Like many monuments, Daniel Chester French’s relief sculpture in the 1917 memorial to the Marquis de Lafayette in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, passed largely unnoticed, even by historians, before attracting attention in recent years. A 2016 article by Summer Brennan in New York magazine, “The Invisible Black Man on a Prospect Park Statue,” zeroed in on French’s depiction of the unnamed “groomsman” tending Lafayette’s horse (the figure was characterized in French’s time as an “attendant,” “aide,” and, in one instance, “boy” and “servant”). Brennan was lamenting the alleged erasure of the black man’s identity from the record. This erasure was deemed all the more egregious because of speculation that the man might be James Armistead Lafayette, a soldier and former slave emancipated by Lafayette. For Brennan as for many contemporary scholars, effacement is at the heart of the problem.
Another source of ire has to do with the black man’s secondary status in the composition. The relief shows Lafayette standing before his mount, flanked by the attendant on one side and a magnolia tree on the other. The attendant is depicted as a real person, with none of the cartoonish caricature that we so often find in popular imagery from the period. But he is also rendered as clearly subordinate. And, gazing up to his left to the horse, from which he is ducking away, he has a certain wide-eyed, wary look that from a contemporary perspective could be seen to evoke familiar and negative visual tropes. Was French poking fun at the attendant, consciously or unconsciously?
I have worked on French, his contemporaries, and their civic art for a long time. My belief is that there is nothing malevolent going on in the Lafayette Memorial, although to complain about scholarly inattention to the black man’s identity is not unreasonable. My aim is, first, to determine whether there is an answer to this question of disparaging intent and, second, to point to some ways of thinking about the issue that do not entail jumping to conclusions about French being a racist. His description certainly indicates that the attendant was regarded as a secondary subject, but for French to acknowledge the class distinctions of Lafayette’s day did not mean that he was advocating their reinstitution in his own. I contend that French’s intentions for the groom were not malicious but closer to the opposite, and that his outlook and approach were hardly atypical. Simply put, I find it inconceivable that French would deploy racialized caricature alongside the idealism embodied by Lafayette, in a memorial (French also characterized the structure as a “monument”) with very serious intentions and meant to stand for the ages.
It is fairly evident that, at the moment French created his relief, the black man in the illustration was regarded as merely an anonymous individual.
The first question that arises is why the black man is there. It is obvious that the sculptor did not include him arbitrarily. The figure is there because the monument’s donor, Henry Harteau (1819–95), specified in his will that the memorial be based upon an engraved illustration of the Marquis de Lafayette, after the 1783 portrait Lafayette at Yorktown by Jean-Baptiste Le Pâon, included in Washington Irving’s then-definitive Life of George Washington; the book underscores Washington’s close ties to Lafayette, Harteau’s hero. Le Pâon’s Lafayette is accompanied by a black groom, standing off to the side. French followed suit. But to what end?
Textual sources, including French’s correspondence, do little to illuminate his intentions directly, but they can tell us something by omission. Period newspapers make little or no mention of the black figure. There is no reference whatsoever to James Armistead Lafayette, suggesting that his contributions to history had been largely forgotten by the turn of the twentieth century. It is fairly evident that, at the moment French created his relief, the black man in the illustration was regarded as merely an anonymous individual.
Another investigative strategy involves comparison between the sculptural treatment of the black subject in the finished Lafayette relief and that in two small plaster sketch models at Chesterwood, French’s home and studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The maquettes, one of which was completed by January 11, 1915, differ from the full-size version, as preliminary studies by their nature often do. What stand out in the former are the black figure’s pronounced bent right knee and his summarily rendered gaze, which has an air of wide-eyed caricature but most likely was simple shorthand gouging.
French stood the groom up and toned down his wide-eyed look between the maquettes and the finished model. The sculptor’s letters offer no insight into why he did so. It is worth noting once more that one of the maquettes dates from late 1914 or early 1915. The other, very similar in appearance, likely dates between January 1915 and 1916. January 1915 was a month or so before the black art critic Freeman Henry Morris Murray sent to French a critique of French’s rendition of the allegorical Africa on the front entrance steps of the United States Customs House (one of the Four Continents, 1907). Their exchange indicates that Murray’s comments made French at least conscious of how he rendered the facial features of black people. But the sculptor’s responses in written or artistic form offer no grounds for believing that French altered the composition of the Lafayette Memorial as a result of that exchange.
