UNKNOWN LIFE MASKS OF GREAT AMERICANS.
Editor's Note.—The recovery of these busts has an uncommon human and historical importance, for they give us the first true revelation of these great men's faces. Now, after so many years, when our knowledge of their personal appearance, owing to the varied interpretations of artists, is largely traditional, we have them before us in the flesh, so that at a glance we know them as we know our friends—as living men.
WHAT one generation fails to appreciate, and therefore decries and sneers at, a subsequent one comprehends and applauds. It is conspicuously so in discovery, in science, in poetry, and in art; so much depends upon the point of view and the environment of the observed and the observer. Were this not so, the very remarkable collection of busts from life masks taken at the beginning of
the second quarter of this century by John Henri Isaac Browere, almost an unknown name to-day, would not have been hidden away until now, while the circumstances that led to their discovery are as curious as that the busts should have been neglected and forgotten for so long.
I was familiar with the tragic story told by Henry S. Randall, in his ponderous life of President Jefferson, of how the venerated sage of Monticello, within a year of his decease, was nearly suffocated by "an artist from New York," Browere, who attempted to take a mask of his living features, and how, in fear of bodily harm from the ex-President's irate black body-servant, "the artist shattered his cast in an instant" and was glad to depart hence quickly with the fragments which he was permitted to pick up.
JOHN HENRI ISAAC BROWERE.
From the original water-color, of the same size as the reproduction, painted by his son, Albertus D. O. Browere, and now owned by Mrs. Frank Van Benschoten, Hudson, N. Y.
With this statement fixed in my mind, I came across a letter from James Madison to Henry D. Gilpin, written October 25, 1827, in which Madison writes, respecting Jefferson's appearance, "Browere's bust in plaster, from his mode of taking it, will probably show a perfect likeness."
I was struck, of course, by the utter inconsistency of Randall's circumstantial account of the shattered cast picked up in fragments and Madison's pointed observations upon "Browere's bust" as then in existence, fifteen months after Jefferson's death. Thus it became important to ascertain the exact status of the subject; a task I
