profession of law. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1838 and Harvard Law School in 1840, he was admitted to the bar and proceeded to distinguish himself as a Boston attorney. He also served as a reporter to the U.S. Circuit Court and published important treatises on the laws of contracts (1844) and personal property sales (1847). In 1843 he married Emelyn Eldredge of Boston, a childhood acquaintance. Artistic ambitions earlier awakened continued to occupy Story, however, and despite the pressures of his legal practice he managed to participate in local artist associations, contribute verse and criticism to some of the day's bolder opinion journals, and develop a modest reputation as an amateur painter and clay modeler.

The death of his father in 1845 was the catalyst for Story's rise to celebrity as a sculptor, an occupation relatively new for American practitioners when Story chose to cultivate that career and exit the predictable course of success he had been treading as a lawyer and occasional author. A memorial statue, destined for Mount Auburn Cemetery, was planned to honor Joseph Story, and the commission for its execution rather unexpectedly went to William Story, whom the organizing committee had approached initially for aesthetic advice. He accepted with the proviso that he first be permitted several years study abroad to acquire the necessary technical proficiency, and accordingly he left Boston in 1847 for a three-year excursion through Europe that resulted in completed designs for his father's monument and an intense immersion in Rome's international colony of sculptors. Although he returned twice to Boston in the 1850s to gain committee approval for the Joseph Story memorial and to supervise its installation, Story had become disengaged from American life, which he now perceived as provincial and limiting to his talents. In 1856 he resolved to commit himself to sculpture as his principal profession and settle permanently in Rome. He secured handsome quarters for his family in the venerable Palazzo Barberini, where he proceeded to entertain an urbane, affluent circle of fellow expatriates and cosmopolitan literati who came to function as an invaluable source of commissions.

Story's efforts to perfect an original idiom within the language of idealized neoclassicism then fashionable for sculpture consumed him through the remainder of the 1850s. He experimented with many different stylistic shadings of figural classicism, and he interpreted subjects as diverse as the mythological Hero (1857), Marguerite (1858) from Goethe's Faust, and the nursery conceit of Little Red Riding Hood (c. 1853). Few of these compositions sold, however, and he grew despondent over the failure of critics to pay serious attention to this work. The American press, while curious about his self-exile from Boston and familiarity with foreign-born notables, often emphasized Story's literary productions, which were ongoing and included poetry--some imitative of the novel dramatic monologues being written by Robert Browning, a close friend of Story's in Italy--art theory (Proportions of the Human Figure According to a New Canon for Practical Use [1866]), political commentary, and the acclaimed Roba di Roma (1862), a travel account of contemporary Rome.

Story's sculpture in the so-called ideal or imaginative, narrative vein, eventually attracted wide and excited notice in 1862 at the London International Exposition, where the public encountered his mysteriously meditative seated figures of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra (1858, Los Angeles County Art Museum) and the legendary Libyan Sibyl (1861, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Curiously, these marbles, which dramatized decisive moments in the imagined psychological existence of their subjects, were not grouped with the American art on display but included in the modern Roman pavilion, their transport costs to London having been furnished by Pope Pius IX. Advance curiosity about Story's Cleopatra also had been fueled by American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the clay model for this imposing figure in Story's studio in Rome and appropriated it as the masterpiece of his romanticized sculptor, Kenyon, in The Marble Faun (1860), which profiled Italy's modern art community. The combination of papal imprimatur, fictional publicity, and original staging of the familiar female themes these statues personified catapulted Story into the front ranks of contemporary sculpture, where he remained until neoclassicism itself had exhausted its aesthetic reign by the 1890s.

For more than a quarter of a century Story repeated and refined the formula that had earned him recognition in London. Enjoying a vigorous business in original commissions and copy orders, he produced a progression of critically praised compositions, most depicting ancient personalities in pensive attitudes drawn from myth, the Old and New Testaments, Shakespeare, and the ancient Greek playwrights. Characteristic of these probing, heroic-scaled works--mostly carved in marble--are his studies of Medea, Contemplating the Murder of Her Children (1864; 1868 replica, the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Sappho, planning her suicide (1863, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Saul, When the Evil Spirit Was Upon Him (1863; revised version, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco). Story's gravitation to such themes prompted his biographer, Henry James, to observe that "it was in their dangerous phases that the passions most appealed to him" (William Wetmore Story and his Friends, vol. 1 [1903], p. 194).

