POWERS, HIRAM

born June 29, 1805, Woodstock, Vt., U.S. died June 27, 1873, Florence U.S. sculptor who worked in the Neoclassical style during the mid-1800s. He is best remembered for his "Greek Slave"-a white marble statue of a nude girl chained after her capture by the Turks. Powers first studied with Frederick Eckstein. About 1829 he was a general assistant and artist in a waxworks museum in Cincinnati, where his ingenious representations of scenes from Dante's Inferno met with extraordinary success. At the end of 1834 Powers went to Washington, D.C., where he modelled a portrait of Andrew Jackson (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). He started for Italy in 1835, and in 1837, after a few months residence in Paris, he settled permanently in Florence. In 1843 he sculptured the "Greek Slave" (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which caused a sensation when exhibited at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London in 1851. It was this statue, of which six replicas were made, that placed him among the most popular sculptors of his time. An artist of amazing technical ability, he commanded high prices for his work. He produced many portrait busts of prominent American visitors to his Florentine studio.