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Ad Code: 2
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from Auction House Records.
Undine Receives Her (Mortal) Soul
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A sculptor who played a significant role in making sculpture in America generally popular, Chauncey Ives completed many idealized portrait busts and life-size Neoclassical figures in marble.
Most of his subjects were either from Greek mythology or romantic literature. A reoccurring theme was the vulnerability of women, a popular 19th-century idea that he expressed through innocent, modest looking female nudes. Ives, following in the wake of Hiram Powers, was one of the increasing number of sculptors able to depict nudes as long as they were cloaked in a bit of drapery in classical motifs.
Ives was born on a family farm near New Haven, Connecticut, and his early talent for art and distaste for farming led his father to apprentice him to a local wood carver. By 1837, he had a studio in Boston and was moderately successful but had ongoing health problems, which led to a doctor prescribing a more moderate climate.
In 1844, he settled in Florence, Italy, where Horatio Greenough and Lorenzo Bartolini were prominent. He completed a work, "Boy and Dove," in 1847 that brought him much positive attention and inaugurated a series of marble pieces with children as subjects.
For unknown reasons, Ives moved to Rome in 1851, and settled there permanently although he made many return trips to the United States where he had much popularity. However, in the latter half of the 19th century, his popularity vanished along with that other Neoclassical sculptors.
Source:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
An example of his work exists, under glass, at the Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum in Chicago, Illinois. It is the "Pearce Monument", a depiction of a mother and child lying down, the gravestone for Frances M. Pearce (died 1864), and her daughter Frances Pearce. The sculpture is signed: C.B. Ives, Roma 1866.
http://www.graveyards.com/IL/Cook/rosehill/pearce.html
Information provided by Byron Caudle in October of 2006 | |
Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| Renewed interest in the lives and works of the American neoclassic sculptors has brought forth recent biographies of such artists as Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford, and encouraged investigation of the careers of Hiram Powers and Randolph Rogers. Others less well-known and often more short-lived, such as Benjamin Paul Akers and Edward Sheffield Bartholomew, have also been the subjects of monographs in the last few years. One figure who has not received attention is Chauncey Bradley Ives (1810-1894), despite the fact that he has never been completely forgotten, and that he is represented in a number of major museums and other public institutions.
Ives was born in Hamden, near New Haven, and Connecticut has always thought of him as a native son. Like most of our neoclassic sculptors, with the exception of the Greenoughs and William Wetmore Story, he was not born to luxury. He was a farm boy, one of seven children, but spurning farming as a vocation because of his poor health, he turned to sculpture, and was apprenticed at age sixteen to R. F. Northrup, a New Haven wood carver. He is supposed to have worked also with Hezekiah Augur, the city's leading carver in both wood and marble. If this is true, it might account for Ives' relatively rapid rise to professionalism, whatever the limits of Augur's talents might have been. It may be, too, that this period of study accounted for Ives' choice of Jephtha's Daughter as a subject for several mature works during his career in Rome, since it was the subject of Augur's most famous work, and the most ambitious ideal sculpture produced in America during Ives' youth. The two artists conceptions of the subject, however, are very different: Augur's is almost baroque, while Ives' is a placid figure which anticipates Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Adams Memorial.
At the age of twenty-seven Ives moved to Boston, where his first work was a copy of Sir Francis Chantrey's bust of Sir Walter Scott, in the Boston Anthenaeum. The copy was purchased by New York's Apollo Association (later the American Art-Union) and was one of their prizes for 1839. Ives also carved a bust of William Hoppin which was exhibited in a jeweler's window and brought him a series of orders. In 1838, Ives modeled several portrait busts, including those of Governor Edward Everett and Charles Sprague. He then went to New Haven and New York and in 1839 modeled six busts, including one of Noah Webster.
In 1840 he carved his earliest well-known piece, a marble bust of the architect Ithiel Town. The next year he did six busts, three of them in marble: one of the art patron Daniel Wadsworth; one of Lydia Sigourney, "The Sweet Singer of Hartford"; and one of Jeremiah Day, the president of Yale College. The Day bust was an important commission which had been secured for Ives by Horace Bushnell despite the fact that the committee deciding upon the matter had wanted Hiram Powers. In 1843 Ives modeled the bust of the portrait painter Thomas Sully. Most of Ives' early portrait busts were male subjects.
