(Fig. 2.9). Rush Never Met Linnaeus, Who Died in 1778, but the Sculptor Was Likely
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medium as in his terracotta portraits (Fig. 2.9). Rush never met Linnaeus, who died in 1778, but the sculptor was likely familiar with the naturalist’s admired and widely- published theories on natural equilibrium and the interrelationships of various species in their cycles of growth and decay. As discussed in Chapter Two, Rush may have carved the bust for Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, which displayed flora and fauna according to Linnaeus’s celebrated system of taxonomy.18 Rush’s labor in wood would eventually be celebrated by Thomas Eakins in William Rush Carving the Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, which commemorated the sculptor in a spirit of centennial-era retrospection (Fig. 3.31). In Eakins’s painting, Rush appears at work in his studio, using a mallet and chisel to carve Water Nymph and Bittern, discussed in the previous chapter. The model, her knitting chaperone, and a chair over which the model’s clothes have been draped, are bathed in light and color, while the rest of the studio recedes into the shadowy background. Relegated to this space, Rush almost disappears among a proliferation of carved ornaments, wood shavings, elaborately sketched designs, and his wooden sculptures, including the Allegory of the Waterworks, carved for a later millhouse at Fairmount, and a full-length portrait of George Washington. Eakins’s placement of Rush among his creations and the murky, brown background not only associates Rush with a historic and 18 William Rush, American Sculptor, 133–35. Linnaeus’s 1749 thesis, “The Oeconomy of Nature,” was translated into English in 1759. See Benjamin Stillingfleet, trans., Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick (London: R. and J. Dodsley, S. Bakerm and M. Cooper, 1759). For more on the importance of Linnaeus and his system of taxonomy to American naturalists, see Worster, 26-55. 168 .