- For the proposed memorial to the Adams family, see Adams Memorial.
The "Adams Memorial" is a grave marker located in Section E of Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C. The memorial was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 16, 1972. It was erected in 1891 by historian and author Henry Adams (a member of the Adams political family) as memorial to his wife, Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams. It features a cast bronze allegorical sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. A shrouded figure is seated against a granite block which forms one side of a hexagonal plot, designed by architect Stanford White.
Saint Gaudens's own name for the bronze figure is "the Peace of God or The Mystery of the Hereafter...beyond pain and beyond joy", but the public commonly called it Grief — an appellation which Henry Adams apparently disliked. In a letter addressed to Homer Saint Gaudens on January 24th 1908 Adams instructed him:
"Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption – Grief, Despair, Pear's Soap, or Macy's Mens' Suits Made to Measure. Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx."
Adams advised Saint Gaudens to contemplate iconic images from Buddhist devotional art. One such subject, Kwannon, (also known as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion), is frequently depicted as a seated figure draped in cloth. Saint Gaudens may also have been influenced by Parisian funerary art from his stay in France.[1]
At the time of Saint-Gaudens' death the statue was well-known as an important work of American sculpture. Its popularity inspired at least one forgery, the Black Aggie which was sold to General Felix Agnus for his gravesite.[2]
An informative and engaging study of the memorial and the relationship between Clover and Henry Adams is "Clover: The Tragic Love Story of Clover and Henry Adams and Their Brilliant Life in America's Gilded Age" by historian Otto Friedrich.
Notes
- ^ Field, Cynthia R. (1995). The Adams Memorial. Smithsonian Preservation Quarterly. The Smithsonian Institution Office of Architectural History and Historic Preservation. Retrieved on 2007-01-17. “Adams, who said his own name for it was "The Peace of God", stated that "The whole meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity"”
- ^ Mills, Cynthia J. (Summer, 2000). "Casting Shadows: The Adams Memorial and Its Doubles". American Art 14 (2): 2-25. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
External links
- Adams Memorial at Cultural Tourism DC
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