The Greek Slave

The Greek Slave is a marble sculpture by American sculptor Hiram Powers.

It was one of the best-known and critically acclaimed American artworks of the nineteenth century,and is among the most popular American sculptures ever.

It was the first publicly exhibited, life-size, American sculpture depicting a fully nude female figure.

Powers originally modeled the work in clay, in Florence, Italy.

At the time, there was quite a bit of anxiety about what America could produce culturally.

Hiram Powers was born in Woodstock, Vermont, Powers’ family moved near Cincinnati when he was 14 years old.

After his father passed away, Powers moved into the city and began work, first as a superintendent of a reading room attached to a hotel, and later as a clerk at a general store.

At the age of 17 he worked as an apprentice to a wooden clockmaker.

Several years later—in 1826—Powers began to study with Frederick Eckstein, a local sculptor of some regional renown.

Powers learned to model the human face and figure.

These skills were put to great use at Joseph Dorfeulle’s Western Museum. While there, Powers created animatronic wax figures to occupy scenes taken from Dante’s Inferno.

These likenesses brought him to the attention of Nicholas Longworth, a local wine entrepreneur.

Longworth paid for Powers to undertake two extended periods of study away from Ohio.

It his trip to the nation’s capital that propelled Powers onward to the success he would later find with The Greek Slave.

While there, he sculpted many Washingtonian elites, including current and former presidents—Andrew Jackson (1834), John Quincy Adams (1837), and Martin van Buren (1837)—as well as John Marshall (1835), the second chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

These successes prompted Powers to depart his native shores for Itally.

Powers hoped to emulate the work of Michelangelo and Bernini, then Florence was just the place to do it.

Powers wrote an explanatory text to accompany the exhibition of his work. In it, he explained that his figure is an enslaved Greek maiden who stands in a slave market during the time of the Greek War for Independence against Turkey (1821-32).

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The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek revolution….Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers…and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these afflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame.

Upon close inspection, one can see a small cross and locket carved on the support. The cross hints at her everlasting Christian faith, while the locket suggests far away love. Through these small details, Powers sets the stage for our reaction: a young Christian female has been abducted from her family, has been stripped bare by her captors, and now stands judged in the slave market. The pathos is palpable.

Nineteenth-century American art does not overflow with examples of the female nude, and those artists who attempted to paint or sculpt such scandalous subjects were often disappointed by reactions to their work. Although her clothing may have been stripped away, she remained cloaked and covered in her Christian piety.

The Reverend Orville Dewey summed this up in an 1847 article in The Union Magazine:

“The Greek Slave is clothed all over with sentiment; sheltered, protected by it from every profane eye. Brocade, cloth of gold, could not be a more complete protection than the vesture of holiness in which she stands.”

The art-viewing public agreed, and the popularity of this work—a popularity that likely exceeded the work’s aesthetic merits—catapulted Powers to international fame.

One of the contributors to the impact of this work was the way in which viewers could consider this both a historical and allegorical composition. In addition to being based upon an event taken from the Greek War of Independence, it was also topical to the situation of slavery in the United States.

These were the connections viewers consistently made when the sculpture was first shown to great fanfare in London in 1845, and then when it toured the United States two years later. It made an appearance at the next two world’s fairs—London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 and the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. At each stop, viewers made the connection between the statue and rising anti-slavery sentiment in the United States.

Powers continued to contribute to the field of sculpture during the course of his long career. As an inventor, he patented new files and rasps, and developed an easier-to-use pointing machine that aided in the creation of marble copies of his works.

He also developed a new finishing technique that allowed him to closely recreate the appearance of human flesh on the finely grained Carrara marble so preferred by Florentine sculptors.

But it was The Greek Slave more than any other element that secured Powers’s reputation as an American sculptor of the highest rank and it remains one of the most important and enduring works of American sculpture.

Powers is, in a lot of ways, a cultural ambassador.” Powers’ studio was a must-see on the Grand Tour and was even listed in travel guides of the period.

That cultural ambassadorship came from a man, who identified as 100 percent American, and whose wife couldn’t wait to return to Cincinnati, where she grew up, to raise her children there. “He is keenly aware that he is raising American kids in Florence,”.

(When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Powers in Florence in 1858, he noted that Powers “talks of going home, but says that he has been talking of it every since he first came to Italy.”)

Perhaps precisely due to his distance from his homeland, Powers was able to tailor his Greek Slave, which interestingly appealed to both northern and southern audiences, to the fraught politics of the day—the divisive period leading up to the Civil War.

“This composition was [acquired] by both Northern and Southern collectors. It sort of underscored the abolitionist sentiment, but also somehow resonated in a way with certain collectors in the South.”

Five more full-sized versions of the statue in marble were mechanically reproduced for private patrons, based on Powers’ original model, along with numerous smaller-scale versions.

4 replicas of “Greek Slave” stand alongside four “allegories” — Prudence, Eloquence, Commerce and Science — in the House Chamber’s chandelier.
Vermont

Copies of the statue were displayed in a number of venues around Great Britain and the United States; it quickly became one of Powers’ most famous works, and held symbolic meaning for some American abolitionists, inspiring an outpouring of prose and poetry.

The position of the figure is said to have been inspired by the Venus de’ Medici in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Described as a Greek woman stripped and chained at a slave market, was seen as so salacious that men and women viewed it separately.

Though it addressed the 1821-1832 Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, abolitionists seized on it as social commentary on the highly volatile subject of slavery in the United States.

“People sit before it as rapt and almost as silent as devotees at a religious ceremony,” reported the New York Daily Tribune in 1847. “Whatever may be the critical judgment of individuals as to the merits of the work, there is no mistake about the feeling which it awakens.”

It was sensational and scandalous. It was the first time many Americans had ever seen a sculpture of a nude female figure and  unauthorized copies were manufactured and sold, prompting Power’s patent application.

When the statue was taken on tour in in 1847 and 1848, Miner Kellogg, a friend of the artist and manager of the tour put together a pamphlet to hand out to exhibition visitors. He provided his own description of the piece:

The ostensible subject is merely a Grecian maiden, made captive by the Turks and exposed at Istanbul, for sale. The cross and locket, visible amid the drapery, indicate that she is a Christian, and beloved. But this simple phase by no means completes the meaning of the statue. It represents a being superior to suffering, and raised above degradation, by inward purity and force of character. Thus the Greek Slave is an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is subject, and may be regarded as a type of resignation, uncompromising virtue, or sublime patience.

Public reaction to the statue was mixed. When the work was first exhibited, many people were scandalized by the figure’s nudity; Powers countered the young woman was a perfect example of Christian purity and chastity, because even in her unclothed state she was attempting to shield herself from the gaze of onlookers.

Furthermore, he said, her nudity was no fault of her own, but rather was caused by her Turkish captors, who stripped her to display her for sale. So well did this reasoning work that many Christian pastors would exhort their congregations to go and see the statue when it was displayed.

Some viewers also drew parallels between The Greek Slave and the slaves who worked on the plantations, of the American South.