Thomas Ball

Several of Ball’s works were exhibited in the 1840s at the Boston Athenaeum, the American Art Union, and the Apollo Art Association, but the uncertainty of commissions made it necessary for him to seek additional means of income. He did this through his talents in music, singing bass in a paid position for the choir of St. Paul’s Church. He frequently performed solo parts for the Handel and Haydn Society, which included the role of Adam in Haydn’s Creation; and lead roles in Rossini’s Moses in Egypt and Stabat Mater, and Handel’s Samson and Messiah. In 1848 he sang the title role of Mendelssohn’s Elijah in the first American performance of that oratorio.

The Society committee honored Ball by presenting him a check for $150 and a gold watch in 1851 (the watch was later lost in the Florence burglary). These came with a note that read “As the medium of this memento, we take the occasion to tender our best wishes for your health and prosperity, and our hopes that your purse, like the widow’s cruse of oil, may fail not, till Time in his course around the dial of your Watch shall find you, like the Elijah of old, worthy to die.” Ball sang the title role many times, and his voice remained powerful and vibrant. Sixty years after his first performance, he agreed to sing Elijah again on January 14, 1908, with the Montclair Oratorio Society.

Ball’s first sculpture came about after an unhappy love affair. He could not concentrate on painting, and, in an attempt to distract himself from his thoughts, he began to model clay heads, at the suggestion of his friend the sculptor John C. King. In 1851 he modeled a small cabinet bust of the great singer Jenny Lind. These became very successful, as the coloratura toured the United States, capturing the hearts of the American public, and Ball’s career as a sculptor was launched. After executing cabinet busts, principally of other musicians (among them George J. Webb, George F. Hayter, and Charles C. Perkins), he modeled a life-size portrait bust of Daniel Webster, completed just after Webster’s death, which gained him much recognition. It was constructed chiefly from memory, since the Statesman never sat for him, and depicted a convincing resemblance of Webster’s features and personality.

Webster held a special attraction to Ball, who had admired him since boyhood. The sculptor then executed a small statuette, hoping to win a commission for a life-size statue. Although not selected, the model was mass-produced in plaster and bronze and sold to the mourning public in 1853. The orator and statesman is depicted as if prepared to address Congress, standing erect, his right hand tucked in his jacket in Napoleonic fashion. Many years later, this statuette was enlarged to heroic proportions and placed in New York’s Central Park. Ball later modeled a companion study of statesman Henry Clay, 1858, and the two statues formed a complementary pair, with the wiry figure of Clay balanced by the ample-bodied Webster. The success of these helped establish a business of small plaster statuettes and portrait studies.

At age 35, with growing success in the sculpture profession, Ball married Ellen Louisa Wild and set sail for Italy in October 1854, aboard the steamer America, intent upon studying and working with the artists in Florence. Although late in establishing his profession, he expanded his reputation and became a close friend of the sculptors Hiram Powers and Joel T. Hart. Among their colleagues were the painter-poet Thomas B. Read, the painter Francis Alexander, and the poets Browning. The expatriates formed a very close social circle and often held receptions where the conversation was interspersed with music and an occasional recitative or theater production, and with refreshments of tea and cakes.

Ball returned to Boston in 1857 and gained the award to build an equestrian statue of George Washington for the city after the untimely death of Thomas Crawford, who had originally been granted the project. He spent four years (1860-64) laboring over this model in a large warehouse which belonged to the Chickering Piano Factory; the Chickerings were relatives by marriage. He accepted a young pupil and apprentice, Martin Milmore, to assist him with background tasks. The statue was cast in bronze at the Ames Foundry in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and placed in the Boston Public Garden. Partridge compared this work to the great heroic equestrian monument of Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio in Venice, c. 1488.

After the statue was completed, Ball returned to Florence in 1865 and in 1870 built a large villa on a hillside near the Porta Romana just off Poggio Imperiale, next door to Hiram Powers. His villa and studio on via Dante da Castiglione became an academy abroad for young sculptors who included Daniel Chester French and William Couper. Many other sculptors, including Frank Duveneck and Anne Whitney, used Ball’s studio to prepare models for casting and making final refinements (For more information on Villa Ball refer to the biography of William Couper, “An American Sculptor on the Grand Tour”).