Spiritual Currents and Manifest Destiny in the Art of Hiram Powers - Critical Essay

Notes

(1.) Hiram Powers to William A. Buffum, Oct. 18, 1855, AAA, 1139/1187. For this letter, see also Wunder, vol. 2, 126.

(2.) Powers to Buffum (as in n. 1). For other instances, see Hiram Powers to George T. Marye, Jan. 24, 1861, AAA, 1141/191; Powers to George Gordon, Mar. 5, 1867, AAA, 1143/1793; and Powers to William S. Latham, June 3, 1867, AAA, 1143/968. In these letters Powers discusses the possibility of casting the figure in bronze; elsewhere, he also expressed a willingness to send California to San Francisco or Sacramento, both near, if not precisely on, the goldfields and both still in rudimentary states of development; see Powers to Samson [Powers], Aug. 18, 1850, AAA, 1134/1416; and Gordon to Powers, July 25, 1867, AAA, 1143/1063.

(3.) Bayard Taylor, El Dorado (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1873), 235.

(4.) Wunder, vol. 1, 158.

(5.) See Donald Martin Reynolds, Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture (New York: Garland, 1977); idem, "The 'Unveiled Soul': Hiram Powers's Embodiment of the Ideal," Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 394-414; Martha Gyllenhall et al., New Light: Ten Artists Inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Glencairn Museum, 1988); Wunder, vol. 1, 47, 129; and Colbert, 30-38, 172-211, 288-312.

(6.) See Signe Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); Marguerite Beck Block, The New Church in the New World (New York: Octagon Books, 1968); and Scott Trego Swank, "The Unfettered Conscious: A Study of Sectarianism, Spiritualism, and Social Reform in the New Jerusalem Church 1840-1870," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970.

(7.) Emanuel Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1982), 227-28.

(8.) Block (as in n. 6), 73.

(9.) At the end of his life, in 1873, it was stated that Powers had been a believer for about fifty years, which indicates that he became a Swedenborgian about 1823. This was the year he entered the employment of Lumen Watson, a Swedenborgian, and there may be a connection between these events. See "New Church Worthies," New Church Messenger, Feb. 18, 1885, Cincinnati Historical Society (hereafter CHS), mss qP888, 6 RM, box 6.

(10.) Hiram Powers to Mr. Tower, Mar. 8, 1864, AAA, 1142/416; and Powers to Mrs. Wise, May 25, 1865, AAA, 1142/1201.

(11.) Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, Sept. 2, 1852, AAA, 1136/173-75. In this letter, Powers remarks that the event occurred ten to eleven years earlier.

(12.) John Worcester, Physiological Correspondences (Boston: New-Church Union, 1931), 387.

(13.) Toksvig (as in n. 6), 313.

(14.) Hiram Powers to Sidney Brooks, Oct. 9, 1856, AAA, 1138/768-70; and Powers to Mrs. Clark, Dec. 19, 1858, AAA, 1139/1291-92. For Swedenborg's thoughts on this matter, see Toksvig (as in n. 6), 258.

(15.) J. M. Bixby to Hiram Powers, Jan. 14, 1850, AAA, 1134/808-9. In this letter he asks Powers's opinion about Daniel Dunglas Home, a medium, and goes on to relate his own spiritualistic experiences. Presumably, he would not be asking this question unless he knew that Powers was already involved in spiritualism. It would seem safe to assume that the sculptor's interest dates from as early as 1849, in other words, just at the time he was conceiving California. In 1852 Powers frequently wrote about spiritualism, which seems to have become a particularly urgent issue in this year and the next; see Hiram Powers to Edward Everett, Sept. 2, 1852, AAA, 1136/173-74.