Howard Roberts (sculptor)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
sculptor based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
. At the time of the 1876 Centennial Exposition, he was "considered the most accomplished American sculptor." But his output was small, his reputation was soon surpassed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the Irish-born American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts generation who most embodied the ideals of the "American Renaissance"...
and others, and he is now all but forgotten. Examples of his work are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
, the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
, and the U.S. Capitol.
Biography
Born into a well-to-do PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
family, Roberts studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
under sculptor Joseph A. Bailly
Joseph A. Bailly
Joseph Alexis Bailly was a French-born American sculptor who spent most of his career in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which has a collection of his sculpture...
. He was an exact contemporary of fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
, and both entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
in Paris in 1866, and studied under sculptor Augustin-Alexandre Dumont
Augustin-Alexandre Dumont
Augustin-Alexandre Dumont was a French sculptor.He was one of a long line of famous sculptors, the great-grandson of Pierre Dumont, son of Jacques-Edme Dumont and brother to Jeanne Louise Dumont Farrenc. In 1818, he started studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he was a pupil of Pierre...
. Eakins did not consider Roberts a friend, calling him "a rich disagreeable young man from Philadelphia, one who has without any apparent reason seen fit to be my enemy." Still, Eakins may have sketched him, and Roberts brokered a reconciliation between Eakins and Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
. Roberts continued his studies under sculptor Charles Gumery
Charles Gumery
Charles-Alphonse-Achille Guméry was a French sculptor working in an academic realist manner in Paris. Several of his figures ornament the Opéra Garnier most notoriously the group La Danse, which was commissioned from him after the group by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was found unacceptable.Though he...
, before returning to Philadelphia in 1869.
Architect Frank Furness
Frank Furness
Frank Heyling Furness was an acclaimed American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his eclectic, muscular, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan...
, whose firm won the 1871 design competition for PAFA's
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
new building, sought advice from the two wonder boys from Paris, Roberts and Eakins, when designing its painting and sculpture studios.
Roberts's first major work was a marble statuette of Hester Prynne (1869–72), the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
's novel The Scarlet Letter. He returned to Paris in 1873, taking with him his life-sized plaster model of Hypathia (heroine of Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
's novel of the same name) to be cut in marble. Instead, he began a new work, completing in marble La Premiere Pose (1873–76), and brought it back to Philadelphia to be exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition. He was awarded a gold medal for the statue. As the critic William J. Clark described it:
In the United States Department there was no piece of sculpture which was marked by such high technical qualities as the Premiere Pose of Howard Roberts. ... The subject is a young woman preparing to pose undraped, for the first time, in a painter's studio, and the sculptor has indicated his own appreciation of the fact that the situation has both a comic and a tragic side, by the grotesque comic and tragic masks which he has added as decorations to the uprights of the back of the chair. ... The workmanship, however, is so fine throughout that it would be an almost endless task to attempt a detailed analysis of it.
Roberts helped turn American tastes away from Italianate Neo-Classicism to French Beaux-Arts realism. He was the unanimous choice in an 1877-78 national design competition for a statue to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Capitol. Rather than creating a heroic formal work, he modeled a young Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat...
dressed in casual clothes, deep in thought, contemplating the possibilities of the steamboat
Steamboat
A steamboat or steamship, sometimes called a steamer, is a ship in which the primary method of propulsion is steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels...
model he holds in his lap:
—A statue of Robert Fulton has been finished in the clay by Howard Roberts. Fulton is dressed as a working man, and is intent on a small model held in the right hand, the forearm being bare. About his chair are tools. The model has been accepted by the Legislature.
This exactly paralleled what Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
was doing in his paintings of William Rush and His Model
William Rush and His Model
William Rush and His Model is the name given to several paintings by Thomas Eakins, one set from 1876-77 and the other from 1908. These works depict the American wood sculptor William Rush in 1808, carving his statue Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain at Philadelphia's first waterworks...
— portraying the artistic/intellectual process of the sculptor/inventor, rather than celebrating the finished work. The Fulton statue was installed in Statuary Hall
National Statuary Hall Collection
The National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol comprises statues donated by individual states to honor persons notable in their history...
in 1883.
Roberts carved numerous portrait busts and statuettes, but no other major sculptures are known. He closed his Philadelphia studio in 1894, and returned to Paris, where he died in 1900.
Selected works
- Bust of Eleanore (1870), marble, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsPennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsThe Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
, Philadelphia, PA. - Statuette of Hester Prynne and Baby Pearl at the Pillory (1869–72), marble, Library Company of PhiladelphiaLibrary Company of PhiladelphiaThe Library Company of Philadelphia is a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded by Benjamin Franklin as a library, the Library Company of Philadelphia has accumulated one of the most significant collections of historically valuable manuscripts and printed material in...
. - Hypathia Attacked by the Monks (1873–77), marble, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsPennsylvania Academy of the Fine ArtsThe Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
, Philadelphia, PA. - La Premiere Pose (1873–76), marble, Philadelphia Museum of ArtPhiladelphia Museum of ArtThe Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
. - Statuette of Lot's Wife (1876–77), marble, private collection.
- (Statuette?) of Napoleon's First Battle (1878–79), location unknown.
- Robert Fulton (1878–83), marble, Statuary Hall, U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC.