The Greek Slave
after Hiram Powers (Woodstock, Vermont 1805-Florence 1873)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1850 - 1875
Materials
Alabaster
Measurements
375 x 110 x 110 mm
Place of origin
Italy
Order this imageCollection
Ham House, Surrey
NT 1139597
Summary
Alabaster, The Greek Slave, after Hiram Powers (Woodstock, Vermont 1805-Florence 1873), c. 1850-75. A small copy in alabaster of Hiram Powers’s marble statue The Greek Slave, the first version of which was made in 1844 in Florence and exhibited to acclaim in London in 1845 and, subsequently, at the 1851 Great Exhibition. A standing naked figure of a woman, looking slightly to her left, her right hand resting on a tree-trunk, around which is wound a fringed cloth, upon the ends of which the woman stands. From the top of the tree-trunk is suspended a small Crucifix. The woman has shackles on both her wrists, originally joined by two chains, now partly, as are most of the fingers of her left hand, which would have originally extended over and covered her pudenda. An integral circular base. The figure ostensibly depicts a Christian girl captured during the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman empire, the sculpture came increasingly to be seen, especially in the United States, as a commentary on the continuing practice of slavery in the Southern States. Several large-scale versions were made by Powers and his workshop in Florence, whilst the popularity of the sculpture was also ensured through numerous smaller reproductions in a range of materials.
Full description
The American sculptor Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave created a sensation both in Europe and in America. It has been described as the most famous sculpture of the entire nineteenth-century (Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers. Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873, 2 vols., Newark 1991, I, pp. 220-74, II, nos. 184-201). The first American sculptor to enjoy an international reputation, largely thanks to the success of this sculpture, Powers was born in Vermont and later moved to Cincinnati and Washington D.C. before in 1837 settling in Florence, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked in a broadly Neo-classical style, the Greek Slave indeed being loosely modelled on one of the most celebrated ancient sculptures in Florence, the Medici Venus. The first surviving plaster version is dated 1843 and the earliest marble version, now in the collection of Lord Barnard at Raby Castle, is dated 1844 (Wunder, Hiram Powers, II, no. 187; Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt, Sculpture Victorious. Art in an Age of Invention, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain, New Haven/London 2014, no. 80). This example was exhibited in London in 1845 to huge acclaim and, subsequently, in 1851 at the Great Exhibition. Much of the enthusiasm for the Greek Slave came from widespread admiration for its beauty, physical presence and refined interpretation of classical models for a modern audience, whilst its subdued eroticism also reflected contemporary fascination with and fantasies about the Orient. In the course of his career, Powers and his assistants made a further five full-size versions in marble, as well as half-size and even smaller versions, and numerous versions in the form of busts. From the time of its first exhibition in 1845, the figure was widely reproduced through photographs and prints. A vast array of small copies of the figure began to be produced in cast plaster, Parian ware ceramic, marble, alabaster and bronze (Wunder, Hiram Powers, II, pp. 167-68). This is the context for the small copy at Ham House, which is in fact quite sophisticated and a little more than simply a routine reproduction. It may well have been made in the 1850s, but could also be later. An example of the Greek Slave in Parian ware is at Arlington Court (NT 985340; Sculpture Victorious, no. 82). Powers explicitly stated that the subject of the Greek Slave was a Christian girl captured during the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman empire (1821-32), placed for sale in the slave market in Constantinople (Istanbul): 'The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek revolution, the history of which is familiar to all. Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these afflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame.' Although the sculptor thereby sought to place the sculpture within an historicizing context, he cannot have been unaware that at the time of the Great Exhibition, slavery in eastern Europe and the Middle East was still very much alive and a hot political issue in Britain, Russia and elsewhere. Indeed, no less than slavery in the Southern United States, Ottoman slavery practices were the subject of controversy and much debate in the contemporary press in Britain. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the practice of slavery continued to be actively practised within the Ottoman empire, with women and men from the Middle East, the Caucasus and Africa being brought to the market in Constantinople. Greek, Armenian and Circassian women were generally sold for harems, the famously beautiful Circassian girls the most sought after. This trade was specifically referred to in another marble sculpture exhibited to acclaim at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Italian sculptor Raffaelle Monti’s Circassian Slave, depicting a chained semi-naked crouching woman (example in the Wallace Collection; see Jeremy Warren, The Wallace Collection. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, 2 vols., London 2016, II, no. 153). Raffaelle Monti had been forced to flee his native Lombardy after the failure of the 1848 uprising against Austrian rule. Whilst the Circassian Slave clearly at one level referred to slavery in the Ottoman empire, it also carried a more subversive meaning for Italian exiles in London longing for their country to be liberated from foreign domination. Although his hidden message does not seem to have been noted by contemporary commentators, Monti’s intention is clear from the surviving preparatory drawing for the sculpture, which the artist inscribed ‘Italy’. By way of contrast, from the time of its first exhibition in 1845, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave was seen by many as an implicit comment on slavery in the United States. Some of the additional versions of the sculpture made by Powers were toured to cities across the United States, drawing huge crowds. Following the statue’s exhibition at the 1851 exhibition, Punch magazine published a celebrated cartoon by John Tenniel entitled The Virginian Slave, depicting a shackled black woman in the pose of Powers’s sculpture, reflecting the significant growth in anti-slavery sentiment in Great Britain from the late 1840s and what had been seen by many visitors to the Exhibition as a hidden subtext in the sculpture. Certainly one of the reasons why some people, especially in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, bought the smaller copies of the Greek Slave in the 1850s and 1860s would have been to signal their personal opposition to slavery. Jeremy Warren December 2021
Credit line
Ham House, The Dysart Collection (purchased by HM Government in 1948 and transferred to the National Trust in 2002)
Makers and roles
after Hiram Powers (Woodstock, Vermont 1805-Florence 1873), model