William Ordway Partridge
Paris, 1861 - 1930, New York
Returning to the United States in 1884, Partridge was still uncertain about a career. Interest in the dramatic arts was followed by a series of public poetry readings and lectures. In 1887 he married Mrs. Augusta Merriam of Milton, Massachusetts; they had one child. During the same year that he married, he returned to Italy to study sculpture. He spent the next two years in the Rome atelier of the Polish exile sculptor Pio Welonski, whose work exhibited the strongly modeled surfaces and naturalistic detail that influenced Partridge's early sculptural style.
By August of 1889 Partridge had settled in Milton, Massachusetts. In February 1890 he secured his first commission for a heroic bronze statue of Shakespeare, erected in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in 1894. In his masterly handling of detail, Partridge chose to emphasize the more contemplative side of Shakespeare's character. Contemporary critics praised the work for its refinement and dignity.
Meanwhile Partridge had been busy with several other large-scale works and numerous commissions for portrait busts. His American debut as a sculptor came at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he exhibited ten pieces, among them the Shakespeare model; Nearing Home, a marble, bust-length portrait of an elderly woman, now in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and a model for a statue of Alexander Hamilton (1757?-1804) commissioned by the Hamilton Club of Brooklyn. The critic for the Studio particularly liked the spirited but reserved treatment of the Hamilton statue and felt that Partridge had the ability to produce serious, monumental sculpture.
The favorable critical attention established Partridge's national reputation, guaranteeing continued commissions that placed him in the front ranks of American sculpture. During his lifetime Partridge produced 176 known works, most of them executed in the years before World War I, with portrait sculpture forming the largest category and modeling the preferred technique.
Partridge's aesthetic philosophy required that he go beyond imitation, which he considered to be merely the technical side of art. Consequently his portraits of individuals such as Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, Edward Everett Hale, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, Robert E. Peary, and John Greenleaf Whittier were neither facile renderings of facial detail nor flattering idealizations but rather a selective emphasis of some realistic details and suppression of others, to convey the ideas he felt were important for the individual he was trying to represent. In an effort to unite the real and the ideal, Partridge made every attempt to understand both the individual and his ideas. Partridge's best efforts are evident in his imaginative portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Jessup Memorial Library, Bar Harbor, Maine) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.). Taking a sensual delight in the rendering of the reflective bronze surfaces, Partridge produced in these busts final sculptural forms that are not far removed from the first spontaneous clay sketches.
Besides the Shakespeare for Chicago and the Hamilton for Brooklyn, Partridge completed a number of large-scale bronze monuments including an equestrian statue of General Ulysses S. Grant in Crown Heights in Brooklyn; Thomas Jefferson and a second Hamilton for Columbia University; Horace Greeley in Chappaqua, New York; Pocahontas in Jamestown, Virginia; the Samuel Hay Kauffmann Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.; and the Joseph Pulitzer Memorial in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City. Partridge's religious works, such as the Pietà for St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, are probably his least successful. Executed in marble, they lack the strength and vitality of his bronzes.
As a critic Partridge wrote and lectured extensively on art for America. One of the first to recognize and encourage an American school of sculpture, he had high praise for such men as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, and Olin Warner. Partridge also devoted lengthy articles to the sculpture of Thomas Ball and John Rogers. In his book Art for America (1894), Partridge stated his belief in the possibility of "a great national art," and optimistically predicted that the United States would produce "art second to none the world has known," with subjects taken from U.S. history, people, and countryside and a style that did not imitate European models, though he could not foresee what that style would become. His criticism covered topics ranging from the necessity to erect good public monuments to the need for a national art exhibition. Partridge's vision of America's cultural and artistic progress as put forth in numerous lectures, articles, and books established him as a spokesman for what is now called the American Renaissance, which ended with the entry of the United States into World War I. Other publications included The Technique of Sculpture (1895), Nathan Hale, the Ideal Patriot (1902), and two novels, The Angel of Clay (1900) and The Czar's Gift (1906).
Partridge's first marriage ended in divorce in 1904, and in June of 1905 he married Margaret Ridgley Schott, a poet; they had one child. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City, where he died.
At Partridge's death, various newspapers and art journals noted his achievements as a sculptor and writer, but the cultural context for assessing those achievements had been lost. The Beaux-Arts style had been replaced by more modern styles, and large-scale commissions for sculpture were not financially viable. During the 1970s renewed scholarly interest in the American Renaissance period led to the inclusion of Partridge's work in a show of New York City public sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974) and a small exhibition for the State University of New York at Plattsburgh (1974), but Partridge remains in the second rank of American sculptors for the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. He produced some excellent pieces and wrote persuasively about American art, but he was not a groundbreaker or in the avant garde. Partridge's sculpture was representative of mainstream developments, and his criticism tied him firmly to nineteenth-century aesthetics with its subtle blend of the ideal and the real. He created art for America in an age that hoped for a second Renaissance in this country and at a time when the artist still felt he had a role to play in the development of that modern cultural rebirth.
Bibliography
The most complete modern source of information on Partridge is Marjorie P. Balge, "William Ordway Partridge (1861-1930): American Art Critic and Sculptor" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Delaware, 1982). Research for the dissertation is based in part on a collection of manuscript material owned by Partridge's daughter, Mrs. William A. M. Burden. The dissertation includes a catalogue of known sculpture. An earlier catalogue, The Works in Sculpture of William Ordway Partridge, M.A. (1914), is helpful but incomplete and misleading in several instances. Contemporary assessments of Partridge's work can be found in Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (1925), and William C. Langdon, "William Ordway Partridge, Sculptor," New England Magazine, n.s. 22 (June 1900): 382-98. An obituary is in the New York Times, 24 May 1930.
Marjorie P. Balge
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Marjorie P. Balge. "Partridge, William Ordway";
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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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