Art: Undressed Father

Old-fashioned high-wheel bicycles accounted for the appearance in last week’s news of George Washington in a striking state of undress. Noting a sudden public interest in the “bone-shakers” of the 1860s, United Pressman Frederick Othmann took up his hat and went over to Washington’s Smithsonian Institution to research.

“In looking for the bicycle department,” he explained later, “I ran smack into the giant statue of a man with a smirk, half undressed. The inscription said he was G. Washington.”

The story Newshawk Othmann uncovered in the Smithsonian basement revived for a new generation of U. S. citizens a 93-year-old art scandal that eventually cost the U. S. Government $35,000. In 1832 architects, hurrying to complete the Capitol after its burning by the British in 1814, decided that nothing would be more fitting for the central rotunda than a heroic statue of the Father of His Country. For this they got Congress to vote $5,000, and commissioned U. S. Sculptor Horatio Greenough to carve the figure. Sculptor Greenough promptly went off to the soft Tuscan air of Florence, Italy, where he rented a large studio, enlarged it further, secured a huge block of Carrara marble, sharpened his chisels, and went to work.

In time the statue was finished. It was 10 ft., 6 in. high, 6 ft. wide and weighed about 20 tons. With enormous difficulty it was hoisted to a dray and hauled by swaying spans of oxen all the way to Leghorn. For enlarging his studio, hiring servants and replanting trees from Florence to Leghorn, Sculptor Greenough sent Congress a bill for $8,311.90. As no U. S. warship big enough to carry the work of art to the U. S. was handy, the Government chartered the merchantman Sea for $6,300. It took two weeks of fussing to load the huge statue on the Sea. The ship’s captain charged the Government $100 a day for demurrage.

It cost the Government $5,000 more to get the statue from the Washington Navy Yard to the Capitol rotunda. There one hot August day in 1841 Congress in its silk hats assembled for the unveiling. The Navy Band played martial airs. Down came the curtains, and there sat George Washington naked to the waist (see cut). Current opinion of the statue was best expressed by Charles Bullfinch, architect of the Boston State House:

“It may be an exquisite piece of work, but our people will hardly be satisfied with looking on well-developed muscles when they wish to see the great man as their imagination has painted him.”

Congress stood Sculptor Greenough’s Washington as long as it could, then moved it out on the Capitol lawn and voted $5,000 more to put a shed over it. A few years later came another appropriation ($1,000) to take the shed down and put up a fence. The last artistic attack on the long-suffering taxpayers occurred in 1908 when, for $5,000 more, George Washington was bundled off to the obscure chapel of the Smithsonian Institution where Pressman Othmann discovered him last week.