Dartmouth Events

Tinted Antiquity, From Cornish to Constantinople

This talk examines two New Hampshire–rooted encounters with the color of ancient Greek sculpture. In 1900, the archaeological illustrator, Joseph Lindon Smith, who was part of the Dublin Art Colony, traveled to Constantinople to produce oil paintings that illustrated the vivid colors of the famous Alexander Sarcophagus. Securing unique access to the sculpture under nearly impossible political circumstances, Smith produced life‑size color renderings of it—the earliest modern record of the sarcophagus's colorful decoration. By 1930, he found much of the sculpture's surface already severely faded, making his still-extant paintings crucial documents of the sculpture's original appearance.

In Cornish, in 1904, Augustus Saint-Gaudens assembled a montage of plaster cast scenes copied from Parthenon Frieze for the exterior of his Small Studio and then had them, as his son recalled, "laboriously and delicately tinted" by several painters before he approved the results. Later conservation work revealed that he revised the scheme from saturated hues to a more toned-down palette—material evidence of taste under revision.

Together, these cases demonstrate that New England artists were important protagonists in a series of international experiments to demonstrate the colors of ancient sculpture to the public and to dispel modern myths of a white classical past.

Image credit:

Joseph Lindon, Smith, Reproduction (oil painting on canvas) of the so-called "Alexander Sarcophagus," Boston Museum of Fine Arts 00.502 (www.mfa.org)