A Library Letter from the Boston Athenceum
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ATHENJEUM ITEMS A Library Letter from The Boston Athenceum No. 113 Sun1n1er 2005 The Director Tours the added later, \\~hen the bust no longer represented a familiar face withm the family thc1t owned it. This small Outback Storage Rooms object a mere six inches in height - therefore pre sumabl} endured the fate of so many acts of portrai OMI.:. rRI ASURI·S are very s1nall indeed, small ture, exchanging its status as c1 living presence or enough to be overlooked or to be entirelv for memorial within the <:>itter's famih b\ eventualh gotten. I his miniature bust, purchased b} the becoming a less familiar "worth}" in a line of descent Library a decade and a half ago, spent most of its life at that led, ultimately, to its new status as a commodity in the Athen~um deep in slumber until I noticed it the marketplace of art and its adoption and rehabilita during a fresh curatorial inspection of our ~torage tion by a cultural institutiOn. roon1s in 2004. Such a diminutive object appealed to me for a variety of reasons. First, becc1use it IS small, and I hc1ve a particular interest in portraits in minia ture. Second, because it so closely re embles its classi cal prototypes. fhird, because it poses a mysten (who does it represent? who made it? how was it used?) and I enjoy a scholarly challenge. And fourth, because ... well, simply because it is beautiful and should ne\ er be overlooked, let alone forgotten. For the past few years it has therefore stood on rny desk, the gentle, quiet pro genitor of the following disco\ erie and obsen at ions. Who, in the first place, docs it represent? Written, in pencil, on the bottom of the base of the statue (not once, but twice) is the inscription "\Villiam La\\rence"; one of the inscriptions also specifies that Mr. Lawrence "died 1848." There is no incised signature and no date, and the necessity of noting the tdentit) of the sitter in pencil strongly suggests that the insLriptions were Note: I he editor would like to correct the number of the pre' ious 1ssue of 4.thenct'lll1l Items, '' h1ch "a-. printed a-. Issue number 131. Th.ll 1~:,ue ''a~. m fact, 1)1>Ue number 131, the first in om ne" formal. \Ve regret the error. Bust of \\'11liam l.avuence (1783-1848). AT H r ~ i t: M I T r ~~ S 1 Two inscription in graphite do not, of course, modest fashion, to the Boston Athenreum, contribut guarantee that this statue does indeed represent a ing fund on a number of occasions so that the Library \Villiam Lawrence deceased mmo domini 1848, and yet could acquire works of art. When he died in 1848, he this is almost certain!} the case. \Ve can reasonably owned three shares, none of which he bequeathed to assume, in the first place, that uch a portrait bust his sun iving fo ur children. The recipients of these even one a unusually small as this one- con1memo proprietorships were Josiah Dwight Whitney (196), rated a pron1inent and prosperous Bostonian. Within Jan1es Bicheno Francis (310 ), and Benjamin Daniel the Ath ena~um's collections vou will find a thin and Greene (311); the shares are owned today by Andrew J. I dutiful memoir devoted to the life and works of Haigney, Diane Neal Emmons, and J\1argaret H. \Vise, \\ illiam Lawrence, a n1ember of the textile, manufac respectively. turing, and retail family that gave its name to Before we leave William Lawrence and Samuel Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Lawrence Academy in Lothrop's memoir of our Christian patriot, we should Groton, and to a series of busines establishments in pau e for a mon1ent to tudy the frontispiece to this downt O\\ n Boston. Born in Groton in 1783, \Villiam slim volume, \vhich reproduces, 1n the form of a steel was the third on of ~fajo r Samuel and Susanna engraving, Chester Harding's sober depiction of Parker Lawrence. His older brothers Amos and Abbott Lawrence as a scaled half-length, hand on hand, with founded the firm of A. and A. Lawrence and were suc the obligatory chair, column, and drapery of Anglo cessful enough to set up \'\Tilliam and their youngest American m ale portraiture. The similarities between brother Satnuel in an in1porting business in Boston. this print and our miniature bust are striking: the same fhat enterprise soon led to a new ven ture in Lowell, egg-shaped, nearly bald head with its generous ears where the two brothers were instrumental in estab and extended sideburns; similarly prominent eyebrows lishing the first incorporated business for the produc and protuberances on the forehead; the same slightly tion of woolen