Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (map)
Paul Kaplan
Professor of Art History, Purchase College, SUNY
“A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans”: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853-1859
Free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the lecture. Please feel free to bring a lunch.
While the transatlantic career of the sculptor Edmonia Lewis is now relatively well known, that of her African-American predecessor Eugène Warburg is far less familiar. Born a slave in New Orleans in 1825/1826, Warburg was the son of a German Jewish immigrant and a mixed-race, slave mother. Manumitted as a child, Warburg trained as a sculptor in marble, had some success in his native city, and arrived in Europe in 1853. In Paris, London, and Rome, Warburg enjoyed the support and encouragement of both important pro-slavery American diplomats as well as famous American and English anti-slavery figures such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Duchess of Sutherland. Warburg’s sculptural illustration of one of the major characters in Stowe’s Dred (1856) has recently resurfaced, and this – along with a number of new documentary sources including an eloquent unpublished letter by Stowe – transforms our understanding of Warburg’s career and influence.