John Paul Jones

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TitleJohn Paul Jones

Date1780

MediumPlaster

DimensionsOverall: 28 1/2 × 20 × 11 1/2 in.

Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Purchased from the American Academy of Fine Arts, 1842

Object number53-S

Label TextIn 1842 the National Academy purchased two plaster casts of Houdon's bust of John Paul Jones from the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York. Only one of these (53-S) survives in the collection.
Houdon was commissioned in 1780 to model the bust of Jones (1747-1792), the Scottish-born naval hero of the American Revolution, by the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris. A version in plaster, tinted the color of terra cotta, was shown in the Paris Salon of 1781. The sculptor depicted Jones in uniform with the military service cross given him by Louis XVI pinned on the left side of his jacket.
In 1786 Jones ordered a number of plaster replicas to be given to his friends and admirers in America and Europe, including Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Jones listed eight other American recipients in a 1788 letter to Jefferson (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.): Edward Carrington, James Madison, William Irvine, John Jay, John Ross, Arthur St. Clair, Charles Thomson, and Jeremiah Wadsworth. Although verification is now impossible, it is quite likely that the older of the busts in the Academy's collection today (53-S) was owned by one of these eight men. When this bust was cleaned of its paint in 1904, a terra-cotta-colored undercoating, possibly the original paint, was discovered. Academy minutes recorded the Council's belief "that this is the original described in the correspondence of John Paul Jones as a bust made in this material," that is, the bust shown in the Salon of 1781. That seems unlikely.
The fate of the second replica of the Jones bust purchased from the American Academy in 1842 is unclear, but it is almost certainly not the one now in the National Academy's collection (54-S). Academy minutes of December 11, 1843, record the authorization for the curator to "exchange one of the busts of Paul Jones belonging to the Academy for the cast of Esculapius [sic]." This action does not seem to have been carried out, for in 1844 George Lowden, a grand-nephew of Jones, wrote to Academy president Samuel F. B. Morse, noting that the Academy owned two busts of Jones and requesting permission to have a plaster cast made from one of them. Morse suggested that the Council approve this request, or consider giving Lowden one of the busts. Two busts of Jones were still in the Academy's possession in 1846 and 1852, according to the collection inventories done in those years; therefore it seems that if Lowden received anything, it was a copy made from one of these. The Academy's 1911 collection inventory, however, records only one Jones bust by Houdon, suggesting that by then the second bust from the 1842 purchase may had either been destroyed, lost, or given away.
Plaster replicas and copies of Houdon's original are legion, and the Academy's bust has itself been copied many times. The most notable of the Academy's copying projects took place under the direction of the artist and National Academician Francis Davis Millet in 1904, when fourteen plaster casts and six bronze versions were made. This undertaking appears to have been occasioned by the 1906 commemorative celebration at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, honoring Jones; the printed program for that event lists the recipients of Millett's copies.
In 1906, at the Council's request, the sculptor Herbert Adams made a gelatin mold of the bust. Ten copies in plaster and bronze were authorized at the time. Others were made in 1911, in 1918, and as late as 1955. Also in 1918, a bronze copy was authorized for Irving R. Wiles to present to Thomas R. Proctor, founding sponsor of the Academy's Proctor Prize for portraiture. The second bust of Jones in the Academy's collection today (54-S) was probably a product of one of these several copying ventures.
Plaster copies made from Adams's 1906 mold of the Academy's bust were acquired, through gift or purchase, by the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Musée de Trocadero, Paris; the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), London; John S. Barnes, New York; John L. Cadwalader, New York; and the following members of the National Academy of Design: Herbert Adams, Sargent Kendall, Francis Davis Millet (who acquired two casts), J. Alden Weir, and Irving R. Wiles. More plaster copies were made in 1907. These went to Mrs. Abraham Lansing, Albany, New York, and to the Sons of the American Revolution. A Mr. Cutting acquired a 1910 plaster; Irving R. Wiles acquired another plaster in 1911; and in 1955 a cast was made for the Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (now the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art).
Bronze casts from the 1906 edition went to the U.S. Department of the Navy, Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland; John S. Barnes, New York; Horace Porter, New York; John I. Waterbury, Morristown,
New Jersey; and J. Alden Weir, New York. Also, as noted, a bronze was produced in 1918 for presentation to Thomas R. Proctor.
The most complete list of previous and current holders of copies of Houdon's bust of Jones was made in 1975 by James W. Cheevers, senior curator of the U.S. Naval Academy (copy, NAD archives).