IVES, Chauncey Bradley

(b. 1810 Hamden, Connecticut, d. 1894 Roma)

American sculptor, who played a significant role in making sculpture in America generally popular. Beginning as a woodcarver, he worked in Boston (1837-c.1841) and New York City (c.1841-1844), studied in Florence, Italy (1844-1851), then settled in Rome.

Most of his subjects were either from Greek mythology or romantic literature. A reoccurring theme was the vulnerability of women, a popular 19th-century idea that he expressed through innocent, modest looking female nudes. Ives’ statue of Undine Receiving Her Soul, remains one of the icons of the American neo-classical movement. Ives was to revisit the subject of Undine in another work, Undine Rising from the Fountain. Two of his works are in the National Statuary Hall, Washington, D.C. Ives created many portraits of the well known persons of his time, many created in Rome of wealthy Americans who were traveling in Europe.

Pandora

In the United States, as in France, Neoclassicism benefited from the political situation: it helped to bolster the regime by suggesting kinship between it and the Roman Republic of antiquity. Two generations of sculptors took up residence in Italy, first in Florence, to which they were attracted by Lorenzo Bartolini, and subsequently, after Bartolini’s death, in Rome. They included, among others, Chauncey Bradley Ives, Hiram Powers, and Randolph Rogers, all for either Philadelphia or Boston, the two cities that vied with each other for the title of the “Athens of America.”

Ives, having arrived in Florence in 1844, left ion 1851 for Rome, where he died. His Pandora, sculpted soon after his arrival in Rome, was an immediate success. The subject was a popular one among an Anglo-Saxon public with a tendency to moralize, suggesting as it did the presence, behind an appearance of innocent beauty, of a mind cursed with curiosity. The piece testifies to its author’s admiration for Canova.

Pandora was to be reproduced many times, nineteen at least life-sized or half life-sized marbles having been manufactured by 1891.

Send Postcard Learn More

Undine Rising from the Waters

The exquisitely carved wet drapery is one of the most notable American examples of see-through illusionism popular in mid-nineteenth-century sculpture.

Send Postcard Learn More