TitleBarnard Shipp
Date[c. 1855]
MediumMarble
DimensionsOverall: 29 × 29 × 12 1/4 in.
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Barnard Shipp, 1869
Object number107-S
Label TextShipp was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1813. Between 1824 and 1827 he studied at Partridge's Military Academy which was located first in Norwich, Vermont, and then in Middletown, Connecticut. He then attended a school for boys in Lexington, Kentucky, for about a year, and seems to have resided in that state, on and off, for the rest of his life. At the time of his presentation of the bust to the Academy, he was residing in Louisville, the city in which, many years later, in 1904, he would die.In 1828 Shipp began a career as an author by writing verses for local newspapers. He published volumes of poems in 1848 and in 1852. These were followed by several historical works including The History of Hernando DeSoto and Florida of 1881, and The Indian and Antiquities of America of 1897.
This work entered the Academy's collection described in Council minutes only as "a bust by the late Mr. Bartholomew." Nowhere in the Academy's records is the identity of the sitter documented. Circumstantial evidence, however, strongly suggests that it is a portrait of the donor. Shipp traveled extensively in Europe from 1854 to 1857, which provided opportunity for him to sit for his portrait in Bartholomew's studio in Rome. The visage of the bust is that of a man in his late thirties or early forties, or Shipp's age at the time he was abroad. The base carved in the shape of a stack of books is emblematic of Shipp's profession. (The artist no doubt recalled his own early apprenticeship to a book-binder in the execution of this distinctive detail, and also may have been aware of Connecticut sculptor Chauncey B. Ives's 1840 bust of Ithiel Town which is mounted in a similar fashion.) Further evidence in support of the identification of this bust comes from its comparison with an oil portrait of Shipp by an unidentified artist now in the collection of the University of Virginia. Although the painting shows him at a younger age than the bust, the features depicted in both are similar enough in both to base a conclusion that the sitter was the same for both portraits.
This bust is listed in the Academy's catalogue of 1911 as being by Bartholomew. Some time later it because registered as a portrait bust of Bartholomew by Launt Thompson, apparently on someone's quixotic decision that the clearly chiseled signature on the back of the sculpture was, instead, an identification label.
