Kenyon Cox’s Attraction to an Unknown Woman

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It has not been recognized that Cox reproduced this drawing as one of the illustrations for his article, “Sculptors of the Early Italian Renaissance,” in the November 1884 number of Century Magazine.² The reproduction is followed three pages after by a second sketch of the bust from a different angle.³ The work had fascinated him since he first saw it upon arriving in Paris as a student in 1877, and was inspired to write home to his mother about it.⁴ He singled out this sculpture for special attention; among the six drawings of portrait busts he used to illustrate the article, the Unknown Woman was the only one he depicted twice, and in response to which he composed a poem:

She lived in Florence centuries ago,
That lady smiling there,
What was her name or rank I do not know—
I know that she was fair.

For some great man—his name, like hers, forgot
And faded from men’s sight—
Loved her—he must have loved her—and has wrought
This bust for our delight.

Whether he gained her love or had her scorn
Full happy was his fate.
He saw her, heard her speak; he was not born
Four hundred years too late.

The palace throngs in every room but this—
Here I am left alone.
Love, there is none to see—I press a kiss
Upon thy lips of stone.

Though only the first three stanzas appeared in Century Magazine, when Cox republished the article in 1905 in his book of collected essays, Old Masters and New, he included the fourth.⁵ That this final stanza was intended from the start is proven by the 1883 sketchbook page on which it was composed, conserved at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In fact, the sketchbook page shows that he originally wrote a different third stanza, which he scribbled over, but which is still legible:

Her poise of head is concentrated graceAnd ‘neath her cap demureA sweet faint smile just ripples o’er a faceAs beautiful as pure.⁶

Cox reworked the language from this unused stanza into the description of the bust in his article, in which he extolled both the beauty of the female subject and of the sculpted marble. His feelings toward the subject and toward her artistic representation became elided, and in the important final stanza his attraction prompted an amorous physical response. Cox embraced the example of Italian Renaissance art in his paintings, so strongly was he drawn to it, which was echoed by his expressed affection for the bust.

An examination of Cox’s choice of words for the bust, and for Italian Renaissance art in general, reveals a basis for his attraction in what he perceived as a sense of mystery. About the Renaissance mode of representation, Cox wrote: “There is in the human mind…a natural shrinking from bare, hard fact. The absolute truth of things as they are…would be intolerable to us. The schools of color restore her veil to nature and wrap her in the mystery of atmosphere…With them everything is mysterious, and therefore nothing is shocking.” This transformation of the prosaic into something more poetic in art was also achieved by sculptors, according to Cox, through their development of very low relief: “Having perfected their system of low relief, they applied it to sculpture in the round. In their busts, in their statues, they still model, as it were, in low relief…This application of low relief to sculpture in the round is the great discovery of the Renaissance. They had learned how to give nature with its mystery and its atmosphere.”⁷

For Cox, the Unknown Woman was the epitome of early Italian Renaissance sculpture: “But the concentration and quintessence of Renaissance art is in that masterpiece of an unknown hand, known and loved by all artists as the Femme Inconnue of the Louvre. Here are the lowness and vagueness of relief, [and] the floating, undefined modeling…What a work of art! and, O ye gods! what a woman! There she is as she lived in Florence four centuries ago, with her…bewitching eyes, and her indefinable, evanescent smile, a very pearl of women!”⁸ Cox found something elusive in her modeling, as well as in her smile. This matched the uncertain particulars of the object: the subject’s identity was unknown, as was the sculptor, though currently the bust is attributed to Francesco Laurana. Cox’s focus on the qualities of the carving and on the woman’s eyes and smile articulated in more specific terms the effect of the bust that had already appeared in a French 1857 journal article, which was quoted in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1883: “The young woman above all attracts by means of a mysterious charm.”⁹

As Cox scholar H. Wayne Morgan has recognized, “The poem was an immediate success in art circles and gained Cox considerable attention.”¹⁰ For example, it was included in J.E.P. Dodsworth’s collection of poems published in 1899, Moments with Art: Short Selections in Prose and Verse for Lovers of Art.¹¹ Cox and his poem were the subject of a column written by C. Lewis Hind for the Christian Science Monitor between 1919 and 1920, in which a female interlocutor discussed with Hind how the poem struck a chord with her: “’how enviable to be remembered by one little poem. It must be thirty years ago since I first read it…I was younger then, and it moved me in a way that few poems have ever moved me.’”¹² A tribute to Cox published days after his death in the New York Tribune counted his achievements, and included the full text of his poem along with a reproduction of the League’s drawing.¹³