Story's exploitation of acutely observed archaeological accessories, his exploration of the physiognomy of subconscious thought and transitional states of mind, and his facility at manipulating marble surfaces to belie the stone's cold inelasticity secured his renown as an innovative sculptor within the classical figural tradition he assiduously respected. His base of patrons spanned from European nobility and the British peerage to moneyed Americans and municipal and government agencies, and aspiring sculptors of various nationalities sought him out for counsel and to survey his success when they visited or began their training in Rome. Story's busy studio--located on the via San Nicolo Tolentino through the mid-1870s and thereafter operating from custom-designed quarters at #7 via San Martino a Macao--was a popular tourist destination often noted in period guidebooks.

Throughout his career Story avowed disdain for portraiture, which he considered a lesser branch of sculpture. Financial comfort allowed him to accept only those portrait commissions of personal interest, exampled by his tender bust of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1866, Boston Athenaeum), or those of great public prestige. Memorable among this limited group of "grand-manner" portrait memorials are his monuments to the revolutionary war hero Colonel William Prescott (1880, Bunker Hill, Charlestown, Mass.), Chief Justice John Marshall (1883, U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.), the recumbent tomb sculpture of financier and philanthropist Ezra Cornell (1884, Sage Chapel, Cornell University), and the colossal commemorative sculpture honoring "The Star-Spangled Banner" author Francis Scott Key (1886) installed in a temple-like structure in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Story accrued a wide range of awards in his later life, including the U.S. fine arts commissionership at the 1878 Universal Exposition held in Paris, election to the French Legion of Honor, and a professorship at Rome's Academy of St. Cecelia in acknowledgment of his musical prowess.

By the 1880s Story shifted increasing responsibilities for his studio operations to his son, Thomas Waldo, himself a promising sculptor. Although Story conceived several new ideal figures in these later years, he devoted much of his time to travel and to writing. Dating from this fertile publishing period are his novel Fiammetta (1886), several stage tragedies, additional volumes of original poetry, and the critical essays Conversations in a Studio (1890) and Excursions in Arts and Letters (1891). Although he twice paid return visits to the United States on lecture invitations, he preferred Europe and built a leisure residence in the resort village of St. Moritz. The 1893 death of his wife eroded Story's enthusiasm for work, and his health quickly declined. His final energies were diverted to the creation of Emelyn Story's elegiac grave monument titled Angel of Grief Weeping Bitterly over the Dismantled Altar of His Life (1894, Protestant Cemetery, Rome). Story subsequently retired to the Tuscan country villa of his married daughter, the Marchesa Edith Peruzzi, in Vallombrosa, where he died. He was interred with his wife at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

A flattering posthumous monograph by Mary E. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, the American Sculptor and Author, appeared in 1897, as did numerous obituaries and memorial tributes summarizing his sprawling accomplishments as an artist and renaissance personality. Story's modern reputation is rooted largely in Henry James's two-volume biography of 1903, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, commissioned by the sculptor's surviving children. A project assumed by James to offset his financial strains of that time, the book dodged the question of Story's enduring merits as a sculptor and focused instead on the price and rewards of his expatriate identity and eclectic talents. Only with the reclamation of critical appreciation of American neoclassical sculpture beginning in the 1970s have Story's psychological inventiveness and technical versatility in this chosen craft been accepted into permanent record by art historians.

Bibliography

Although Story never bequeathed his papers to any single archive, the two main repositories of manuscript material illuminating his career and friendships are Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry E. Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to those titles cited in the entry, other notable works written by Story include The Life and Letters of Joseph Story (1851), Poems (1847 and 1856), Graffiti d'Italia (1868), A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem (1870), He and She; or, A Poet's Portfolio (1883), and Poems and Lyrics--Parchments and Portraits (1886). His famous statue of Cleopatra was the focus of special analysis in Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, "William Story and Cleopatra," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 2 (1943). Useful critical assessments include William H. Gerdts, "William Wetmore Story," American Art Journal 4 (1972); Frank R. DiFederico and Julia Markus, "The Influence of Robert Browning on the Art of William Wetmore Story," Browning Institute Studies 1 (1973); and Jan Seidler (Ramirez), "A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story, American Sculptor and Man of Letters" (Ph.D. diss., Boston Univ., 1985). An obituary is in the New York Times, 8 Oct. 1895.

Jan Seidler Ramirez

Citation:

Jan Seidler Ramirez. "Story, William Wetmore";

http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00837.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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