Emigrants for Art's Sake

When I was growing up in upstate New York, art was my first love, especially drawing and painting. That passion for art, which I wrote about in an essay, together with thirty-three-millimeter slides I made of some artwork I had done in high school, helped me do something unusual for a working-class teenager with no connections: I secured a seat in a freshman class at Harvard University.

Once I settled into college life, however, I abandoned my plan of formally studying art. I got pulled away by my other great love since childhood: history. Painting and drawing remained a mere hobby—one I intermittently starved and nurtured over the years as I went on to do a doctorate and build a career as a working historian.

Content as I am in the path I chose, I sometimes feel regret when I meet professional artists who produce things that resonate powerfully with my own tastes and sense for their craft. It takes no university degree to understand why, furthermore, when I am digging into the records of the past, I am easily captivated by stories of men and women of earlier times who threw themselves fully into artistic work—especially in the face of obstacles so different from the opportunity I once had in my hands.

I recently was captivated in this way by the stories of two Catholic artists of the nineteenth century, a Swiss woman named Emilie Linder and an African-American woman named Edmonia Lewis. I learned of them while doing the research for my newest book, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know, an introductory-level history of women in the Catholic Church from the Apostolic era to contemporary times.[1] Although I wove into the book’s narrative some stories of important female artists from across the ages, such as Plautilla Nelli of Renaissance-era Florence, I was unable to devote much space to these two remarkable figures.

So here are their stories, to make up for that. I offer them for two reasons. First, more of my fellow Catholics should know that such women existed. Currently, Linder and Lewis are unfamiliar to most Catholics, even as their legacies are increasingly appreciated by contemporary art historians and museum curators. Second, I am moved by their stories for more personal reasons, which I simply wish to share with readers.

Emilie Linder (1797-1867)

Emilie Linder was born amid the turmoil of revolutionary-era Europe, living from 1797 to 1867. Although it was not unheard of by this period for women to pursue professional artistic careers, it was still a rarity. Linder, however, was fortunate among European girls with artistic talents and aspirations to have a wealthy, socially prominent grandfather who encouraged her in this regard. Johann Konrad Dienast, a wealthy citizen of Basel and an avid art collector, nurtured her study of drawing and painting and, with the inheritance he left her when he died, facilitated her unorthodox decision to leave Switzerland for Germany to pursue a professional artistic career.[2]

In 1824, at the age of twenty-seven, Linder relocated to Munich. Although she was unable to formally study at the famed Academy of Fine Arts because she was a woman, she was able to receive extensive training from established artists there, including Joseph Schlotthauer, her primary mentor. In time, she became part of a circle of artists and intellectuals in Munich who were drawn to traditional religious and aesthetic principles that were undergoing a revival in the wake of the Enlightenment.[3]

Two older artists whom Linder got to know in Munich offered to marry her, but Linder remained single her whole life, devoting herself to her work and traveling widely. Early in her career, for example, she spent considerable time in Rome, studying the artwork in churches and museums there.

In Rome, Linder befriended a group of German Romantic painters known as the Nazarenes. Their primary aim—in reaction against the Neoclassical styles of painting that dominated in the formal institutions of art education in Europe—was to re-enchant the modern world through artwork inspired by medieval and early Renaissance styles. The latter were, in their view, more consistent with Christian spiritual principles. Unsurprisingly, then, Nazarene artists painted sacred subjects a lot, but in ways inspired by the Romanticism that was culturally influential in the early nineteenth century.[4] This can be seen in paintings such as Ignaz Dullinger’s The Widow’s Mite and Joseph von Führich’s Jacob Encountering Rachel, both from 1836, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.

Linder’s own work, such as a painting she did in 1831 of Christ’s miraculous awakening of the daughter of Jairus as recounted in Mark’s Gospel, shows clear Nazarene influences. What is more, the directions her artwork took, encouraging her personal reflection on sacred themes, influenced her decision to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1843. This was not an easy step for her. It had long-term reputational consequences for her, especially back home in staunchly Protestant Basel. Her conversion reinforced her decision to remain in Munich rather than to return to her homeland.[5]

Much of Linder’s later work was done as altarpieces and other devotion-oriented pieces for churches. She usually did not sign these—something that linked her to the tradition of more obscure artists and artisans of medieval Christendom instead of the modern cult of artistic genius. This has made the study of her oeuvre challenging, as it has not always been clear which works are hers.

Never abandoning her Swiss identity, Linder in her later years contributed greatly to the arts in her native city of Basel, even while remaining based in Munich. After her Catholic conversion, she donated numerous paintings to the Basel Art Museum—many of them by Nazarene artists—which she had been collecting from across Europe. By 1859, she had donated so many that city officials determined that a new building was needed for the museum. She also became a patroness to the marginalized Catholic community of Protestant Basel. She supported the construction of the first Catholic Church built in that city since before the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century. This church, St. Marien, remains the heart of an active Catholic community to this day.[6]

Due in no small measure to prejudiced views against Catholics that prevailed in Basel well into the twentieth century, Linder was sometimes dismissed as an unimportant artist and patroness in the decades after her death in 1867. In recent decades, however, she has received increasing attention from scholars and museum curators within and outside of her homeland. This is illustrated by the resources, mostly in German, that I myself consulted for this article, and by a space today devoted to her work in the Basel Art Museum, which I got to visit last year.