A present-day observer might view as problematic the way that French deliberately distinguished the “stocky” groom (French’s word) from the “aristocratic” Lafayette, reinforcing the racial and class distinctions between the two. Such a juxtaposition of upper- and lower-class subjects, however, and of racial difference was simply the norm in the academic figurative art of French’s era. Augustus Saint-Gaudens contrasted real and ideal in his memorial to David Glasgow Farragut (1881); Gaetano Russo portrayed Manifest Destiny and imperial triumph in his Columbus Monument (1892); Frederick MacMonnies set off, through dress and posture, a black sailor from white ones in Brooklyn’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch (1900); and James Earle Fraser, in his equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939), celebrated the former president’s explorations in Indian territory and Africa through allegorical racial types—to cite a few examples in New York City alone. French was doing nothing exceptional in depicting such distinctions here.
Was there a tradition of black grooms being harassed by horses, or otherwise mocked, as some present-day viewers perceive to be the case in French’s Lafayette? Some comments here might help to explain further French’s choice of pose and imagery. In many of his portraits, John Trumbull (1756–1843) depicted horses, with grooms both black and white, that had been agitated by the chaos of battle, and hence were “acting up.” These Trumbulls remind us that there was some tradition of playing off the real and the ideal in portrait paintings, with horses intentionally deployed as a contrast to the main subject, who is removed from earthly time. The antebellum painter Edward Troye (1808–74) gained renown as a painter of horses, riders, and black grooms; Jessica Dallow has demonstrated astutely how these portraits reveal ways in which “imagery of African Americans during the antebellum and Civil War years” could both adhere to “artificial social and racial hierarchies” and at the same time depict the black grooms, typically slaves, as “serious, competent, and intelligent persons, many with renowned reputations.”
The groom was not someone whom French would insult, and it would not have been in character for the sculptor to do so.
French’s horse in the Lafayette Memorial is not agitated, and the sculptor’s description does not indicate any such behavior, but the composition relates iconographically to the work of Le Paôn, Trumbull, and Troye. The black man in the Lafayette Memorial may have been Armistead Lafayette or simply an unnamed groom. In either case, he would have been a trusted member of the cavalry or the workplace of the stable, held in especially high esteem by the horse’s owner. Details in the finished relief such as the cloak over the groom’s shoulder convey his elevated stature within the culture of horsemanship. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt III has observed that, in the twentieth century, to include the groom in a work of art, either alone or standing amid a small number of people, when in fact up to a hundred trusted people might work within the stable of one prize horse, was to underscore the groom’s significant stature at the top of the hierarchy. The groom was not someone whom French would insult, and it would not have been in character for the sculptor to do so.
In any case, the Marquis de Lafayette could not feasibly be shown standing solo, at rest, in front of an unaccompanied horse. Someone else has to be there to control the horse. This reality would explain the slight sidewards lunge in the man’s movement in the Chesterwood maquette. The groom is gripping at the reins to restrain the steed. The muscle tension in the hand, a small but noteworthy detail that complements the sideward movement, evokes that effort vividly. The gesture contrasts with the verticality, softness, contemplative resolve, and relative remoteness of the primary subject Lafayette, who occupies a separate, timeless, ideal realm.
With the why of the groom’s inclusion well-established, the only possible objections would have to take issue with the how, the arrangement of this particular composition. The fact remains that the groom is positioned awkwardly within a compressed space, relegated compositionally and in terms of stance to a presumptive secondary status. The simple, racialist reading insists that these particulars owe to the racism of the artist and his culture.
The groom figure indeed is spatially confined, but this owes more to the insurmountable spatial limitations imposed upon the sculptor than any racial prejudices. French was allotted a specific amount of room with which to work, a demand to which he had to acquiesce—on top of the one that his work be based on a two-dimensional print, whose composition and coloration had to be adjusted to suit the three-dimensional medium. More broadly, these facts remind us that that French’s work is an early twentieth-century relief sculpture, whose physical and iconographic properties must be taken into account in terms separate from Colonial, Federal, or antebellum painting or engraving.
There are significant compositional reasons for the groom’s posture, too. His stance in the finished relief constrains movement in order to focus, balance, and unify the composition, to minimize visual distraction, and to allow for greater space between the figure and the border of the relief. In the final design, the verticality of the black groom on the left provides a unifying counterweight to the magnolia tree on the right, establishing a greater sense of stability and dignity.
This history, as is often the case, had biographical, legal, political, and urban dimensions, both local and national.
