Prior to 1900, American art viewers had an uneasy relationship with the nude, a prominent theme in Western art since antiquity. Images of male and female nudes were considered scandalous; when sculptor Horatio Greenough exhibited Chanting Cherubs in Boston in 1831, locals dressed the two baby angels in little aprons to conceal their genitals. The same opprobrium extended to America’s garden or “rural” cemeteries, a popular venue for viewing white marble figural sculpture before the first public parks and art museums. Mourning figures and angels are usually fully dressed. Yet there are a few exceptions in American cemeteries—rare female nudes—that beg explanation. Even more unsettling, given our current sensitivity to child sexual abuse, are cemetery memorials featuring nude girls on the cusp of puberty, such as the Eliza Barnwell Heywood monument in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, created by local carver A. F. Chevreux. Eliza died in 1871 at twenty-one, not ten to twelve, the age the sculpture appears, but we cannot help but conflate the demurely seated nude with the body buried below. Was it read similarly in the late nineteenth century? Is it the cemeteries’ pseudo-religious nature, our Puritan roots, or the discomforting juxtaposition of sex and death that explain why such works appear shocking even today?
American ambivalence about the nude is especially apparent in contrast with nineteenth-century European cemetery sculpture. Although condemned by art critics as “inappropriate,” there was a dramatic increase in both female and male nudes, particularly in Italy’s monumental cemeteries. Naked female angels splay across sarcophagi, undressed couples embrace, and nude women confront skulls and skeletons. Freud demonstrated the opposing allure of Eros and Thanatos. By examining the few nudes in American cemeteries and comparing them to Italian cemetery sculpture, this paper is a beginning attempt to illuminate nineteenth-century Americans’ contested relationship with the nude.
About the presenterElisabeth Roark
Elisabeth Roark, Professor of Art History at Chatham University,received her M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at the University of Tennessee and Converse College. Her research addresses pre-1900 American art, especially portraiture, artist imagery, and cemetery sculpture. Roark edits Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. Publications include the book Artists of Colonial America and articles in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, American Art, Italian American Review, and Nineteenth-Century Art.