A Tomb Sculpture of Ezra Cornell

Abstract

In 1884 William Wetmore Story received a commission to make a recumbent portrait sculpture of Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University, who had died in 1874 (Fig. 1). The piece, which was placed in the memorial mausoleum of Sage Chapel at Cornell University, was executed in Rome and unveiled at Cornell in the fall of 1885.Story was a prominent figure among the nineteenth-century American expatriate sculptors. A lawyer and a poet, as well as a sculptor, he was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1819 and died in Vallombrosa in 1895. Like Thomas Crawford, Story chose to live in Rome rather than in Florence where Hiram Powers had taken up residence. In his ideal pieces, however, Story differs from these others because of his preference for a more realistic, emotional and literary style. The part of Story's work devoted to portrait busts and statues of nineteenth-century personalities include some of his most interesting pieces, both aesthetically and historically.