The Day Jefferson Got Plastered (June 1963 | Volume: 14, Issue: 4)

The Day Jefferson Got Plastered

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Authors: Donald B. Webster, Jr.

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June 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 4

On October 15, 1825, there appeared at Monticello, the home of the venerable Thomas Jefferson, one John Henri Isaac Browere, sculptor and celebrity hunter. He had come, he announced, to make a likeness of Mr. Jefferson. Browere had already gained some degree of lame for his busts of well-known people. Not carved from wood or chiselled from marble, these busts were cast of plaster, in the European manner, from molds taken of the features of living subjects. He made the molds with a grout whose formula he himself had concocted and which he jealously guarded.

Critics were divided on the merits of Browere and his technique, some deriding him as a mere mechanic and calling his New York studio a “plaster factory.” But none could deny that his work achieved a stark realism uncommon in that day. His plaster busts showed the age-lined brow, the pock-marked face; his subjects appeared as they were, not as artists generally portrayed them. His life masks were, and remain, the most authentic likenesses of some historic figures who lived in a day before photography provided more easily obtained but similarly uncompromising portraits.

Before visiting Monticello, Browere had that same year made molds of the aged Marquis de Lafayette, of Mayor Philip Hone of New York, of Governor DeWitt Clinton, of Jacob Brown (then General in Chief of the Army), and of former President James Madison and his wife, Dolley. At the sculptor’s request, Madison had written Jelferson about Browere, recommending him in glowing terms. So the affable patriarch of Monticello, then eighty-two years old, was prepared for the New Yorker’s appearance. He looked over Browere’s testimonials while the sculptor bragged about his famous subjects. Then, after hearing Browere’s smooth assurances that the entire operation would last only twenty minutes, Jefferson assented to having a mold made. He told his apprehensive and protesting family, as one of them later related, that “he could not find it in his heart to refuse a man so trifling a favor, who had come so far.”

Jefferson and Browere retired to the east wing sunroom, and a slave, Burwell, removed his master’s coat and shirt while Browere closed the door against the chattering womenfolk.. In view of Jefferson’s age, Browere had intended to make the molds in separate stages, doing the neck and shoulders first, then the face, and finally the back of the head. At the last minute he changed his mind: why not, he thought, try molding the entire bust at once? Unaware of this decision, Jefferson had no idea what he was in for. Instead of twenty minutes, it took Browere an hour just to mold the neck and shoulders.

Next came the head itself. Browere had the frail octogenarian lie on a couch, stuck breathing straws in his nostrils, and applied a coating of oil to his face to keep the grout from sticking. Then, while the old man closed his eyes