Cox had company amongst his peers in his admiration for and emulation of Italian Renaissance models. He began the article in which his drawing of the Femme Inconnue appeared by asserting that the French sculptors Paul Dubois, Alexandre Falguière, Antonin Mercié, “and the rest of that brilliant school”—known as the neo-Florentines—“owe much of what is purest and best in their works to the study and the example of these old Italians.”¹⁴ He added to this list the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom he praised as one of the country’s leading sculptors and to whom he devoted an article in 1887. In that article he favorably compared the effect of two of Saint-Gaudens’s figures to “the kind of tender personal feeling that the Femme Inconnue of the Louvre inspires.”¹⁵ The two artists became friends while living in New York City in the 1880s, and in 1887 Cox painted a portrait of the sculptor working in his studio (destroyed in a fire in 1904, but replicated by Cox in 1908).¹⁶ In the background Cox placed a copy of the Femme Inconnue, situated where it might easily inspire Saint-Gaudens (fig. 3).¹⁷ This was not a prop invented by Cox for the portrait—Saint-Gaudens owned a plaster replica of the bust. In an illuminating recent article discussing Saint-Gaudens’s fascination with Donatello, Martha Dunkelman reproduced an oil painting by his wife, Augusta, dated to the couple’s residence in Paris from 1877-1880, that shows the bust supported on a stand displayed in a corner of their apartment.¹⁸

The inspirational effect of the Unknown Woman on late nineteenth-century artists like Cox and Saint-Gaudens may be gauged not only by the presence of casts of the bust in photographs of artists in their studios, like the one of French Art Nouveau architect Henri Guimard from 1903 conserved at the Cooper Hewitt,¹⁹ but more concretely by sculptors’ creation of new busts in emulation of its example. The American sculptor Henry Adams studied under the neo-Florentine sculptor Antonin Mercié in Paris during the latter half of the 1880s, and exhibited a bust of his future wife Adeline Valentine Pond Adams in plaster at the 1888 Salon and in marble at the 1889 Salon (fig. 4).²⁰ This was the first of a series of portraits inspired by fifteenth-century Italian models. One critic wrote about Adams’s bust in the Century Magazine, “This bust is quite in the spirit of the Renaissance, and yet is thoroughly modern…[I]n looking at it one instinctively thinks of that other in the Louvre, the delight of the artist, the despair of the copyist, and the puzzle of the Philistine, ‘La Femme Inconnue.’”²¹ Another critic wrote that the bust “is pervaded…with an exquisite mystery of feeling, as of something beyond the artist’s and the husband’s knowledge hidden behind the veil of the woman’s separate existence, but a mystery the quality of which his knowledge comprehends…[It] leaves one guessing, as do many of the old Florentine women’s portraits.”²² Similar to Cox’s response to the Femme Inconnu, the writer perceived a sense of mystery in Italian Renaissance busts of women, which Adams was able to impart effectively to his own work too.

If one felt sufficiently enamored with the Unknown Woman, either upon seeing the bust at the Louvre or a representation of it, as in Cox’s drawing, one could purchase a plaster replica to live with in one’s home or studio. For example, one of the primary firms that handled plaster replicas in the United States was P. P. Caproni & Brother, based in Boston. This bust appeared as number 440 in the firm’s illustrated 1894 catalogue, and could be acquired for the price of $6.00 (fig. 5).²³ Or, one could purchase a replica directly from the Louvre, which had a shop dedicated to the production of plaster casts. Édouard Dantan depicted the cast-maker’s practice in a somewhat titillating fashion in the painting Un moulage sur nature (Taking a Cast from Life, 1887), and in the background a replica of the Femme Inconnue appears to observe coolly the proceedings (fig. 6).²⁴ When the head of the atelier des moulages (plaster workshop) at the Louvre, Eugène Arrondelle, was asked in 1901 which work from the museum was requested most often, he replied, “le buste de la Femme inconnue.”²⁵

