William Ordway Partridge

• 1. Introduction

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  William Ordway Partridge wrote a sonnet for the unveiling of one of his own statues. The sculpture was a bronze William Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, Chicago. It was dedicated on the 23rd of April 1894, the Bard's 330th birthday. A sculptor who also wrote verse could mark such a day in his own words. Partridge was an American sculptor, teacher and author, and each of those roles fed the others.

  Who was this man, and how did he train for such work? What else did he do with his voice and his pen? And what happened to his monuments once cities, institutions and wars began to change the places where they stood?

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• 2. Paris Roots

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  In Paris, George Sidney Partridge, Jr. served as the representative of the New York City department store A.T. Stewart. His younger son William was born there on the 11th of April 1861. The boy's mother, Helen Derby Catlin, was a cousin of the painter George Catlin. His brother, Sidney Catlin Partridge, grew up to become a bishop of the Episcopal Church.

  The family returned to New York City in 1868. William was enrolled at Cheshire Academy in Connecticut and then at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn. In autumn 1881 he entered Columbia University, but poor health forced him to withdraw.

  A trip to Europe in 1882 changed his direction. In Florence he worked in the studio of Fortunato Galli and became friends with the young Bernard Berenson. In autumn 1883 he audited classes at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, although he never formally enrolled there. He also spent a short time in the Paris studio of the sculptor Antonin Mercié. By the spring of 1884 he was back in New York City, and the next school he chose taught acting rather than sculpture.

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• 3. Stage and Studio

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  At the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Partridge trained for the theater and soon appeared in a New York City production of David Copperfield. He then moved to Boston. There he supported himself by giving dramatic readings of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. All the while he kept sculpting, and his cousin, the sculptor John Rogers, encouraged him in that work.

  A bust called Nearing Home, made in plaster in 1887, gave him his first popular success. Its subject was a woman who was 101 years old. The original plaster has not been located. A marble version made in 1892 belongs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

  Also in 1887, Partridge married Augusta Merriam, a wealthy widow from Milton, Massachusetts, who was 15 years older than he was. They had a daughter, also named Augusta, who died in 1916. The couple divorced in 1904. On the 14th of June 1905 he married the poet Margaret Ridgely Schott, and their daughter was also named Margaret.

  The newlyweds traveled to Europe that same year. In Paris, Partridge studied briefly in the studio of the painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. There he formed a close friendship with the neo-Gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram. The couple then moved to Rome, where he worked in the studio of the Polish sculptor Pio Welonski. In 1889 they returned to Milton, and Partridge established a studio of his own. A commission from Chicago was only a year away.

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• 4. Chicago and Brooklyn

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  In 1890, Partridge won a national competition to create a statue of William Shakespeare for Chicago. To carry out the work he went back to Paris and set up a studio there. In 1893 his full-size plaster model went on show at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, along with nine other works.

  The Hamilton Club of Brooklyn commissioned a larger-than-life bronze statue of Alexander Hamilton for its headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. It was dedicated on the 4th of October 1893. For months before and after that day, Partridge's full-size plaster model of Hamilton was on exhibition at the World's Columbian Exposition. The bronze stood in Brooklyn until 1936, when it was moved to The Grange, Hamilton's country house in northern Manhattan.

  Fifteen years after the first Hamilton, Partridge made a second one for the Alumni Association of Columbia College. It was installed on campus in front of Hamilton Hall and dedicated on the 27th of May 1908. The two statues now stand in northern Manhattan, less than 1.5 miles apart.

  The Union League Club of Brooklyn commissioned the equestrian statue of General Ulysses S. Grant, made in 1895-96 and Partridge's most colossal work. It was installed in the center of Bedford Avenue, in front of the club's headquarters, and dedicated on the 27th of April 1896. The bronze horse and rider are about 12 feet high and stand on a granite pedestal of about 15 feet. In 1900 he made a 21-inch bronze statuette, General Grant as President, which is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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• 5. Smithson's Tablet

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  James Smithson, an Englishman who lived from about 1765 to 1829, left a bequest that funded the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1896 Partridge was commissioned to make a bronze memorial tablet marking that bequest. It was meant for Smithson's gravesite in Genoa, Italy.

  For the relief portrait, Partridge worked from an earlier one made from life in 1817 by Pierre-Joseph Tiolier. That earlier portrait was once attributed to Antonio Canova. Partridge first made two casts of his tablet, one for the gravesite and one for the nearby Protestant Chapel of the Holy Spirit. In 1898 he made a third for Pembroke College, University of Oxford, Smithson's alma mater.

