Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

In January, 1870, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow received a letter from a group of friends presenting him with a marble bust of the subject of his poem “Sandalphon”. The letter read “A few of your admirers and friends of Flora Freeman ask your acceptance of her “Sandalphon.” Will you give it a place among your house hold objects, and confer a great pleasure on us?” Among the signatories to the letter were Longfellow’s brother-in-law Thomas Gold Appleton, Anna Shaw Greene - the sister of slain Civil War officer Robert Gould Shaw, Helen Bigelow – later one of the founders of the Worcester Art Museum, and other prominent members of Boston society.

The bust was sculpted by Florence Freeman. Born Ann Florence Freeman in Boston in 1836, she moved to Italy to study and work as a sculptor, eventually setting up a studio in Rome in 1862, where she was part of a network of expatriate women sculptors, many with their own ties to Massachusetts. Freeman continued to reside in Rome for the rest of her life, dying there in 1883. Surviving examples of her work appear to be few indeed, and this bust of Sandalphon is perhaps the best known. Markings on the back of the sculpture indicate that Freeman made it in 1864, not too long after she set up shop in Rome. During the Longfellow family’s Grand Tour of Europe in 1868-1869, family members visited many artists’ studios, but unfortunately no mention of this particular work is made, and it is unclear if Henry Longfellow or any of his relatives visited Freeman’s studio.

Longfellow had finished writing “Sandalphon” twelve years to the day before the sculpture and its accompanying letter were sent to him. He recorded the occasion in his journal on January 18, 1858, writing “Finished the poem, "Sandalphon,"--a strange legend from the Talmud, of the Angel of Prayer.” Inspiration for the poem had come to him just a couple of months earlier, when on November 2, 1857 he was paid a visit by Swiss poet Emmanuel Vitalis Scherb. Longfellow wrote that during that November evening “Scherb read to me some curious Talmudic legends from Corrodi's “Chiliasmus” of the great angel Sandalphon . . .” In the poem Longfellow refers to the title character as “the Angel of Glory” and “the Angel of Prayer”. The poem would be published later in 1858 as part of Longfellow’s collection Birds of Passage.

Although we can’t be sure of where in his home Henry Longfellow initially put the sculpture, it has occupied a prominent place of display in one of the house’s first-floor hallways since at least 1912.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.