Finding a Franklin Bust from France

This spring the Incollect site published Pamela Ehrlich’s article “The Lost Bust of Benjamin Franklin.” It begins:

In 1949, France sent forty-nine World War I-era wooden railroad cars filled with gifts across the Atlantic to thank Americans for their aid in the aftermath of World War II. “Le Train de la Reconnaissance,” or the “Merci Train,” was a grass-roots effort to reciprocate for the “American Friendship Train”—a convoy of 700 railroad cars, packed with food and fuel sent by the American people to France and Italy in 1947.

Among the treasures on the Merci Train was the bust of Benjamin Franklin that Franklin had presented to France’s Royal Academy of Sciences in 1785. Upon arriving in America, it was lost and forgotten—and with it, its remarkable history.

That bust of Benjamin Franklin was one of several that the artist, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, made in plaster based on his terra cotta original—a common practice. The terra cotta from 1777 remains in the Bibliotheque Mazarine in Paris, so France didn’t send over its first or only version.

Furthermore, Caffieri’s reputation, and even his credit for this bust, had been eclipsed by the fame of Jean-Antoine Houdon, a younger artist known in the U.S. of A. for his full-length statue of George Washington. Houdon did sculpt a bust of Franklin in 1778—just not this one.

Franklin actually preferred the Caffieri bust. “Between 1778 and 1785,” Ehrlich wrote, “Franklin ordered at least eight plaster Caffieri busts for family and friends.” Caffieri hoped that Franklin’s favor would lead to many more commissions from the new American republic, and he wrote several letters asking to be recommended.

As he left for Philadelphia in 1785, Franklin told Caffieri that each state would make its own choice of artists. He ordered one more copy of his bust for the Royal Academy of Sciences; that’s the one eventually shopped over on the Merci Train. And then he sailed off—with none other than Houdon, heading to Mount Vernon.

Ehrlich found that in 1949 the Franklin bust was presented (reportedly as a Houdon) to the Benjamin Franklin University in Washington, D.C., a business school spun off of what became Pace University. You haven’t hear of Benjamin Franklin University? It no longer exists. And thus Ehrlich was left to figure out the location of that bust today.

“Lafayette: An American Icon” in Boston

The French tall ship Hermione is scheduled to arrive here in Boston on Saturday, 11 July, and to stay for the weekend.

The welcoming events include a parade of reenactors, public tours of the ship, church bells tolling, crafts demonstrations on the Greenway, and the screening of a Gene Kelly film at the Museum of Fine Arts. The last seems like a bit of a stretch, especially since Lafayette didn’t like dancing.

Already the Boston Athenæum has been hosting an exhibit titled “Lafayette: An American Icon.” Curator David Dearinger wrote:

Born into one of France’s wealthiest and most prestigious families, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette (1757-1834) dreamed of becoming a champion of freedom and a hero of chivalric proportions. . . .

Beginning in 1777, when he left France for America to offer assistance in the American Revolution, he enthralled his countrymen and earned the adoration of the rebellious Americans. Within a year, George Washington thought of the young Frenchman as an adopted son, Lafayette considered himself to be a “citizen of two worlds,” and American patriots commonly referred to him as “Our Marquis.” Lafayette’s fame was assured when he went back to France in 1779 to plead the American cause—and subsequently returned to America with the French government’s promise of troops, ships, and financial support. This alliance turned the tide of the American Revolution and eventually led to the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, a historic event in which Lafayette participated.

The Boston Athenæum celebrates Lafayette and his role in the founding of the new United States with an exhibition of portraits and other images of Lafayette (paintings, sculptures, and engravings) as well as a small selection of contemporary documents, manuscripts, and maps. The exhibition is inspired by the recent historic reconstruction of Hermione, the frigate that brought Lafayette back to America in 1780. That ship, with its game-changing news, made landfall in Boston in April of that year.

I have to point out that Lafayette’s news in 1780 was that France was sending more forces. The French navy had already been active off North America for nearly two years at that point. Bostonians had seen thousands of French sailors. L’Hermione was thus neither the ship that first brought Lafayette to America nor the ship that brought news of the French alliance. But it was a grand ship, and its replica is said to be “the largest and most authentically built Tall Ship in the last 150 years.”

The “An American Icon” exhibition includes the statue shown above, “Jean-Antoine Houdon’s great bust of Lafayette, acquired by the Athenæum in 1828 from Thomas Jefferson’s descendants.” Alongside it are works from several other major American museums and libraries,

In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney wrote of two of the later portraits:

In Samuel F.B. Morse’s painting, of 1825, sapling has matured into oak. The dashing young nobleman who had looked so boyish (and slightly supercilious) hasn’t just aged but thickened. Lafayette has the look of a character out of Balzac, and not necessarily a virtuous one. In contrast, Rembrandt Peale — son of Charles Willson Peale — painted him that same year looking considerably more avuncular, even rather sweet.