In 1841, while Ives was making plaster casts in Meriden, Connecticut, a doctor commented on the sculptor's declining health and advised him to go to Europe. Several years later, in 1844, with the financial assistance of Charles Chauncey of Philadelphia, William Dillingham, and Charles McAllister, Ives was able to go to Italy for health and for study. He spent seven years in Florence and then moved on to Rome, for Rome was becoming the center of the neoclassic movement (Florence had been pre-eminent when Powers and Horatio Greenough were there). Rome was to be Ives' home for the rest of his life. His years there were happy ones. In 1860 he married Maria Louisa Davis of Brooklyn, and they had several children.
In Italy Ives continued to make portrait busts, and after 1846 these were all in marble. His sitters were often distinguished men and women, and some were colleagues. In 1849 he carved a bust of the essayist and art historian Henry T. Tuckerman; in 1853 he did one of the wife of his fellow sculptor Joseph Mozier, and on his many trips back to America he secured numerous portrait commissions. Back in this country in 1857, for instance, he carved six portraits, including two replicas of his bust of William H. Seward; and a few years afterward he carved the bust of Professor Benjamin Silliman now in the New-York Historical Society.
Nevertheless, as with most of his colleagues, Ives' major energies were devoted to his ideal works, which made his reputation. Apparently the earliest of these, done while he was still resident in America, is a Maternity, carved in marble in Philadelphia in 1842 and sold to Daniel Wadsworth. Ives exhibited fairly extensively in Philadelphia and in 1844 had for sale, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, his figure Meekness, as well as a replica of his bust of Town. Later that year, soon after his arrival in Italy he modeled a Beatrice, his earliest ideal sculpture, done in Florence. The following year he carved the bust Jephtha's Daughter which he sold to Philip Kearney of New York, a fairly consistent patron of his; years later, in 1874, the same subject was treated in a full-length work. In 1846 he carved a bust of Flora, which, again, was made a full-length subject six years afterward.
The first of a series of images of children upon which much of Ives' fame was based, was "Boy and Dove", carved in 1847. It was in 1848, however, that his first subject to achieve real popularity was created: a "Bacchante", which he repeated eight times, once for his patron Kearney. This was followed by "Ruth", which brought forth nine replicas, and in 1851 his first version of "Pandora", perhaps his most famous work, was considered equal to Powers' "Greek Slave" in anatomy, and superior to it in grace, ideality, and the representation of emotion.
From then on, Ives' ideal busts, full-length statues, and depictions of childhood were unfailingly popular. His patrons, as well as his portrait sitters, were nearly all Americans on the grand tour. Those who commissioned works from him and then neglected to pay for and collect them were subject to the indignity of having the sculpture, with the unpaid bill prominently attached, exhibited on the step to Ives' studio. Since artists' studios in Rome were open to the public at least one day a week these debts were not usually outstanding for very long.
Replicas of Ives' earlier work were in great demand. He made twelve of his 1852 "Ariadne" bust and twenty-five of his 1854 "Rebecca at the Well"; a Mr. Hawley of New York purchased the first one of "Rebecca". There were seven of the "Piper Playing his Musical Instrument Before the Madonna", and five of the first version of "Undine Receiving her Soul", created in 1859. One replica of "Undine" was purchased by the art collector Marshall O. Roberts, whose daughter Kitty had been portrayed by Ives; another replica of this "Undine" went to the Western Academy of Art.
Second only to "Rebecca" in popularity was Ives' "San Souci" of 1863, of which twenty-one more were made; and in the same year he remodeled his "Pandora", which was followed by nineteen replicas, the last as late as 1891. In 1864 he modeled his "Hebrew Captive", which was put into marble in 1868. In 1860 the "Cosmopolitan Art Journal" stated that ". . . the estimation in which Mr. Powers, Mr. Hart, Mr. Ives and Miss Hosmer are held is such as to flatter our national vanity."
During the late sixties a number of public and official commissions were awarded to Ives. The first of these, in 1867, was from Washington College (now Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut) of a statue of its first president, Bishop Thomas Church Brownell. It still stands on the grounds of that institution. In 1868 the State of Connecticut ordered a statue of Jonathan Trumbull for Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, and, in the following year, one of Roger Sherman. Replicas seven feet high of these were later made for the Connecticut capitol; the statues were dedicated in 1878 and placed on each side of the center tympanum over the east entrance of the building.
