Art of Kansas and the Region

Aesthetic Scanning

Find three examples of visual texture, where something looks like it would feel.

• Smooth skin of head
• Mustache
• Wrinkles around eyes
• Mood

What makes this person look pleasant rather than stern?

Compared to the painting we just looked at, this piece is symmetrically balanced, isn't it?

While many things about this sculpture seem realistic, what seems unusual about the eyes? (white, unpainted)

• Artists working at the end of the 1800s used ancient Greek and Roman sculpture as examples for their works of art because these ancient cultures were highly respected. A portrait sculpted to look like an ancient sculpture connected the sitter (person having their portrait made) with the high status of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
• Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures are made of stone and are thousands of years old. Artists didn’t know that the ancient sculptures had once been painted and that the paint had worn off over time, and so 19th Century artists, like Henry Dexter, did not paint their sculptures because they wanted them to look like ancient Greek or Roman sculptures.

How is this work different from the painting we just looked at?

• Sculpture, therefore three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional
• No color versus color
• Portrait rather than landscape

Cultural & Historical Information

Amos Lawrence, whose image is represented in this sculpture, was a wealthy Massachusetts businessman. He is the founder of Lawrence, Kansas. Amos Lawrence was interested in establishing a Free State town in Kansas, so he paid people to move to the area of Kansas that is now Lawrence to work to make Kansas a Free State. In 1877, the Board of Regents requested a portrait of Amos Lawrence for the university. Two years later, Amos Lawrence sent this marble bust of himself instead.

The artist, Henry Dexter, was born in New York in 1806. He was a very good blacksmith but was unhappy with his job. His dream was to become an artist, so he moved his family to Providence, Rhode Island, where he became a fairly successful portrait-painter. Eventually, he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began making sculptures. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of American sculpture, but unlike many other artists, he never traveled to Europe to study the artworks of the European masters. He believed that studying abroad was not necessary and that American artists who lived in Europe were not distinctively American artists.

Henry Dexter was a self-taught artist. He never saw any sculptor model in clay or carve in marble before he tried it himself. He went on to make portrait busts (head and shoulder sculptures) of many mayors, governors, and other dignitaries.