The exhibit will be at the Athenaeum until 27 September. Admission is free for members, $5 for everyone else.

Washington at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge

The Commander Hotel in Cambridge opened in 1927 during the Colonial Revival. Located near the site of the “Washington Elm,” the hotel was named in honor of George Washington, the commander-in-chief. Some of its architectural details are modeled on Mount Vernon.

A couple of decades later, Frank A. K. Boland was the hotel’s owner. He had once been an attorney representing the American Hotel Association. (He had been disbarred in 1909 for bribing a court clerk and reinstated in 1912; that seems have to have been a normal way of doing business in New York then.)

I haven’t found out exactly when, but at some point a visitor told Boland that a bronze reproduction of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s statue of Washington was available in Somerville. The T. F. McGann & Sons Company was offering it for sale, advertising in School Executive and School Management and Institution. Obviously, the firm thought that it would be appropriate for a school.

Boland went to see the statue. It had turned black from standing out in a storage yard since 1932. The McGann company had made it for Manchester, Connecticut, but “financial disagreement resulted in final cancellation of the order.” Perhaps the Depression had also been part of the problem.

Boland bought the statue and mounted it on the Commander Hotel’s lawn on “a stately base of rough finish granite.” With its base, it stands 6'10" tall and weighs 1,034 pounds. Every so often it gets to wear a Bruins, Celtics, Red Sox, or Patriots jersey during a championship run.

In 1949 Boland started a campaign to commemorate the Washington Elm, which had fallen twenty-six years before. Artist Leonard Craske was already at work on a bas-relief showing Washington reviewing troops under a tree, much like Washington Elm images going back over a century. But by that point historians had turned against the elm legend. The final text on Craske’s monument says nothing about the tree:

General George Washington, having taken command of the Army of the United Colonies at Cambridge, inspects the troops near this spot on the fourth day of July 1775.

Undaunted, Boland planned an unveiling on 3 July 1950, the traditional day of the Washington Elm ceremony. At noon on 2 May he led a committee of Cambridge notables to meet with President Harry Truman and invite him to the unveiling. The Truman Library shows the President’s schedule for that day. Corbis offers a photograph of the committee giving the President a relic of the fallen elm. Boland is the man looking happily at the camera.

The young man at left who looks like an office intern was Rep. John F. Kennedy, who had arranged the meeting. Truman didn’t come, but Kennedy was one of the main speakers at the ceremony that July.

(Photograph above by Wally Gobetz, available via Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Thanks to Ed Guleserian, current owner of what’s now the Sheraton Commander Hotel, for a copy of Boland’s press release about the statue.)

Capturing George Washington’s Face in 1785

In yesterday’s Boston Globe an op-ed essay by George H. Rosen retold an anecdote about Jean-Antoine Houdon making a life mask of George Washington in 1785. I can’t confirm the details of that anecdote, which sound a lot like the story of John Henri Isaac Browere making a similar life mask of Thomas Jefferson forty years later. But the underlying incident is documented.

The state of Virginia wanted a full-size statue of its celebrated general. Jefferson, then an American diplomat in Paris, sought out Houdon, a promising French sculptor, and made a deal with him to travel to America to start the work. (Jefferson also bought insurance in case Houdon couldn’t finish the job.)

Houdon arrived at Mount Vernon in October 1785 with recommendations from Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He spent a few days observing how his host stood, taking measurements, and deciding that the expression he wanted to capture was when the general became upset at a horse-trader.

On 10 October, Washington wrote in his diary: “Observed the process for preparing the plaster of Paris and mixing of it according to Mr. Houdon.” To capture the general’s physiognomy, Houdon would pour that plaster over the general’s face and let it harden.

Washington’s granddaughter Nelly Custis later recorded her memory of the process:

I was only six years old at that time, and perhaps should not have retained any recollection of Houdon & his visit, had I not seen the General as I supposed, dead, & laid out on a large table coverd with a sheet. I was passing the white servants Hall & saw as I thought the Corpse of one I considerd my Father, I went in, & found the General extended on his back on a large table, a sheet over him, except his face, on which Houdon was engaged in putting on plaster to form the cast. Quills were in the nostrills. I was very much alarmed until I was told that it was a bust, a likeness of the General & would not injure him.

I suppose folks might have told Nelly this was for a bust. The quills were to let Washington breathe through the plaster.

The cast no longer exists, it appears. The plaster mask Houdon made with it is at the Morgan Library and Museum, and the terra cotta bust that he made next is at Mount Vernon. Houdon returned to Paris to complete the full-sized statue, which stands in the Virginia capitol building; it’s a magnificent portrait. Many replicas have been made; I recall encountering two ’round these parts at the Boston Athenaeum and the Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge.

(The image above is the replica of Houdon’s life mask of Washington that one can buy from Haunted Studios.)