Seth Kaller, Inc.

Daniel Webster was hailed as a giant of the House of Representatives and the Senate and as the greatest Secretary of State.

This bronze statue of Daniel Webster was created by American sculptor Thomas Ball in the year following the famed senator’s death. Webster stands with his right hand tucked into his lapel in a pose reminiscent of Napoleon. The sculpture also captured the senator’s rumpled clothing and expanded waistline.

It was one of the earliest patented and mass-produced sculptures in the United States. Ball assigned his design patent No. 590 to New York art dealer George W. Nichols. To produce a series of bronze replicas, Nichols turned to the J. T. Ames Foundry in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Common iconographic symbols in this sculpture include the truncated column that stands for Fortitude and Constancy, a reference to Webster’s dedication to the preservation of the Union. The two books at the base of the column represent Rhetoric, an acknowledgment of Webster’s eloquence and oratorical powers.

Ball later created two monumental statues of Webster. A modified enlargement of this work cast in Munich in 1876 stands in New York’s Central Park. The other from 1885-1886 stands at the statehouse in Concord, New Hampshire, after original sculptor Martin Milmore and his brother both died before completing it.

[DANIEL WEBSTER]. Thomas Ball, Bronze Statue. Chicopee, MA: J. T. Ames Foundry, 1853. 27¾ in. tall.

Inventory #27252       Price: $10,500

Historical Background
After an undistinguished start as an artist, Thomas Ball turned to sculpture in 1850. The following year, he produced a small portrait bust of singer Jenny Lind, and her popularity and his skill led to a considerable sale of plaster copies.

Ball next turned his attention to Daniel Webster, creating a life-size bust and a statuette of the orator and statesman. Ball started the bust from photographs and engravings until Webster passed by Ball’s studio. He completed the bust days before Webster’s death, and the subscription list for copies quickly filled. Ball later used the bust for his statues of Webster.

Ball created this small Webster statue in 1853, and according to his reminiscences, “The first day it was seen, I had the very tempting offer of five hundred dollars for the model and the right to multiply it. I accepted the offer with avidity, feeling relieved from any further responsibility. The shrewd art-dealer who bought it must have made five thousand dollars out of it, at the very least. But I could not have done it; so I never murmured, and was only too delighted at the success, and to receive from the Charitable Mechanics’ Association a first-class gold medal for it.”[1] A contemporary newspaper wrote of Ball’s statuette of Webster that it was “acknowledged by every one to be a remarkably correct and happy delineation of the great statesman.”[2]

To produce bronze replicas like this one, the “shrewd art dealer” George W. Nichols employed James Tyler Ames, who with his brother Nathan P. Ames had moved the family tool and cutlery business to Chicopee, Massachusetts, in 1829. The company began creating works in brass and bronze in 1835 and added an iron foundry in 1845. During the Civil War, Ames became one of the Union’s most important manufacturers of sidearms, swords, light artillery, and heavy ordnance. The Ames Manufacturing Company later cast both the bronze doors of the East Wing of the United States Capitol (1868) and Daniel Chester French’s The Minute Man statue at the Lexington-Concord bridge (1874).

Nichols produced numerous replicas in plaster and Parian (porcelain) ware, and the Ames foundry produced more than 200 statuettes in bronze. They were with or without drapery over the column and with a “fine” or “ordinary” patina.[3]

The commercial success of the Webster statue encouraged Ball to create a companion piece of Henry Clay in 1858. Ball also claimed the copyright for his Clay statue (No. 1060) on November 9, 1858, and assigned it on the same day to George W. Nichols, who again turned to the Ames foundry in Chicopee to cast bronze copies.

Daniel Webster (1782-1852) was born in New Hampshire, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1801, and was admitted to the bar in 1805. He represented New Hampshire in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1813 to 1817. As a preeminent attorney, he argued 223 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning about half, and playing a key role in eight of the Court’s most important constitutional law cases decided between 1801 and 1824. Chief Justice John Marshall accepted Webster’s arguments in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), finding that a state’s grant of a business charter was a contract that the state could not impair; in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), finding that a state could not tax a federal agency (specifically, a branch of the Bank of the United States), for the power to tax was a “power to destroy”; and in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), finding that a state could not interfere with Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. Webster represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1823 to 1827 and then in the Senate from 1827 to 1841 and again from 1845 to 1850. His 1830 reply to South Carolina’s Robert Y. Hayne is considered one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the Senate. Webster’s oratorical abilities made him a powerful Whig leader, and he served as Secretary of State, first from 1841 to 1843 under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, and again from 1850 to 1852 under President Millard Fillmore. His support of the Compromise of 1850 may have postponed a civil war, but it cost him politically in his increasingly abolitionist home state of Massachusetts.

Thomas Ball (1819-1911) was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He worked at the New England Museum, the predecessor of the Boston Museum, and became an apprentice to the museum wood carver Abel Brown. His earliest works included busts of Jenny Lind and Daniel Webster, which sold well before being widely copied by others. Ball was also an accomplished singer in Boston churches and for the Handel and Haydn Society. He began his artistic career as a painter but soon moved to sculpture. In 1854, Ball moved to Florence, Italy, to study but returned to Boston in 1857. He again went to Italy in 1865 and remained there until 1897. When he returned to the United States, he lived in New Jersey and had a studio in New York City. He wrote two autobiographies, My Three Score Years (1880) and My Three Score Years and Ten (1890). Among his most prominent works are his bronze of Daniel Webster in Central Park, New York City; a marble statue of John A. Andrew in the Massachusetts State House in Boston; a bronze equestrian statue of George Washington at Boston Public Garden; the bronze Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.; and his bronze George Washington Monument in Methuen, Massachusetts. His students included American sculptor Daniel Chester French.

George Ward Nichols (1831-1885) was born in Maine. He worked as a journalist, art critic, and art dealer in New York City until the Civil War. He published and sold photographs of Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South (Old Kentucky Home) painting in 1859. In 1862, he entered the Union army as an aide-de-camp to General John C. Fremont. He later served as an aide-de-camp to General William T. Sherman during the Atlanta campaign and “March to the Sea.” At the end of the war, he left the army with the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel. His The Story of the Great March: From the Diary of a Staff Officer (1865) was a bestseller and was translated into several languages. His February 1867 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine entitled “Wild Bill” created the legend of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. Nichols later moved to Cincinnati, where he became president of the Cincinnati College of Music. In 1868, he married the much younger Maria Longworth after cataloging her family’s vast collection of artwork. She later became the founder of Rockwood Pottery and was a patron of the fine arts.