The story of Edward Augustus Brackett is also the story of the remarkable diversity of the 19th century. In a long life that spanned nine decades, this Boston based polymath was a well-regarded artist, a dedicated abolitionist, a fervent spiritualist, a poet, a horticulturalist, an amateur architect, an animal breeder and a conservationist. He left his mark on all these fields and helped point toward many of the concerns of our own times.
Edward Augustus Brackett
Brackett was born in 1818 in Vassalboro, Maine. His father, an itinerant farmer and watchmaker, led the family on a peripatetic journey throughout the Northeast. Finally, they settled in Cincinnati in 1835. Edward Brackett, by then 17, had spent his adolescence trying to reconcile his desire to be an artist with his father’s demands that he settle on a practical trade. In Cincinnati he discovered sculpture. Brackett developed his skill as a tombstone carver, then the purview of artists who, like him, came from humble backgrounds.
An undated photograph of Edward Augustus Brackett
Brackett achieved modest success as an artist in Cincinnati, although sadly, none of his works from this period survive. But recognition stirred his ambition. While many of his fellow sculptors set off for Italy, Brackett lacked the money and patronage to make the trip. Instead, he made his way back East. He settled first in New York, where he began to make inroads by sculpting portrait busts of the cultural and political elite. His subjects included such luminaries as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and the very short-lived U.S. president, William Henry Harrison.
But not content to be a mere bust carver, Brackett also created a sculpture titled The Binding of Satan, a two figure work based on a passage from the Book of Revelation. He failed to sell this now lost work. But its positive reception gave him the confidence in 1841 to move to the more culturally sophisticated Boston.
Move to Boston
Boston proved a happy choice, and he would remain in the area for the rest of his life. Brackett married his Cincinnati sweetheart, Amanda, and set up a studio in Boston. He made his living and supported a growing family (eventually he would have five children) through a variety of enterprises. He carved portrait busts of prominent citizens, gave art lessons and embarked on various side ventures in the fields of horticulture and animal husbandry. But Brackett still had grand ambitions as an artist. In 1848 he created his most monumental work. Shipwrecked Mother and Child was inspired by reports of a tragic shipwreck in 1841. It depicts the naked corpses of a mother and child flung up on the shore.
Shipwrecked Mother and Child by Edward Augustus Brackett, 1850, marble, Worcester Art Museum.
While a few critics objected to the sculpture’s realism, it caused a sensation when exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Audiences reportedly wept and trembled at its representation of the terrors of untamed nature and violent death. Brackett had high hopes of selling the work to a major institution, but he never pulled that off. Then, as tastes changed, it disappeared from public view. His masterpiece languished, yellowed and chipped, for many years in the basement of the Worcester Art Museum. However, the wheel has turned. Thanks to a major grant from the Luce Foundation, Shipwrecked Mother and Child has been restored and returned to its former glory. It now occupies pride of place in the museum’s 19th century gallery.
The Crow’s Nest
Despite his failure to sell this work, Brackett felt sufficiently comfortable by 1850 to set about building a house for his family. He chose four acres of undeveloped land in what would become Winchester, Mass. This project was inspired by Orson Fowler’s book A Home for All, which detailed plans for an octagon shaped house. Thanks to Fowler, a thousand such sparely ornamented, relatively inexpensive homes were built across the country in the 1850s. However, Brackett’s version was extremely original. Instead of a single large octagonal shaped exterior, he joined together five room-sized octagons, each of a different height. Sitting high on a hill, this design suggests a castle whose central two-story octagon rises like a battlement over the stepped components below. Thanks to its lofty position, the house was dubbed The Crow’s Nest. Attesting to its uniqueness, the National Register of Historic Places now lists Brackett’s octagon house.
The Edward A. Brackett House
The passions that would culminate in the Civil War tore Boston apart. Brackett’s choices of portrait subjects make his political sympathies clear. He created busts of most of Boston’s most prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips. These associations led to his most famous work, a bust of the notorious rabble-rouser John Brown.
Edward Augustus Brackett and John Brown
The story of his creation of this work almost seems made for cinema. Inspired by a chance sighting of Brown on the streets of Boston, Brackett determined to create the bust following Brown’s ill fated raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. With the help of Charles Stearns, a member of the “Secret Six” who had funded Brown’s raid, he traveled to Charles Town, Va., where Brown awaited execution in prison.