French’s letters and period sources say little to nothing about the model, but the historical record can still help contextualize the question of racial dynamics by establishing the memorial’s significance: why it came to be, and how specifically it got there. It is worth remembering the reverence commanded by Lafayette as a hero in the American imagination at the turn of the century, as well as exploring the patronage history and social processes involved in the genesis and realization of this particular monument. This history, as is often the case, had biographical, legal, political, and urban dimensions, both local and national.
The origins of the Lafayette Memorial follow a familiar story, of the death of a local “best man” and the administration of his estate. In September 1895, Henry Harteau, the president of a successful plate-glass manufacturing business, died at the age of seventy-six. His will allocated $35,000 for a memorial to the Marquis de Lafayette, a personal hero of Harteau’s since his childhood. As mentioned earlier, the provisions specified that the design be based upon the Le Pâon–derived engraving in Irving’s Life of George Washington. The will established a committee, composed of Brooklyn Eagle editors and like-minded colleagues, to realize the monument and develop a suitable inscription. The expansiveness of the specifications suggested that Harteau had envisioned this project as part of something grander.
The will also stipulated that the money was not to be released until the death of Harteau’s widow, Margaret, to ensure that she would be suitably provided for. Margaret lived until 1913, and nothing went forward until then. At that point disagreements broke out in earnest, although tensions had been stoked earlier when Harteau’s niece and assorted relatives had sought to contest the will. Now, the family members initiated a lawsuit, arguing on a point of law surrounding the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs into the new City of New York. The suit claimed that with consolidation, property held by and/or donated to the city of Brooklyn had been transferred to the City of New York, meaning the bequest was no longer valid or applicable for the borough of Brooklyn. The case went to the appellate court, where Judge William J. Gaynor (1849–1913), a Brooklyn insider and former acquaintance of Harteau, threw out the case, asserting that the corporate rights vested in Brooklyn remained valid, even though Brooklyn was now part of the greater city.
At this juncture, in 1915, the money was released and the project officially moved ahead. When exactly Daniel Chester French was selected and who chose him or the site are not clear, but his letters indicate that he had received the commission by the early fall of 1914, and had begun “thinking” about the designs by September of that year. Based on the correspondence and on the general decision-making processes for municipal design in New York City, moreover, it seems likely that the choices of site and artist were made by the Brooklyn parks commissioner Raymond Ingersoll (because the monument was on parks land), who likely consulted with the former Brooklyn mayor Charles Schieren and other well-connected members of the memorial committee, especially the estate trustee and former Brooklyn parks commissioner George V. Brower.
It glorified Brooklyn as a spectacular, cosmopolitan borough in a newly unified city.
The chosen location at Prospect Park West and Ninth Street was consistent with the ideal of a punctuation point along the park’s western edge. The Lafayette Memorial established something of a City Beautiful call-and-response dynamic with the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza. The implied relationship was fitting and had emblematic resonances. Each monument had patronage connections, both direct and indirect, to the Grand Army of the Republic. The Lafayette Memorial’s placement thereby contributed to a majestic symbolic statement about the triumph of republican unity. It glorified Brooklyn as a spectacular, cosmopolitan borough in a newly unified city.
After some delays caused by problems on the bronze-manufacturing end, the monument was dedicated in May 1917, with Daniel Chester French and a delegation including the French war commissioners Joseph Joffre and René Viviani in attendance. It was a profoundly moving experience for the sculptor, with the work taking on additional resonance in light of American assistance to France during World War I. French described the experience in a letter of early June:
The unveiling of the Lafayette Memorial by General Joffre was a memorable occasion. The fact that this tribute to Lafayette was begun years ago must have impressed the visitors as a proof that our esteem and gratitude were not hysterical. I wish you might have seen the welcome that your native town gave to the Frenchmen. . . . I am sure Joffre and Viviani must have been impressed by this sweet picture of peace and happiness and must have contrasted it with the field of horror with which Joffre, at least is familiar. It represented what we think we are fighting to protect.
The Lafayette Memorial acquired significance as an illustration of complicated estate politics, as a symbol of Brooklyn’s ascendency as part of a modern metropolis, and as an expression of American–French solidarity and selfless patriotism in the wake of a horrific world war. These are the three faces of Daniel Chester French’s Marquis de Lafayette; the black attendant, be he James Armistead Lafayette or not, is reflected in each one. To be sure, he is set off, even partly marginalized. But the racialist interpretation is far from the whole story.