Art schools were major purchasers of plaster casts, with which they stocked their classrooms for teaching introductory antique classes. The term “antique” suggests that the casts that served as models derived exclusively from classical antiquity, but in fact art instructors selected examples of idealized naturalism from antiquity through the nineteenth century, with favoritism shown to the Italian Renaissance. The painting An Alcove in the Art Students’ League (1888) executed by Charles C. Curran while he was a student documents several works in the League’s cast collection (fig. 7), including Michelangelo’s Night at the left and the Femme Inconnue.²⁶ Those who have attended or visited the League at its present location will not recognize the studio depicted, because from 1887 to 1892 the League was quartered in the Sohmer Building on East 23rd Street, as recognized by Stephanie Cassidy, Head of Research and Archives, in her informative LINEA post on Curran’s painting.²⁷ A bearded figure at the painting’s center appears to be the instructor of the class in session, and scholar Kenneth Silver has suggested that this may have been Kenyon Cox.²⁸

Cox may or may not have been involved in the acquisition of the Unknown Woman replica for the League’s collection, but he must have guided his students toward studying a work that had so captured his imagination. Though I am not familiar with any studies from the bust in the League’s collection, Belinda H. Jouet’s finished drawing of a similar fifteenth-century female bust was executed in Cox’s antique class in 1892 (fig. 8).²⁹ The bust of a Young Woman at the Bargello in Florence is now considered to be the work of Desiderio da Settignano, but at the time it was attributed to Antonio Rossellino, and was another of the casts that could be obtained from P. P. Caproni & Brother (fig. 5).³⁰ Though perhaps not to the same degree as the Louvre bust, presumably this sculpture exhibited a similar synthesis of natural and ideal beauty and an air of mystery that qualified it to Cox as an apt object of study by artists in their formative years.

Just as Cox’s classroom instruction imparted lessons on beauty to art students, his article on early Italian Renaissance sculptors was intended to cultivate taste among the more general audience of Century Illustrated readers. The periodical’s readers eagerly consumed such articles, and were ambitious to learn more about beauty in the visual arts. Well-informed readers might have been aware of the heightened attention given to beautifying one’s living environment by European design reform movements, like the British Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, and been receptive to incorporating replicas or reductions of recognized masterpieces into their home décor. Numerous museums in the United States at the time amassed substantial galleries of plaster casts to educate and to cultivate the public’s taste, so home decorators would not have held copies in this medium in disdain.³¹ A short essay included at the end of the Catalogue illustré du Salon of 1879 brought to the public’s attention striking novelties that the authors had witnessed in the homes of painters, and may have contributed to sparking a trend. One of the standout furnishings was a fireplace that synthesized multiple Italian Renaissance motifs, such as the Florentine fleur-de-lis and the Medici family escutcheon, which was surmounted by “a masterpiece of our Renaissance room at the Louvre, the Femme inconnue…, which strikes a different note within this harmonious ensemble” (fig. 9).³² It may not be a coincidence that in the view of Guimard’s studio mentioned above the cast of the Louvre bust is centered on the mantel above the fireplace. It must have become such a common object of home decoration that it appeared as a distinctive, though not unexpected, home furnishing in an American 1918 magazine article giving furniture advice (fig. 10).³³

During the late nineteenth century, artists, art educators, collectors, museum curators, and the public at large were especially drawn to the aesthetic of the Italian Renaissance, both in the United States and abroad. This sensibility involved a blending of realism and idealization that Kenyon Cox and his contemporaries thought captured the mysterious beauty of nature, and served as a model for artists who wanted to respond to the modern world while also maintaining continuity with tradition. The Louvre’s bust of the Femme Inconnue was one of the principal works by which they were smitten. It was also placed before students as an approved object for drawing training, made possible through the commercial availability of plaster replicas. Cox encouraged appreciation of the Renaissance aesthetic through his numerous mural paintings, and through his writings, which in the Century article we have discussed expressed his particular affection for the Louvre’s bust. The extraordinary emotion he felt for this female portrait, reflected not only in his drawings but also in his poetry, however, suggests it fulfilled strongly personal desires for beauty, both in terms of aesthetics and the objectified female form.

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