Il Penseroso, 1866 by Joseph Mozier [America, 1812-1876]

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Il Penseroso, 1866 by Joseph Mozier [America, 1812-1876]

About the Item

Il Penseroso, 1866 Carrara marble Height 55 ½ in. (141.0 cm.), width 17 in. (43.2 cm.), depth 17 in. (43.2 cm.) First example carved in Rome, spring/summer 1866 (now Smithsonian Institution ); this example also carved in Rome, fall 1866 Incscribed on side of base: J[oseph]. MOZIER. Sc[ulpsit]. / ROME 186 ; Inscribed on front of base: IL PENSEROSO Provenance, Private Collection, Mexico City John Milton’s great seventeenth-century poem, Il Penseroso, inspired at least three capital American sculptures, more than two centuries after its composition. The first was a good but somewhat uncharacteristic full-length marble (in a private collection, Washington) by Hiram Powers (1805-1873); the second was a very fine bust by William Henry Rinehart (1825-1874), now in the Corcoran Gallery; and the third was the present superb composition, now known in two versions—a slightly larger original in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the very slightly smaller but contemporaneous copy offered here. The stimulus to emulate Milton’s famous apostrophe to Introspection (“Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, … Forget thyself to marble”) originated with repeated suggestions by the statesman Edward Everett—in 1845, 1846, and 1849 —which finally resulted in the 1851-1856 version by Powers (though Nathaniel Hawthorne commented in 1858 that the composition of that example derived in fact from a mass-produced print). Exactly fifteen years later the same theme, splendidly calibrated and resolved, was taken up by Mozier; a visitor to his Roman studio reported in Harper’s Magazine for June 1866 that “we saw also, in clay, the dawning of his ideal of Il Penseroso.” The carving of the version now in the Smithsonian must have followed immediately, since a notice in the New York Evening Post for 16 October 1866 comments that Mozier had then returned to American shores “after a residence of nearly twenty years in Rome, [and] brought with him many of his most successful works … Another of his statues, “Il Penseroso,” illustrates [a] passage from Milton”. Even if the example offered here was left to be carved from an ephemeral prototype and shipped subsequently to New York (thus perhaps accounting for the blank year-digit in the date—a characteristic of more than one of Mozier’s marbles of this period), it could not reasonably be supposed to have been made any later than the end of the same year of 1866, since the Smithsonian version was demonstrably carved in exactly as short a time. In any event, the artist died soon after, in Switzerland, and this inscription refers unequivocally to Rome. The overall conception of Mozier’s masterly figure, with its left hand pensively raised to the chin, the right held against the body to support a heavy fall of drapery, the sandaled feet, its chaste expression and coiffure, certainly derives from his memory—or a print—of Hiram Powers’ fifteen-year earlier prototype. (The specific detail of the diadem studded with seven stars also comes from Powers’ full figure of America, modeled in 1845; the wavy locks of hair beneath are perhaps indebted in turn to Rinehart’s bust of Il Penseroso, as is possibly the low neckline and pliant material of the bodice.) But whereas Mozier’s exactly coeval Undine dissolves that drapery in a tour-de-force of the fashionable see-through illusionism that reveals the swathed face and body descriptively, Il Penseroso much more successfully insists on the integrity and corporeality of each fictive material. There is a real, believable mass in the cascade of drapery, especially from the beautiful rear view (where one small reminiscence of Undine’s delicacy is essayed in the evanescent overlapping of the gathered tresses with the topmost drapery fold). The thicker fabric upheld by the right hand is truncated—as in Powers’ figure—at the knee; but once more that weighty, substantial fabric carries fully around Mozier’s figure, as a specific transliteration of Milton’s “sable stole of cypress lawn / Over thy decent shoulders drawn.” It even inspires the binding of Introspection’s “decent” sleeves with half-a-dozen spherical buttons, based on the same forms in Mozier’s White Lady of Avanel (a theme taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Monastery), with an identical inscribed date. The nearest approximation of a true “pendant” is indeed the last-named figure, which is identical in size, drapery details, and base, as well as in inscription. But the White Lady conveys an unmistakable impression of informality, in its more rapid movement, expressive gestures, and upturned gaze. The inspired forms of Il Penseroso, on the other hand, are—programatically—introspective, closed, and complete in themselves. As such, they constitute an unforgettable celebration of the gravity and nobility of Milton’s great poem, in which the very words are freighted with import, and the cadences are as serene as this superb masterpiece by Mozier, crafted over two hundred years after the poem had joined the canon of English literature.

Creator:
Joseph Mozier (Maker)
Dimensions:
Height: 55.5 in (140.97 cm)Diameter: 17 in (43.18 cm)
Style:
Neoclassical (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Carrara Marble,Carved
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
19th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1866
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Kensington, MD
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU9776817955