Modeling an abstract idea as a woman, here an allegory of America, artist Hiram Powers sought to give visual form to democratic ideals, which he believed would resonate strongly with audiences in both the United States and Europe in the mid-19th century. Draped cloth partially covers the figure’s chest and she wears a headband, or diadem, whose 13 stars signify the nation’s first states. This classicizing bust is drawn from Powers’s full-scale sculpture, similarly called America, in which the woman triumphantly raises one arm and stands upon broken chains. Living in Florence, Powers supported the uprisings there for a republican government. An abolitionist, he also strove to reaffirm the ideals of liberty and self-governance at home, where slavery—fueled by a white colonialist drive to expand westward—threatened the Union in the 1850s.
Date
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Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (Macmillan, 1924).
Merle Curti, “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93, 3 (June 1949), 209–15.
Sculpture in American (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968).
Sylvia Crane, White Silence: Greenough, Powers, and Crawford, American Sculptors in Nineteenth Century Italy (University of Miami Press, 1972).
William Gerdts, American Neoclassic Sculpture: The Marble Resurrection (New York, 1973).
Wayne Craven, “Images of a Nation in Wood, Marble, and Bronze: American Sculpture from 1776–1900,” Two Hundred Years of American Sculpture, exh. cat., (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976).
Joshua Taylor, “America as Symbol,” America as Art (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976).
Donald Reynolds, Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture (Garland, 1977).
Vivien Green Fryd, “Hiram Power’s America: ‘Triumphant as Liberty and in Unity,” American Art Journal 18, 2 (1986), 55–75 (ill.).
Tom Armstrong, “The New Field–McCormick Galleries in the Art Institute of Chicago,” Magazine Antiques 134, 4 (Oct. 1988), 822–35.
P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873 (University of Delaware Press, 1991).
Art Bulletin 74, 4 (Dec. 1992), 687–90.
Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento (University of Chicago Press, 1993), ill.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 166–168, no. 73.
Eric Foner, “The Civil War and the Story of American Freedom,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, 1 (2001), 13, pl. 1.
Beloit College, Wis., Theodore Lyman Wright Art Center, 1932–1972.
Ellen E. Powers, (the artist’s daughter), Florence, Italy, to 1910; sold by her to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1910.
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