Launt Thompson

Launt Thompson (b. Ireland, 1833-1894)

Launt Thompson was born in Ireland and emigrated to the United States with his widowed mother about 1847, settling in Albany, New York; other than that, nothing is known of his youth. His interest in sculpture grew out of his interest in anatomy, a discipline he began studying under the direction of his first employer in Albany, Dr. James H. Armsby. It was probably Armsby, too, who introduced Thompson to Albany's leading sculptor of the day, Erastus Dow Palmer, who hired the young man as a studio assistant in 1849. Thompson had already begun to draw, having been encouraged by the painter William Hart, and he produced his first sculpture, a bust of Armsby, soon after entering Palmer's studio.

In 1858 Thompson moved to New York, where he met the city's leading artists, including Samuel Morse and Daniel Huntington. He made a living by carving portrait medallions and cameos, several of which he showed at the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition in 1859. He was elected an associate member of the Academy in 1859 and was elevated to full membership in 1862.

Most of Thompson's works are portraits; he became something of an expert at modeling images of children, some of which had allegorical overtones, and characters from great literature. The portrait busts of well-known people that he created early in his career--the actor Edwin Booth (1863) and the publisher James Gordon Bennett (1865), for example--helped make him known to the general public. Thompson's first lifesize figures were of Napoleon (1865; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.) and Shakespeare (1866). A colossal bronze bust of William Cullen Bryant (1867; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) received much notice in the press during the 1860s and 1870s, though Thompson's hopes that it would be erected in Central Park were never realized.

Thompson made his first trip to Europe in 1867, visiting Paris and settling for a time in Rome, and returned to America in 1869. During these years and throughout the 1870s he was occupied with commissions for Civil War monuments, including life-size portraits of Major General John Sedgwick (1867; West Point, New York) and of General Winfield Scott (1873; United States Soldiers' and Airmen’s Home, Washington, D.C.). He was back in Europe in 1875, when he visited the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, who was working on his Statue of Liberty at the time. By then, however, Thompson's behavior was becoming erratic, evidently due to alcohol abuse. He managed to finish two more major works after his return to the United States in 1881--a monument to Admiral Samuel Du Pont for Washington, D.C. (now in Rockford Park, Wilmington, Delaware) and an equestrian bronze sculpture of Major General Ambrose E. Burnside for Providence, Rhode Island. But in 1890 he was committed to a hospital in Orange County, New Jersey, and two years later was transferred to a mental institution in Middletown, New York, where he died.

Joy (L'Allegra), ca. 1858

Plaster (oval), 17 x 15 in. (43.2 x 40 cm)

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Emigh (1976.105)

Grief (Il Penserosa), ca. 1858

Plaster (oval), 17 x 15 5/8 in. (43.2 x 40 cm)

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Emigh (1976.106)

Although long known simply as “Joy and Grief”, these plasters are almost certainly versions of two "marble medallions" that Thompson showed at National Academy of Design in 1860 under the titles “L'Allegra” and “La Penserosa”.(1) The titles were taken from John Milton's poems of about 1631, "L'Allegra" and "Il Penserosa," the latter being an especially popular source of inspiration for nineteenth-century artists. These works (or versions of them) were offered for sale that year at the annual exhibition of the Artists' Fund Society, where they were described and grouped as "a pair";(2) and one of them (or a cast) was shown in 1860 at the Young Men's Association in Troy, New York, lent by its owner C. H. Ludington.

It was not unusual for a sculptor to create pairs of reliefs, whether portraits or allegories. The popularity of such images in the 1850s was undoubtedly due in part to the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen's “Day and Night” (1815). Thorwaldsen was one of the most famous European artists in the first half of the nineteenth century, and his relief pair was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, from marble and plaster replicas and from engravings.(3)

The family of the original owners of Thompson's reliefs has traditionally believed that “Joy and Grief” were based on portraits of Marian and Isabel Colman, respectively. The girls were twins and daughters of Samuel Colman, a bookseller and publisher in Portland, Maine, and his wife, Pamela Atkins Chandler. While the children were still young, the Colmans moved to New York, where their father was known as "one of the first tasteful dealers in fine engravings in New York."(4) The elder Colman published the poems of Nathaniel Willis and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others, in volumes illustrated with fine engravings by leading American artists. The firm's offices on Broadway became a gathering place for artists. It is not surprising that Colman's son, also named Samuel, became an artist and, eventually, a well-known member of the Hudson River School of landscape painters.

It was undoubtedly through the younger Samuel that Launt Thompson was introduced to the Colman family. When Thompson arrived in New York in 1858, he took rooms in the Tenth Street Studio Building, which was at the center of artistic life in New York for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. Thompson certainly knew Colman by 1861, when he mentioned him in a letter,(5) but it is very likely that the two artists had met earlier, probably shortly after Thompson's arrival in New York.

The Colman sisters were amateur artists themselves and were frequent participants in events organized by their brother and his artist friends.(6) In 1856, for example, when Samuel Colman arranged for a group of painters, including Daniel Huntington and Asher B. Durand, to gather for the summer at his Jackson, New Hampshire, studio, the sisters went along. And it was there that Marian met the painter Aaron Draper Shattuck, whom she later married. If tradition is correct, Thompson gave Marian Colman the two relief sculptures as a wedding gift. The marriage took place in 1860, and the reliefs were likely to have been created shortly before, probably in 1858 or 1859.

Given Thompson's training under Erastus Dow Palmer, who was one of the most proficient and prolific users of the relief format, it is predictable that he would have investigated the technique and been successful at it. In 1859, shortly after he arrived in New York, a writer for the “Crayon” noted that Thompson was "producing beautiful medallion heads"; and in 1865 a visitor to the sculptor's rooms in the Studio Building wrote that "arranged along the wall, are ten or twelve medallion portraits, also in plaster."(7) Writing at about that same time, Henry Tuckerman remarked on Thompson's "remarkable talent for medallion portraits," which, "upon his taking up his residence in New York, in November 1858," brought him "ample employment."(8)

DBD

Bibliography:

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "Among the Studios, II," “Our Young Folks” 1 (December 1865): 775-78; Henry T. Tuckerman, “Book of the Artists” (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1867), pp. 594-95; Elizabeth K. Allen, ”'Picnic' “Drawings by the American Sculptor Launt Thompson," “Master Drawings” 35 (summer 1997): 115-41.