July Fourth was the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the city’s oldest equestrian statue, that of George Washington at the southern end of Union Square. The statue was also the city’s first public bronze cast in this country; nationally it was second, after the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. The Union Square statue’s unveiling took place in pouring rain. As the New York Times reported on July 5, 1856:

[T]he noble statue was revealed to the eager gaze of the delighted multitude; a universal shout rent the air; hundreds of pistols that had been expressly loaded for the occasion, could contain themselves and their contents no longer. … The windows of all the houses that commanded a view of the proceedings were filled with ladies, who waved their handkerchiefs, and, in many instances, joined in the loud huzzas. And while the shouts of the assembled thousands were still echoing to Heaven, the clouds parted, and the sun beamed brightly forth, as if he, too, desired to be a partaker in the great event of the day.

The 1850s were a boom time for George Washington. In addition to the statue, there was Washington Irving’s monumental five-volume biography of George Washington. It seems that it was a sort of reminder of our national identity just before the bloodshed of the Civil War.

The statue’s sculptor was Henry Kirke Brown, who had lived and worked in Italy. He was an important transitional figure in American sculpture’s move from neoclassicism to naturalism, as is evident in the Washington statue, which takes its basic form from the ancient statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome’s Campidoglio but at the same time gives us vividly naturalistic horse and rider. In many ways, Brown’s standing figure in bronze of Lincoln, at the north end of Union Square, is more classical, though Brown did it more than a decade later.

Brown also led a movement to get American artists to use American subject matter. Another Brown statue of note in the city is his portrait of DeWitt Clinton, our greatest mayor, in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

Note the two names inscribed on the base of the Washington. Along with Brown’s is the name of John Quincy Adams Ward, Brown’s assistant in his Brooklyn studio. If Brown always remained a classicist at heart, Ward gave us, in works like “The Indian Hunter” in Central Park, a naturalism that caused the art historian Wayne Craven to call Ward “the Thomas Eakins of sculpture.” Apparently, Brown felt his assistant’s contribution to the Washington statue prompted inclusion of Ward’s name.

Brown depicts Washington facing south, his outstretched arm apparently pointing to the city that was still some miles distant as the general rode down from the Van Cortlandt house in the Bronx on November 25, 1783, known as “evacuation day.” Some people think Washington may have passed through the present site of Union Square. President Lincoln’s funeral cortège 82 years later may thus have intersected Washinton’s path at this point, making the square a special place indeed.

fmorrone@nysun.com