Whatever else Orin might or might not be, he was undeniably energetic.
He missed no opportunities through neglect, and he never left undone
anything which was likely to tell for his own advantage. He had once
before called upon the world to admire his work on the completion of
his masterpiece, a figure called _Hop Scotch_, representing according
to Bently "a tenement-house girl having a fit on the sidewalk." He
therefore understood well enough the usual methods of managing these
affairs, and as the ladies who had taken him up felt bound to make a
point of patronizing the exhibition, the affair succeeded capitally.
Stanton had no regular studio in Boston, and had for this work secured
a room on the ground floor of a business building. The light, to be
sure, was not all that might have been desired, but it was abundant,
window screens were cheap and the sculptor not over sensitive to
subtile gradations of values. He made no attempt to decorate the room
for his exhibition, partly from a certain indifference to its bareness,
and partly from a native shrewdness which enabled him to feel both the
difficulty of doing this adequately, and the fact that the statue
appeared better as things were. There were a few benches, scantily
cushioned, two or three chairs, not all in perfect repair, with the
paraphernalia essential to his work. A few sketches in crayon and
pencil were pinned to the wall, and among them the artist had had the
fatuity to pin up a photograph of that most beautiful figure, the
_Winged Victory_ of Paionios.
The study for _America_, which was of colossal size, represented a
woman seated, leaning her left hand upon a rock. The right hand held
slightly uplifted a bunch of maize and tobacco plant; her head wore a
crown in which the architectural embattlements not uncommon in classic
headdresses had been curiously and wonderfully transformed into the
likeness of the domed capitol at Washington. The figure was completely
draped, only the head, the left hand and the right arm to the elbow
emerging from the voluminous folds in which it was wrapped, save that
the tip of one sandalled foot was visible, resting upon a ballot box.
Half covered by the hem of the robe were seen a tomahawk, an axe, a
printer's stick, a calumet, and various other emblems of American life,
civilized and barbarous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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