In Charles Town, Brackett battled resistance from public officials who had been warned that he was “an Abolitionist and a spy.” Finally, with the assistance of a sympathetic assistant jailer, Brackett was secreted into the cell. There he met Brown and made the sketches necessary for his project. Before returning to Boston Brackett accepted a set of dispatches written by a pro-abolitionist reporter posing as a writer for a pro-slavery publication. Literally going undercover, Brackett wound the sheets of paper around his body beneath his clothes. Thus, he managed to bring this firsthand account of Brown’s trial to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune.
John Brown by Edward Augustus Brackett, 1860, marble, Tufts University permanent collection
The subsequent bust gives Brown the aspect of an Old Testament prophet. It was unveiled to great acclaim in a ceremony attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Bronson Alcott and other abolitionist luminaries. After the war, the bust disappeared from view. It was only rediscovered in 2015 when Laura McDonald, registrar for the Tufts University Art Galleries, stumbled across it, nose broken and swathed in plastic, in the galleries’ storeroom. Like Shipwrecked Mother it has been rescued, restored and is regularly displayed.
Edmonia Lewis
Brackett’s abolitionist sympathies also explained his association with Edmonia Lewis, the first female artist of color to achieve international recognition. An artist of mixed Black and Indigenous descent, William Lloyd Garrison introduced her to Brackett after several other prominent Boston sculptors had refused to work with her. Brackett mentored her, taught her how to model figures in clay and permitted her to create a medallion of John Brown based on his bust. She then sold the medallion at anti-slavery meetings.
Edmonia Lewis
Brackett didn’t mentor Lewis for long. They fell out for reasons that are not clear. Lewis went on to spend most of her career in Rome while being championed back home for works that touch on issues like abolition, slavery, Native American identity and mythology. She is currently the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art. The exhibition includes Brackett’s bust of John Brown.
The 1870s
The 1870s were a time of great change for Brackett. In 1871 his wife, Amanda, died. The following year he remarried. His new wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Amanda’s sister. He began to wind down his art career, closing his Boston studio in 1873. Meanwhile, his avocation as an animal breeder landed him a position with the newly formed Massachusetts Commission on Inland Fisheries. As commissioner and then chairman, he had responsibility for stocking streams and ponds with game fish. Those duties later expanded to include preservation of wild game and protection of endangered birds.
Edward Augustus Brackett and his animal pens, undated photograph.
He would hold this position for the next three decades. During that time his accomplishments included the patenting of a “fish ladder” designed to help migrating fish swim upstream across dams and culverts to reach their spawning grounds. He also joined the campaign against the use of bird feathers in fashionable women’s hats. And he championed the public’s rights to the nation’s waterways.
Edward Augustus Brackett, Spiritualist
But if Brackett had one foot in the camp of conservation and science, he planted his other foot in the world of spiritualism. He shared that interest with his second wife, Elizabeth. Judging from poems he wrote in her honor; it was one way of dealing with the death of his first wife Amanda. Spiritualism confirmed Brackett’s essentially positive vision of reality. For Spiritualists, death was not the end, but rather another stop on the path to human perfectibility. Because Spiritualism was associated with freedom from organized religion, patriarchal and racial hierarchies and class-based divisions, it found adherents among abolitionists, feminists, labor organizers and other social reformers.
Brackett wrote extensively about Spiritualism and his conversion from doubter to believer. He attended hundreds of seances. Many observers reported their amusement as he paraded around seance rooms on the arm of a “materialized apparition” of his dead niece Bertha. Brackett also participated in efforts to provide a scientific basis for Spiritualism. This caused him to lock horns with William James, the more skeptical founder of the American Society for Psychical Research. But Brackett made common cause with Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. Wallace’s disappearance from history is often linked to his embrace of Spiritualism.
Legacy
Brackett died in 1908, just six months short of his 90th birthday. Obituaries cited his many achievements, his art career, his abolitionist activities, his poetry and other writings and his work with the Fish and Game Commission. Today, when experts zealously guard the borders of their disciplines, it is refreshing to see how Brackett, an autodidact from a humble background, could move so fluidly between different branches of knowledge. His life and work reconnect us to a time of hope, belief in progress and a much-needed striving for connection.
Eleanor Heartney is contributing writer to Art in America, Artnet, Artpress and the Brooklyn Rail and author of many books and essays on art. Her most recent book is Edward Augustus Brackett: the Life, Art and Tumultuous Times of an American Original.
***
Click here to order your copy today.
Images. Brackett house by By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11661817. Featured image created by ChatGPT.