Although by the 1870's the neoclassic movement in sculpture was on the wane, Ives' popularity and his production do not seem to have suffered seriously. In 1871 he created his figure "The Truant", of which three replicas were carved, and in 1873 a classical group, "Ino and Bacchus". Attesting his continued success were the six replicas of his 1874 "Jephtha's Daughter", which now became a full-length statue; twelve replicas of his 1875 "Beggar Boy"; six of his 1876 "Egeria"; and ten of his remodeled "Undine" of 1880. In the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, which in the view of some schoalrs marked the end of neoclassicism, Ives exhibited his "Ino and Bacchus" and busts of William Henry Seward and General Winfield Scott.
It is only after 1880 that Ives' career seems to have declined. Toward the end of that decade, Ives was engaged in the creation of several monuments to be cast in bronze; previously, only his statue of Brownell had been in this medium. His most ambitious public monument was "The Willing Captive of 1886", cast in bronze by Cavalliere Nellio in Rome. Modeled from a group created in 1862 and carved in marble in 1868, it depicts an Indian chief, his white captive, and her mother. The story illustrated was taken from George Bancroft's "History of the United States" (New York, 1865), from Francis Parkman's works, and other authorities. It was a sentimental, appealing tale of a New England girl who had been captured by Indians and married to one; later, when the tribe to which she had become attached was being forced by the white victors to move, she was given the option of returning home. In fact, a number of captive brides rejected their old homes and their parents, preferring to remain with their Indian mates, and Ives' sculpture may bear specific reference to the history of Eunice Williams, the daughter of the Reverend John Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Ives is said to have returned to the United States from Rome expressly to find an Indian model for the group. The work was donated in 1895 by J. Ackerman Coles to the city of Newark, New Jersey -- appropriately enough, since Newark was settled by colonists from Ives' native Connecticut.
Ives' portrait busts were comparable in quality to those by his many contemporaries, and the sculptor Lorado Taft said that Ives' ideal works represented the taste of his generation. Purely literary and allegorical themes were not common in his production. He treated about twice as many classical as Biblical subjects and it is in these that his art finds its highest expression. In contrast to the almost baroque melodrama of some of the later works of Thomas Crawford, or of the sculpture of Ives' friend Randolph Rogers -- the latter's famous Nydia, for instance - a classical purity characterizes nearly all Ives' works, down to such late figures as his "Egeria". This figure, his "Pandora", "Jephtha's Daughter", and a number of others, including most of the ideal busts, show a serenity that allies them to the earlier work of Powers and Greenough; and only William Henry Rinehart, among Ives' contemporaries, exhibited this same neoclassic purity. Even his more spirited Undine, rising from the waters, has a Hellenistic grace.
In his own time, despite the popularity of the classical subjects, Ives' reputation seems to have been built particularly upon his portrayals of childhood. In a sense these are life-size marble equivalents of the popular plaster genre groups of John Rogers, and the term neoclassic is a misnomer in regard to them. With their virtuoso treatment of textures, fussy details, and lack of thematic nobility, they seem too close to the commercial sculpture turned out by later nineteenth-century Italian stonecutters, which may account for the censure and even neglect that Ives suffered at the hands of later historians.
The classical and religious themes chosen by Ives were fairly standard among the neoclassic sculptors. In addition to the "Jephtha's Daughter", the subject of Cupid, for instance, was one depicted by Greenough, "Flora" by Crawford, and "Ruth" by Rogers. Joseph Mozier and Benjamin Paul Akers had each carved an "Undine". William Henry Rinehart and Erastus Dow Palmer, as well as Ives, carved the subject of "Evening", and "America" had been previously portrayed by Hiram Powers.
The Indian theme was also popular with Mozier, Crawford, Peter Stephenson, and Edmonia Lewis and marks a peculiar meeting of a native American subject with the neoclassic style. In carving such subjects as his Indian and Hebrew captives, Ives was following the pattern set by Powers with his "White Captive". Ives, then, may stand for the typical American neoclassic sculptor, and his work is an important part of America's cultural achievement at the height of the Victorian era.
Source:
CHAUNCEY BRADLEY IVES, AMERICAN SCULPTOR
William H. Gerdts
The Magazine ANTIQUES, November 1868.
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