Henry G. Lewis Memorial (lost), ca. 1894
Enid Yandell, portrait bust, bronze
Richard Holman Hunt, pedestal, limestone
East Rock Park
This is a a lesson in absence. Here was once an image of Henry G. Lewis, a mayor of new Haven who died 1891, and was “everywhere noted as an eloquent speaker, ” according to his obituary in the New York Times.
The makers of the piece deserve their own separate histories: Enid Yandell, a sculptor who studied with Rodin, and Richard H. Hunt, who designed the base for the monument, and whose father also drew a plan for a pedestal, although his was on a somewhat larger scale, given that the Statue of Liberty is standing on it.
In 1894, an original proposal to place the Lewis memorial in front of what was then the county courthouse across from the New Haven Green was rejected on the grounds that it would be putting public land to private use and would further constitute “an obstruction.” There are precedents, then, for the massive fuss over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc on the Federal Plaza in New York City.
So what must have seemed at the time to be the secure and pastoral alternative of a site in East Rock Park ultimately meant its doom. The portrait bust and plaques were pilfered, probably to be melted down in some salvage yard crucible. Now there are graffiti signatures in search of a work. Why not undertake a project like that recently underway on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square? Give local artists a chance to make the surviving fragment a setting for their own works, one a day for a month, the only requirement being that each piece be entitled “Portrait of Henry Lewis,” even if it isn’t.
Object Lesson #34
Object Lesson #33
Object Lesson #32
Object Lesson #31
Object Lesson #30
Object Lesson #29
Object Lesson #28
Object Lessons #26 & #27
Object Lesson #25
What a fantastic idea.