Hiram Powers Biography

Dromo's Den

POWERS, Hiram (1805–73). An American sculptor. He was born July 29, 1805, on a small farm near Woodstock, Vt. As the farm proved insufficient for its support, his family moved to Ohio, where the boy first worked in a clock factory. Later he was employed for seven years to model and repair wax figures in a dime museum in Cincinnati. This occupation led to his moving to Washington, where he made wax portrait busts of leading men of the time, General Jackson, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Chief Justice Marshall, and others, which, being modeled from life, brought him into intimate relations with his famous subjects. In 1837 he carried the plaster casts of his busts to Italy, and to superintend their execution in marble he established a studio in Florence, where he spent the rest of his life. Within a year he had completed a statue, "Eve Tempted." His bust of Webster met with the approval of Thorvaldsen, and in 1843 he finished the well-known nude female statue, the "Greek Slave," of which many replicas were made, one being in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington. It had enormous success, especially in England, by reason of the beauty and chastity of its conception. A bust of "Proserpine," a statue of a "Fisher Boy" (Metropolitan Museum, New York), "America" (1854), "California" (1858, ib.), and "Eve Disconsolate" (Cincinnati Museum), are in the same style as the "Greek Slave." He made also statues of Franklin and Jefferson (1862, in the Capitol at Washington), of Washington for Louisiana, Webster for Boston, and Calhoun for South Carolina (1850). His best work, however, is in portrait busts of men. These include those of John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren (1835), Longfellow and General Sheridan (1865), and William J. Stone (Corcoran Gallery). Powers was a realist of strong convictions, but was lacking in skill and originality.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 143.