Who was Emma Cadwallader-Guild?

»The work of Mrs. Guild shows unmistakable talent and such as fresh, free spirit of originality that one can almost accept the alleged dictum of Berlin that Mrs. Guild 'is the greatest genius in sculpture that America has ever had’«, a Boston newspaper judged Emma Cadwallader-Guild's work on the occasion of an exhibition in 1903. The sculptress had been living in Europe for more than 20 years at that time and had become a minor celebrity there by then. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that her reputation rushed after her to her native country, the United States. Shortly before her 180th birthday, Art.Salon looks back at the career of the former leading figure, who has been almost forgotten for a long time.

Emma Cadwallader was born in Zanesville, Ohio on August 27, 1843. Her father, a physician, came from an English family, and her mother painted oil paintings and watercolors and introduced her daughter to art. At 18, Cadwallader married a Unitarian minister named Edward Chipman Guild (1832-1899), with whom she raised two children in Boston. She delved her interest into painting, painted still lifes and landscapes, and interacted with local artists. How Cadwallader-Guild found sculpture has come down to us in a narrative.

One morning in 1876, she was walking through the market in Boston when she saw a black man leaning dejectedly against one of the stalls. She is said to have been so fascinated by the sight that − without ever having sculptured before − she fashioned a bozzetto out of clay. She is said to have spent weeks working on the model. Finally, she had the bronze figure cast in Italy and provided it with the title Free.

In contrast, however, there are also indications that Cadwallader-Guild is said to have worked on a bozzetto for a life-size David as early as 1875. How exactly she actually found her way to sculpture will probably remain a mystery. But it appears that it must have been quite sudden and she quickly realized where her true talent lay. To the end of her life, she received much praise for her outstanding statues and busts.

Free shows a Black man clad in a loincloth, leaning against a waist-high tree stump, looking down. His arms are folded behind his back, making his wrists appear to be bound. In fact, however, his hands are free. The statue is understood as an interpretation of the living conditions of black people in the USA after the end of slavery: On paper they were free, but society continued to oppress them − at the time a groundbreaking innovation to declare this circumstance the content of a sculpture and thus the high arts. With Free, Cadwallader-Guild created a sensational figure that years later became a veritable attraction in her studio in London. Today it belongs to a descendant of the artist. Only a copy in wood by Otto Braun is known to the public.

Emma Cadwallader-Guild was self-taught and created her statues from studies and sketches of existing sculptures. As a woman, she was not allowed to model a nude man. In addition, she attended anatomy courses to deepen her knowledge of the human body. Cadwallader-Guild became most famous for her busts of notable people and politicians, but her mythological and sacred figures were also well received by art critics for their originality and high quality craftsmanship. Many statues, statuettes and some busts are lost today. A few of them have survived through old photographs. In 2018, art collectors had the rare opportunity to bid on Cadwallader-Guild's bronze statuette Endymion (ca. 1896).

In the mid-1880s, the artist moved to London with her daughters and opened a studio at 76 Fulham Road. The reasons for the move are not known. Her husband had to continue preaching in his church in the United States. In England, Cadwallader-Guild gained notoriety with Free and became a portraitist in demand. She sculpted busts of the British artist George Frederic Watts and the German painter Hans Thoma, as well as of numerous nobles such as Princess Helena of Great Britain and England. The background to the bust of British Prime Minister William Gladstone illustrates how highly regarded she was: he personally modeled for her, something he had never done with any other sculptor throughout his life.

The fascination surrounding her almost lifelike images eventually spread to her home country. Several times she traveled to the United States to complete commissions for busts. Cadwallader-Guild exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy in London. After Free in 1885 and a still life in 1986, she showed several busts and medallions in the following years, as well as the Endymion statuette mentioned above. She also participated in exhibitions at the Glass Palace in Munich, the Paris Salon, and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts. Later, in 1904, she won a bronze medal at the St. Louis World's Fair.

Emma Cadwallader-Guild also lived for several years in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin, as the Royal Academy records show. The German capital was even her main place of residence and work from 1897, where her husband also demonstrably lived with her after his retirement from 1897. In the various German cities, the artist showed herself to be a skillful networker, and she also quickly made contacts in Italy, where she studied the great sculptors of past centuries. Details about this period of the artist's life have not been preserved, but in addition to her artistic talent, she also seemed to have a talent for marketing herself and her work: From her fortune, the artist was able to buy a villa in the then world-famous Bad Homburg.

Around 1905, Emma Cadwallader-Guild moved back to the USA to do well-paid commissioned work. Here, her trace disappears, she probably died in 1911. Most of her works were privately owned, which is why museum exhibitions were difficult to organize. Thus, after her death, the artist quickly disappeared from art historical memory. Since most of her artworks were busts that went out of fashion in the early 20th century, art historians probably saw little incentive to preserve information about the sculptor's oeuvre for posterity in light of the radical innovations of modernism.

It is likely that the turmoil of the two world wars contributed to the fact that the whereabouts of most statues and busts cannot be traced today. Among the few exceptions is Cadwallader-Guild's 1895 bronze sculpture Elektron in the Museum für Kommunikation in Frankfurt. It depicts the Greek god Hermes, who could move faster than light and was responsible for rhetoric and magic, among other things, curiously operating a Morse key: an allegory for the advance of technology that eclipsed anything that had gone before. The artist also created a marble version of Elektron (see image above). One opportunity to see her work in the U.S. is in Washington, D.C.: the 1901 bust of U.S. President William McKinley stands in the Capitol.