{"id":3487,"date":"2018-12-05T00:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=3487"},"modified":"2018-12-06T12:13:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T17:13:01","slug":"sunderlin-valentine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2018\/12\/05\/sunderlin-valentine\/","title":{"rendered":"Plaster and Process – The Studio of Edward V. Valentine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Figure 1. Interior of Edward V. Valentine\u2019s Studio (showing Uncle Henry on left), Cook Collection, The Valentine, Richmond, VA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Plaster sculptures appeared in nineteenth-century homes, studios, museums, and schools, and their use and reception varied in each of these contexts. My dissertation considers the works of two American artists, both of whom worked with and displayed plasters in their studios, and had close ties to the museums displaying plasters to a wider public. To illuminate the roles and uses of plaster in the sculptor\u2019s studio, I examine the studio of Richmond-based sculptor Edward Valentine (Fig. 1). The plaster cast collection of the Valentine Museum (founded by Edward\u2019s brother) will be examined in order to understand plaster\u2019s function within the public museum. By closely analyzing Valentine\u2019s correspondence, works, and related documents (such as contracts with clients or foundries), I reveal not only the role of plaster in his process, but also the professional ecosystem that existed to support and create his work. In turn, this case study tells us about the use of plaster and the practices of plaster-modelers in the period more broadly. My research thus far has revealed professional ties to other sculptors and plaster-modelers in both Richmond, Virginia and New York City.<\/p>\n

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Figure 2. Edward V. Valentine, The Nation\u2019s Ward, 1868, plaster, The Valentine, Richmond, VA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I also consider how Valentine, his clients, and visitors to his studio felt about the use of plaster aesthetically through anecdotal evidence, personal correspondence, and newspaper articles. How did viewers approach plaster objects in the artist\u2019s studio? What can their impressions tell us about larger sociocultural and political trends or beliefs? One example of the outcome of such inquiry comes from the chapter I am currently writing, a section on Valentine\u2019s series of plaster sculptures of African Americans \u2013 The Nation\u2019s Ward, Knowledge is Power, and Uncle Henry (Ancien Regime) \u2013 a challenging subset of his oeuvre (Figs. 2, 3, and 4, ). All three works reveal not only Valentine\u2019s own personal racist sentiments, but also the pervasive racism and bigotry of the era, evidenced in the sculptural narrative and formal qualities of each piece.<\/p>\n

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Figure 3. Edward V. Valentine, Knowledge is Power, 1868, painted plaster, The Valentine, Richmond, VA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Race as a concept underwent profound development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most pernicious attempts to establish a racial hierarchy came from the measurement and comparison of crania, particularly the work of Pieter Camper. Diagrammatic charts published alongside his lectures seemingly presented a hierarchy of mankind from ape to Apollo, with the European next to the Greek god, and the African next to the ape (Fig. 5). That the Apollo Belvedere was chosen to represent the highest visual ideal is significant. In his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), Winckelmann argued that Classical sculpture should serve as a model for modern artists, especially in learning to capture the ideal \u2013 the emotional, intellectual essence and perfected physical form of a subject \u2013 devoting a particularly effusive passage to the Apollo Belvedere. Despite the fact that there was early evidence for the use of polychromy by the Greeks and Romans, whiteness remained an important aspect of Winckelmann\u2019s ideal and it was about more than just sculpture\u2019s emphasis on form. That plaster is inherently a white medium cannot be overlooked and its whiteness in conjunction with its use to reproduce the classical sculptural canon, a canon now closely linked to Europeans, reinforces the linkage of white racial superiority to the classical tradition privileged Euro-American institutions of arts and education.<\/p>\n

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Figure 4. Edward V. Valentine, Uncle Henry (Ancien R\u00e9gime), 1873-74, painted plaster, The Valentine, Richmond, VA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Valentine\u2019s first work cast in plaster was a copy of the bust of the Apollo Belvedere in his father\u2019s home, itself a reproduction. In copying from this sculpture, Valentine became part of a larger Euro-American academic tradition that privileged Classical statuary. Furthermore, owning and displaying such a copy was meant to exemplify his perceived social, racial, and intellectual superiority from which his elite status as a member of Richmond\u2019s high society was derived. As a result, Valentine kept it in his studio for the rest of his life. Thus, this copy and his three sculptures of African Americans would have been in visual dialogue in his studio, reproducing in three dimensions Camper\u2019s damning diagrammatic chart.<\/p>\n

While the depressed economic climate in the South immediately after the Civil War kept the commissioning of monumental marble or bronze public sculpture at bay, it did support the production of portrait busts and figurative sculpture cast in plaster and sold commercially. Plaster\u2019s whiteness demanded that the subjects\u2019 blackness be made visible in other ways (or doubly visible when painted). The half-length bust of The Nation\u2019s Ward depicts a young African American boy wearing worn clothing and a military cap, part of a Civil War uniform. When visiting Valentine\u2019s studio, two ladies visiting from the North viewed the piece and one \u201csaid what a pretty name and sentiment it was, but on conversing with a Southern gentleman found it was meant as a satire.\u201d Valentine has relied upon the use of stereotypical features \u201csuch as thick protruding lips, flared nostrils, and kinky hair\u201d to identify this figure as a person of black African descent. This work is an example of a racist caricature, the picaninny, extremely popular at the time and for most of this country\u2019s history. By drawing upon the character of the picaninny, Valentine is reinforcing the stereotype of African Americans as lazy, often portrayed in cartoons of the era as comical in their indolence and ignorance. He seems to be making a cruel joke at their expense, masked as \u201cgood humor,\u201d ridiculing what he and others perceived as their misguided reliance on the Federal government in the postwar era. It was Valentine\u2019s bigoted and bitter answer to the national debates over the work ethic of and economic opportunities for the nation\u2019s recently freed African American men and women, amusing only to other bigoted elite white viewers. Plaster\u2019s versatility and affordability allowed for the replication of imagery, from the Classical ideal to the modern caricature, and all its attendant ideologies, from the implicitly to explicitly racist.<\/p>\n

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Figure 5. Reinier Vinkeles after Petrus Camper, Print Illustration for Petrus Camper, Verhandeling van Petrus Camper over her natuurlijk verschil der Wesentrekken im Menschen (Utrecht, 1791), figures representing skulls and heads of monkeys and men, seen full front, 1786, engraving on copper, ca. 10 x 18 inches, The Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kate Sunderlin<\/h3>\n

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Plaster sculptures appeared in nineteenth-century homes, studios, museums, and schools, and their use and reception varied in each of these contexts. My dissertation considers the works of two American artists, both of whom worked with and displayed plasters in their studios, and had close ties to the museums displaying plasters to a wider public. To […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3487"}],"version-history":[{"count":45,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3756,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions\/3756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}