Republic of Taste by Kelly Catherine E.;

Author:Kelly, Catherine E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Waxing Political

Imagine that you are in the center of a large room. High ceilings. Tall windows. In front of you sits John Adams, the second president of the United States, double chin resting gently on his collar. Nearby, stately George Washington stands head and shoulders above two young women dressed as personifications of Peace and Plenty. It isn’t clear what they are doing here. Perhaps they have come to socialize, for nearby there is a small tea party under way. Three fashionable young ladies, attended by a slave, sip from delicate china cups. But before you can learn whether the presidents are planning to join the party, you are distracted by a terrible sight on the opposite side of the room. The king of France is preparing to die. His wife and children are beset with grief. The Dauphin clings to his father, unwilling to release him to the glinting blade of the guillotine. You turn away from this scene only to confront an Indian warrior advancing toward you, brandishing a tomahawk and a scalp still wet with blood. Behind him is an old woman whipping a small black boy who is powerless to protect himself from the lash. A handful of beautiful women, dressed in the finest silk fashions, smile flirtatiously at the boy and his mistress. Or maybe they are hoping to attract the attention of two bare-chested boxers who circle one another, fists raised.

What dreamscape have you entered? What strange amalgam of history and hallucination appears before you? The year is 1798. You are in Boston’s Columbian Museum, surrounded by wax statues.1

Figures like the ones you have just conjured were prominent features of the early republic’s most distinguished museums and its most obscure traveling shows. They afforded paying spectators “very exact” representations of the nation’s founders and statesmen, “large as life” and “elegantly drest.” Sometimes these men stood alone; sometimes they appeared in tableaux. Withal, they embodied the nation’s brief history, its singular virtues, and its providential destiny. But as this imaginary tour suggests, the figures assumed their roles in a complex visual and spatial field. The usual suspects in the republican pantheon stood cheek and jowl with exotics and curiosities. They were accompanied by Indians, dwarfs, and “beauties,” by Chinese “mandarins,” English boxers, and beheaded criminals.

With the exception of the attention that has been lavished on Charles Willson Peale’s famous Philadelphia Museum, scholars have been slow to explore early national museums like the ones founded by Gardiner Baker, Joseph Steward, and Daniel Bowen in the late eighteenth century or by Ethan Allan Greenwood some twenty years later.2 They have all but ignored the wax figures that formed such a prominent part of those collections. The invisibility of wax figures surely owes much to their transience. For obvious reasons, they lack the shelf life of other museum artifacts, like paintings, arrowheads, fossils, and even stuffed birds.3 They appear only in shadow form, in the written record: newspaper accounts, advertisements, museum ledgers, the letters and memoirs of wax sculptors and museum owners, and, very occasionally, the comments of spectators.

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