It was the cause celebre of 1896: a statue of a naked drunken woman was gifted to the new Boston Public Library by Charles Follen McKim. McKim, one of the men who designed the “palace for the people,” planned to install the sculpture in the courtyard.
Bacchante and Infant Faun, detail, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Naked Drunken Woman
The bronze statue, Bacchante and Infant Faun, was of a laughing young woman – naked of course — dangling a bunch of grapes before the infant in her arms. Frederick MacMonnies created it. He also created a clothed statue of Nathan Hale, now in the National Gallery of Art. MacMonnies had given a cast of the statue to McKim as thanks for a $50 loan.
Plaster cast of Gaudens’ marble group holding library seal. Image courtesy Boston Public Library.
Harvard President Charles Eliot led the charge against the Bacchante, which the Boston Post characterized as the Naked Drunken Woman. They found especially offensive the idea that the drunken woman offered liquor to her child.
It then turned into a battle between Boston’s Puritans and Bohemians, and the Puritans won. (Some had even argued that Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue The Puritan be placed in the library.)
McKim gave up and donated the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which called it “one of the most vibrant images in American art.”
Philistines Win
Thomas Russell Sullivan, a Boston writer, declared, “the Philistines be upon us.”
Boston had a reputation for prudery. The catchphrase “Banned in Boston” resulted from the overzealous censorship of the city’s Watch and Ward Society. From 1878 to the 1920s, the puritanical group of private citizens made Boston a target of scorn. The group also – unintentionally – heightened interest in the books and plays it banned.
Bacchante and Faun at the Boston Public Library
MacMonnies’ statue was no exception. The controversy allowed him to sell many small replicas of the sculpture.
It wasn’t the first time a nude image associated with the library caused an uproar. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had sculpted two young boys holding up the library seal. The marble nudes and the seal were then mounted over the library’s main entrance.
The Boston Evening Record on Feb. 10, 1894, ran an editorial under the headline, WIPE OUT THE BLOT. It described “a pure-minded lad … [who] cried in anguish as he observed, ‘See that thing they have put up there, papa, isn’t it horrible?’ Because it offended this ‘bright, clean, Boston boy,’ the Record then argued, ‘This indecency must not remain!’
A century after the Naked Drunken Woman controversy, the Boston Public Library decided to bring back the Bacchante. It had a copy made of the original, which stands in the Museum of Fine Arts. She and her infant preside over the fountain at the library’s courtyard. And that is exactly where Charles McKim originally intended it.
This story last updated in 2022.
Brooklyn Museum version: By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37045441.
