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3 Posts in this Thread 20/pg 1 Jump down to your Entry Post into this Thread Some research on Black Aggie and Grief and all that[post=42580 /] 604 Views
Some excellent research from a 1998 article by a DC group called Cosmos-Club, per their website at http://cosmos-club.org/: "The Cosmos Club stands as 'the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington's intellectual elite.' --Wallace Stegner" AN UNEXPECTED RENDEZVOUS AT THE COSMOS CLUB ON LAFAYETTE SQUARE The Strange Odyssey of the Pirated Copy of the Adams Memorial by Saint Gaudens By DANIEL B. KRINSLEY Two years ago, I wandered into the courtyard behind the buildings of the old Cosmos Club at Lafayette Square and was startled to see a copy of the Adams Memorial. As a member of the Cosmos Club, steeped in the history of the Club and its relationship to the events and personalities embodied in that figure, I marvelled at the brilliance of its installation.
Henry Adams, a founding member of the Cosmos Club, had commissioned the original sculpture from Augustus Saint Gaudens as a gravesite memorial to his wife, who had committed suicide in 1885. The resultant memorial is considered Saint Gaudens's masterpiece. After this tragedy, Adams sought solace and emotional support from Elizabeth Cameron, an admirer and confidante. Their extensive correspondence, initiated prior to his wife's death, continued over a period of thirty–five years and reads as a remarkable testament to courtly love. The remarkable journey of this artifact of these events and relationships to the site of its origins can be documented as serendipitous. However, the romantic might suggest that the spirits of the principals involved were drawn together in a ghostly return to Lafayette Square.
On Sunday morning, December 6, 1885, after a late breakfast at their home, 1607 H Street (Figure 1, A) on Lafayette Square, Marian Hooper Adams, known in her circle as Clover, went to her room. Her husband, Henry Adams, troubled by a toothache, had planned to see his dentist. While departing his home, he was met by a woman calling to see his wife. Adams went upstairs to her room to ask if she Join free for top speed and maximum content. [post=42738 /] 604 Views
[post=77939 /] 604 Views
Casting Shadows The Adams Memorial and Its Doubles Cynthia J. Mills "American Art" Casting Shadows: The "Adams Memorial" and Its Doubles Cynthia J. Mills American Art, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 2-25 This article consists of 24 page(s). The Adams Memorial entered history as an extraordinar cemetery monument, making the site in Washington, D.C., where Marian Hooper Adams was buried in 1885. Her suicide at age firty-two left her grieving husband, Henry Brooks Adams, the descendant of two presidents, searching for answers for his remaining years. He commissioned artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the haunting bronze figure, hoping it would serve as a private vehicle for catharsis and also as an enduring testimonial to the couple's elite taste and status. The original sculpture (frontispiece) sits in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery within an elegant granite setting designed by Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White. It has become one of America's most celebrated works of funerary art, appealing still to modern-day viewers because of its unsettling, riddlelike quality. It represents only the first part of the monument's story, however, because the cloaked bronze figure did not remain a one-of-a-kind tomb marker. It became a progenitor. Over the decades, its image was reproduced and relocated in many ways. These spinoffs or "doubles" --from photographs and casts to pirated sculptural copies-- served new functions not anticipated by the patron or artist. In some instances, sculptural reproductions were given as gifts in expression of friendship; in others, they were marketed and sold commercially. Copies of the figure were used to memorialize different people. And on one occasion, a cast was almost made for an eccentric English adventurer's country estate. The latest of the sculptural doubles are two authorized bronze casts made from a 1960s plaster mold for the collections of the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampsire, and the Smithsonian American Join free for top speed and maximum content.
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