  The bronze tablet at the gravesite was stolen. The chapel's tablet served as the model for a marble copy, which was installed at the gravesite in 1900.

  Then the Genoa cemetery was slated for destruction so that an adjacent quarry could expand. Alexander Graham Bell, a member of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, proposed bringing Smithson's remains to the United States. In 1904 the remains and the grave monument were moved to the Crypt of the Smithsonian's Castle Building in Washington, D.C. The 1900 marble copy of Partridge's tablet made the journey too.

  Allied bombing destroyed the Chapel of the Holy Spirit during World War II. In 1963 a new marble copy of Partridge's tablet was carved, and it stands today at the site of the chapel.

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• 6. Faith and Grief

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  In St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, behind the High Altar, stands Partridge's larger-than-life Pietà in white Carrara marble. The dead Christ slumps before a seated Mary, who cradles his face with her hand. The critic Robert Burns Wilson wrote a sensitive appreciation of the work. It is Partridge's most famous religious sculpture.

  For the Baptistery of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., he made the Jordan Font around 1904. It carries eight marble panels from the life of Christ, carved between 1902 and 1904. In 1907 he completed a marble Last Supper, which hangs over the altar of the Church of the Epiphany in Washington.

  Christalan, a marble figure of 1900, stands at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Christalan is the title character of Katrina Trask's epic poem about a teenage boy apprenticed to a knight. The author and her husband commissioned the sculpture as a memorial to their four children, who all died young. It is listed as the Spencer Trask Memorial.

  Around 1921 Partridge made the Samuel H. Kauffman Memorial for Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. A bronze figure sits on a granite exedra, accompanied by seven bronze bas-relief panels. The panels depict Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man.

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• 7. Pocahontas Across the Atlantic

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  The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, or APVA, commissioned Partridge to make a larger-than-life bronze statue of Pocahontas, the Native American princess. It was made for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia. The exposition marked the 300th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. During the exposition the statue stood in front of the Administration Building.

  Afterward the APVA loaned the statue to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It later donated the statue to Jamestown, where it was re-dedicated on the 3rd of June 1922.

  Queen Elizabeth II visited Jamestown in 1957 for its 350th anniversary and was charmed by the statue. Her reaction inspired a replica, cast after the sculptor's death. The Governor of Virginia presented it as a gift to the British people. It was dedicated on the 5th of October 1958 outside St. George's in Gravesend, the English church where Pocahontas had been interred in 1617.

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• 8. Lectures and Last Works

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  From 1897 to 1903, Partridge lectured at what is now George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He went on to lecture at Stanford University in California. He also spoke at the National Social Science Association, the Concord School of Philosophy and the Brooklyn Institute. His studio stood at 15 West 38th Street in Manhattan, and Lee Lawrie was among his assistants.

  Technique of Sculpture, a manual on sculpting, appeared in 1895. Partridge also published two volumes of poetry, The Song-Life of a Sculptor in 1894 and Sonnets and Lyrics in 1902. He wrote three verse novels: The Angel of Clay, Nathan Hale: The Ideal Patriot, and The Czar's Gift. In November 1900 he gave a lecture titled Sculpture in Its Relation to Architecture at the American Institute of Architects convention in Philadelphia.

  His portrait busts ranged from poets to presidents. He modeled Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a bronze Abraham Lincoln went to the Lincoln Club of New York City in 1906. A marble bust of Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller reached the United States Supreme Court Building in 1914. His bronze George Washington has a replica at Sulgrave Manor in Oxfordshire, the Washington family's ancestral home.

  At Columbia University's College Walk, the Class of 1885 Sundial of 1914 was designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White. A 16-ton green granite sphere cast its shadow on a circular dial. The sphere cracked and was removed in the 1940s. Only the dial's base survives, encircled by Partridge's 24 bronze Hours of the Day panels.

  A bronze Samuel J. Tilden of 1926 stands on Riverside Drive at 112th Street in Manhattan. A bronze Paris Gibson, from about 1928, stands in Gibson Park in Great Falls, Montana. Partridge died in Manhattan on the 22nd of May 1930. His last major work was the 1930 bronze of Lion Gardiner in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Its inscription honors Gardiner as builder and commander of Saybrook Fort from 1635 to 1639.

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