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907)

Linder was still a new Catholic in 1844 when, far across the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Greenbush in upstate New York, a baby girl of African and Native American ancestry was born into a humble but artistically inclined family. Her mother, for example, who was partly of Ojibwe heritage, was a talented weaver.

Lewis’s life and career have been studied by various scholars in recent years, including Kirsten Pai Buick in her book Child of Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (2010). We learn from such resources that Lewis’s life was a highly itinerant one. Although she spent her earliest days in Greenbush, she lived in various places thereafter as a child and young woman, including in Newark, New Jersey, and Oberlin, Ohio, where she was able to enroll in the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (today Oberlin College).[7]

The Civil War was raging during Lewis’s time in Ohio, and, as a student there, she faced great difficulties due to strong racial prejudices against her. Her Catholicism was disdained, too. At one point, she was badly beaten by attackers who were never prosecuted and then was herself falsely accused of several crimes while she was recovering.[8]

Amid all of this, Lewis became determined to become an excellent sculptor and to earn a living that way. This was a most unusual ambition for a young woman of the mid-nineteenth century, let alone one beset by American racial and religious prejudices. Yet around the age of twenty, she moved to Boston to train as a sculptor in the Neoclassical mode to which she was most drawn. She was able to find a supportive mentor there in Edward Augustus Brackett, a sculptor close to prominent abolitionists of the era.[9]

Among Lewis’s early works, sculpted in marble, was a portrait bust of the Native American figure Hiawatha which was inspired by the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, today owned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another was the dramatic sculpture—commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation—entitled Forever Free, today owned by the Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Early in her career, Lewis traveled to Rome as Linder before her had done, partly to study the art there but also to find a more welcoming home—as both a woman of color and a Catholic—than she was finding in the U.S.A. She went on to spend most of her life in the Eternal City, although in the years preceding her death she lived in Paris, and then, finally, in London.[10] With her Catholicism amply reinforced in Rome, she sculpted sacred-themed pieces whenever she could, including many depictions of the Virgin and Child, a sculpture of the enslaved Biblical woman Hagar, and a fine copy of Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses, which she saw at the church of San Pietro in Vincolo in Rome. The latter two works, completed in 1875, are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., today.

While based in Rome and never marrying, Lewis achieved great success as a sculptor, becoming wealthy from her commissions and receiving many tourists at her studio. Her reputation became such back in America that she was asked to participate in the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, for which she sculpted a monumental depiction of the death of Cleopatra, which was regarded as the finest American sculpture in that exhibition.[11] The following year, the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, asked her to sculpt his portrait, which she did, the result being very much to his satisfaction.

When Lewis died in 1907, the Neoclassical mode of sculpture that she strongly preferred had fallen out of favor with elites across Europe and North America, so she ended her life in some obscurity despite the success she had achieved. Lewis’s legacy has been revived, however, in recent decades partly because of the greater attention being given to female artists and artists of color than was done in previous eras. Lewis’s work also received new attention about nine years ago, when a bust of Christ she had done in Rome in 1870 was taken out of cabinet in a Scottish noble family’s home, Mount Stuart, in which it apparently had been sitting, hardly noticed, for more than a century. It is now lovingly on display in the entranceway of Mount Stuart.[12]

The Courage of Linder and Lewis

There are many things about Linder’s and Lewis’s stories that speak powerfully to me—as an historian, as a Catholic living in a time when fidelity to the Church is not always socially advantageous, and as someone who, when young, almost pursued an artistic career but did not, despite the firm cultural and institutional supports I could have enjoyed compared to what these nineteenth-century women had at their disposal.

Yet it is the simple fact that both left their homelands permanently as young, single women for the sake of art in that era—an era without airplanes and modern communications technology—that affects me most. That required a courage of a sort to which I cannot easily relate. After I finished graduate school, the vagaries of the academic job market required me to spend several extended periods of time on my own in places, including Germany, very far from the region in which I grew up and wished to live. I suffered from homesickness in those places, sometimes to the point of making me question my long-term commitment to the craft as well as the profession I had chosen. But I ended up with opportunities that enabled my return to the New York area, where I have been living while my earlier labors have borne fruit as published books.

Stories such as Linder’s and Lewis’s, when I stumble across them in my work, help to strengthen my commitment, as an historian and writer, to ensuring that more people, including my fellow Catholics, simply know about the names and legacies of such culturally significant figures whose legacies require further cultural effort to stay preserved. And more fundamentally, they help me to reflect upon my own life in new ways and to appreciate things about it that I can easily take for granted.

They also make me see people around me in a new light. I know many fellow historians and other scholars and teachers who have permanently left beloved homelands, across the world, to pursue their talents and passions and to build careers in higher education and advanced research. And here in New York City, several of the successful artists I have met are immigrants from diverse countries. Some left their homelands specifically to study art and build artistic careers, not knowing, for long years, if they would succeed while dealing daily with all of the challenges that come with immersion in a foreign country.

Not sharing my Catholic faith in many of these cases, these colleagues, friends, and acquaintances might be amused to know that some of my work for a book entitled Women of the Church has led me to better appreciate the paths they have taken for the sake of their particular craft—and the courage that this has at times required of them. I am grateful for their enriching presence in my country, as I am grateful now to know about Linder, Lewis, and numerous other women who, despite wide gaps of centuries and experience, are, through the communion of the saints, my sisters in Christ.