LEWIS, EDMONIA

born July 4, 1845, Greenbush, N.Y., U.S. died after 1909 Hagar, marble sculpture by Edmonia Lewis, c. 1868; in the National Museum of American Art, in full Mary Edmonia Lewis American sculptor whose neoclassical works on religious and classical themes won contemporary praise and generated renewed interest in the late 20th century. Lewis was the daughter of an African American man and a woman of African and Ojibwa (Chippewa) descent. By the age of four she was an orphan. She then lived with her maternal aunts among the Ojibwa, by whom she was called Wildfire. With the help of an older brother, she obtained admission to the preparatory department of Oberlin College in 1859, and in 186062 she attended the college proper. Lewis thrived at Oberlin, excelling particularly at drawing, but left in 1863 after having been accused of poisoning two of her classmates and later of theft. After the first incident, a mob beat her severely before her trial, but lawyer John Mercer Langston won her acquittal. Again with her brother's support, she then made her way to Boston, where Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison introduced her to a local sculptor from whom she received a few lessons in modeling. Her first work seen publicly was a medallion featuring the head of militant Abolitionist John Brown that was advertised early in 1864. Later in the year her bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (a Boston favourite who had been killed leading his black troops in the attack on Fort Wagner, part of the assault on Charleston, South Carolina) was widely praised. Sales of copies of the bust allowed her to sail in 1865 for Rome, where Charlotte Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, and other members of the American artistic community took her under their wing. Lewis mastered working in marble and refused to hire Italian stone carvers to transfer her plaster models to marble, to quell any question that the work was her own. She quickly achieved success as a sculptor, having great technical skill and imagination. She illustrated contemporary as well as classical themes. Inspired by the Emancipation Proclamation, she carved The Freed Woman and Her Child (1866) and Forever Free (1867). She turned subsequently to Native American themes and created The Marriage of Hiawatha (c. 1868) and The Old Arrow Maker and His Daughter (1872), both based on the narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of whom she carved a bust (c. 1869). Her other notable works included busts of Garrison, Lincoln, John Brown, and Maria Chapman and a grave statue of Hygeia commissioned by Harriot K. Hunt. Lewis also depicted biblical figures, such as Hagar (c. 1868). Her career reached its peak in 1876 when her sculpture The Death of Cleopatra was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Her last major commission came in 1883 for Adoration of the Magi for a church in Baltimore, Maryland. This piece, like the bulk of her work, cannot be located and perhaps did not survive. It was variously reported that Lewis had been last seen in Rome in 1909 or 1911, but the circumstances of her death are uncertain.