Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a historian and writer who lives in Middlesex.
[T]he people of Brattleboro awoke on New Year’s Day 1857 to an astonishing sight, an 8-foot-tall crystalline sculpture of an angel standing at the intersection of two streets. The sculpture, which had appeared as if by magic overnight, depicted the Recording Angel, which held a stylus and tablet and is said to note the actions of everyone for later judgment.
Crowds gathered around the angel, which was made of snow. The piece was said to have been so beautifully executed, with its solemn expression, flowing drapery, and delicate hair and wings, that schoolchildren managed to restrain themselves from destroying it, if you can imagine that.
The local weekly newspaper, the Vermont Phoenix, reported the event first. Its account was followed by stories in papers including the Springfield Republican and the New York Tribune. Those stories were, in turn, reprinted in foreign papers.
The newspapers revealed the name of the young sculptor behind this unusual work, and helped make his reputation, but anyone who knew Brattleboro well could have guessed: It was Larkin Goldsmith Mead.
Born across the Connecticut River in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, Mead had grown up in Brattleboro in a prominent family. His father was a well-known local lawyer. His mother’s brother was also well known, but not universally popular. He was John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Putney-based cult of Perfectionism, which advocated “complex marriage,” a sexually liberated view of relationships that got the community forced out of Vermont. (Noyes successfully re-formed his group as the Oneida Community in New York.) In later years, Larkin’s brother William would become a partner in the leading architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, which designed such landmarks as New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, the Boston Public Library and the West Wing of the White House.
Larkin Mead, who would turn 22 years old two days after the unveiling of his wintry creation, was already known for his prodigious artistic talent. Just three years earlier, he had been working as a clerk for Williston & Tyler’s hardware store in town. When not occupied by his duties, he spent his time behind the counter carving a pig from white marble. A well-connected, out-of-state customer, who was in Brattleboro to undergo the “water cure” at the renowned Wesselhoeft Hydropathic Institute, was impressed by the work in progress and arranged for Mead to work in the studio of Henry Kirke Brown in New York City. There he helped Brown create the equestrian statue of Washington that now stands in New York’s Union Square.
Returning to Brattleboro, Mead found few outlets for his talents. Perhaps out of boredom, he hatched a plan to build his snow angel with the help of two friends, brothers Edward and Henry Burnham. On New Year’s Eve 1856, the three young men set to work in the biting cold. Working with snow from a drift, Mead found the snow too powdery to clump together easily. So the Burnhams kept a fire burning at their father’s brass foundry. Throughout the night, they took mounds of snow into the foundry, so it would melt enough to mold. Once Mead had sculpted it into the desired shape, Henry would pour water on the creation. The water quickly froze, giving the sculpted form the sheen of glass. The angel was a sort of seasonal gift to Mead’s hometown. Showing up on New Year’s Eve, this recording angel, wrote the Phoenix, “may be supposed to wait upon Time, making up her record at the close of the year.”
The finished work lasted only about two weeks, until a January thaw set in, but it changed his life. News of the sculpture reached Nicholas Longworth, an art patron from Cincinnati. Longworth hired Mead to make a duplicate, this one of Vermont marble. He later made two copies of the angel, one of which is now on permanent loan to Brattleboro’s Brooks Memorial Library.
Longworth’s commission was the first of many. Later in 1857, Mead was hired to sculpt a statue of Agriculture, based on the Greek goddess Ceres. The wooden sculpture adorned the roof of the Vermont Statehouse until 1938. Because of the sculpture’s dilapidated condition, 87-year-old Sergeant-at-Arms Dwight Dwinell carved a rough copy, which still tops the building.
In 1861, another prestigious commission came Mead’s way. He was hired to sculpt a marble statue of Vermont founder Ethan Allen. The statue stood outside the Statehouse for decades, but it too weathered badly, and was replaced with a copy in 1941.
The same year he created the Ethan Allen statue, Mead spent six weeks at the battlefront during the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly, sending back sketches of camp life. The next year, he left his war-stricken country and headed to Italy to study sculpting. His artistic sister, Elinor, accompanied him.
Both Elinor and Larkin found love in Italy. Elinor met and soon married the U.S. consul in Venice, William Dean Howells, who is better remembered as a writer and as the editor of Henry James and Mark Twain.
Mead was smitten when he glimpsed an angelic beauty he passed one day in the piazza of San Marco in Venice. He didn’t manage to get the young woman’s name, but she remained in his thoughts even after he moved to Florence to set up a studio. While in Florence, Mead befriended another Vermont expatriate sculptor, Hiram Powers, who had gained international fame before the Civil War with his work “Greek Slave,” a stab at the institution of slavery.
Still besotted with this unknown woman, Mead returned to Venice in the desperate hope of finding her. Oddly enough, he did. The woman, Marietta di Benvenuti, was also quite taken with Mead and soon the couple married.
Mead’s career continued to thrive. After the Civil War, he won a $200,000 commission to create a sculpture for Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Ill. A bust of Lincoln that Mead created in preparation for the larger work for the tomb stands in the lobby of the Vermont Statehouse. On the nation’s centennial in 1876, he carved a rendering of Vermont’s Ethan Allen, which stands today in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
For the rest of his life – Mead would live until 1910 – the sculptor made his home in Italy. He did bring Marietta to his home state once. But unlike the angel that helped launch his career, Marietta apparently couldn’t stand the cold.