goods, the ~t iddl esex J\ lanufacturing fuller lower lip and (when the statue is viewed lightl} Company. \Villiam married usan Ruggles Boardman off center) the same sharply chiseled nose. The \ViJliam and moved, in 1822, to a house at No.3 Bulfinch Street; Lawrence of the print (and painting) has developed in 1847, the year before his death, he moved to a house worldly jowls, but otherwise the two images are very on Colonnade Row, Tremont Street, next to that of his much of a piece. brother Amos. Samuel would eventually reside at No. \ Vho, then, is responsible for creating such a care u Beacon Street and Abbott at No. 8 Park Street, now full y modeled portrait, so close in representational the home of the Union Club. form to the engraving and yet so uncannily independ William's success as a businessman was augmented ent in its own stony, diminutive state? The fa ct that bv his efforts to establish the Suffolk Bank System, such an important painter as Harding, author of the de igned to place the currency of New England on a life-si7ed Athenreum portraits of J\rlarshall and \Veb sound basis, but it was his work as a philanthropist that ster in our front vestibule, was responsible for takes central stage in Samuel Lothrop's memoir, which Lawrence's likeness on canvas suggests that our phil was in fact written for the American Journal of Educa anthropic merchant would not have turned to an tion (BA catalog number 65.L438). Here, in the stately unknown sculptor for his likeness in marble. Vve and sonorous pages of mid-nineteenth-century cannot, however, locate a large-scale bust of Lawrence, Bostonian eulogy, Willian1 Lawrence is praised as "a the kind of statue that would normally be signed or noble specimen of a New England merchant, and a documented, and without such a larger "original" it is Christian citizen and patriot." His nobility was princi doubtful whether we shall determine the authorship pally based on his gift, in 1844, of S1o,ooo to Groton of this reduced copy or version. I an1 making a critical Academy, which he had attended as a student. Such assumption here, of course, which is that the minia was the unprecedented scale of this gift and those of ture bust was not created as an object completely his brother Amos that the Academy was subsequently independent of a larger head-and-shoulders statue; renamed for the Lawrence family, a gesture that no and I make this assumption simply because large-scale doubt pleased \Villian1, whose total benefaction to the busts were the norm in Victorian New England and school rose to $4o,ooo through further gifts and a gen miniature busts were exceedingly rare - so rare, in erous bequest. fact, that my coll eagues and I have not been able to \Villiam Lawrence was also generous, in a more locate a similar object in marble. ATHJ NtLUM I TtMS 2 This is not to '>a\, ho\'\C\er, that miniature bush arc intended to reach a large'-' commuLial audience. them<;cln:s unknO\'\ n. \ Greek bust of ~lcnandct (J. \Villiam La\\ renee mav have been \\·ell known within ' Paul Csctty t\1useum, t\1alibu ), cast in bron1c and only h1s commumtv, but he \\as not a national (let alone an ' ' 'llightl} taller than William I awrence, is qutte similar international) figure; he d1<.l not participate in the early in its basic representc1tional elements. Small portrait stages of cultural celebrity in the wa} that lh ron, Lind, busts were also produt.ed in the Italian Renats':lance, and Sc.ott did; he \'\Js not a pol1tician, like \\ellmgton although recent anal). sis of a series of se\en Inimature and CIa}; he \'\as <-.Imply a "noble speumen of a i'\cw bush of Pope Paul III hunese at the ~at10nal Gallery England merchant." in \'\"ashington - for which there is no precedent There is an important irony at work here, hO\\e\'er. during the sixteenth centuq - reYealed that the~ were \Vhen B) ron's friend John Cam Hobhousc commis brass (not bronze) objects probably cast in the nine sioned the Danish sculptor Berthel Thorwaldsen to teenth or even in the twentieth century. This is not c.Jnc a bust of the poet in Rome, Byron found himself surprising, given the interest in miniature portrait slightly ill at ease with this venture. "Even both s1ts for busts in both England and America during the early their picture,, he noted, "but a bust looks like putting and middle decades of the nineteenth century. fhis up pretensions to permanenq, and smacks something virtual explosion in the production of diminuti\ e stat of a hankering for public fame rather than prJ\ ate ues took several forms. A large number of surviving remembrance., The more private \Villiam La\\.