Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Faculty Scholarship Spring 2011 Angels in the Home: Adelicia Acklen's Sculpture Collection at Belmont Mansion Lauren K. Lessing Colby College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the American Art and Architecture Commons Recommended Citation Lessing, Lauren K., "Angels in the Home: Adelicia Acklen's Sculpture Collection at Belmont Mansion" (2011). Faculty Scholarship. 67. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/faculty_scholarship/67 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. Angels in the Home: Adelicia Acklen’s Sculpture Collection at Belmont Mansion, Nashville, Tennessee Lauren Lessing Following the Civil War, the wealthy plantation owner Adelicia Acklen redecorated her villa, Belmont, near Nashville, Tennessee, with white marble ideal sculptures by the American sculptors Randolph Rogers, Chauncey Ives, Joseph Mozier, and William Rinehart. During the war, Acklen had compromised her reputation as a genteel Southern lady by bargaining with Union officers in order to sell her cotton at exorbitant wartime rates. By purchasing and displaying a collection of statues that embodied the ideal of true womanhood, Acklen hoped to publicly redomesticate both her home and herself and to express her affinity for the ideology of the Lost Cause. N JUNE of 1865, Adelicia Acklen, a forty-six- passing curiosity about American sculpture. She year-old widow from Tennessee, traveled to was planning to redecorate her palatial Italianate I Europe for the first time in her life.