This year, the country turned 250, and the New York Historical marked the occasion with an exhibition called “Democracy Matters.”
The show, as described by the Historical’s website, asks some searching questions: “Why does democracy matter? What opportunities does it offer? What does it look like in action? Whom does it represent?”
Into the exhibit at the Klingenstein Family Gallery went a 7-foot-tall statue of Thomas Jefferson, the principal writer of our Declaration of Independence. In one hand, at his side, Jefferson holds the Declaration. In the other, pressed over his heart, a quill.
Or at least there was supposed to be.
Somewhere between the statue’s old home in the research library and its new home in the gallery, the quill broke.
“The Jefferson statue is a fragile work — made of plaster not bronze,” New York Historical spokesperson Marybeth Ihle said, a statement both factual and metaphorical.
Museum visitors won’t notice. The quill has already been fixed. But this is just the latest drama to befall the statue.
Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy commissioned the French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers to create the sculpture in 1833. Levy sent the bronze to Congress and gifted the plaster cast to New York City.
Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the U.S. Navy, intended the statue as a monument to religious liberty and proof that Jews had found a place among the city’s elite. Meanwhile, Democrats were in a pitched battle with the Whig party and found a convenient symbol in the statue (and in Jefferson), something that spoke to their party’s ideals and power, according to Michele Bogart, a professor emerita of art history at Stony Brook University and former member of the Public Design Commission.
The statue’s movements are a bit hard to trace, though a PowerPoint presentation on the Public Design Commission’s website offers some help.
In 1887, a magazine writer found the plaster Jefferson in a “shabby apartment in City Hall called the Governor’s Room…It is impossible to see it to any advantage, since it is pushed up close in a corner, with its back to the window, in front of which it stands.”
From there, it went to the basement and perhaps to the offices of the Board of Child Welfare (a setting found “not consistent with the prominence of the personality of the statue”) and/or the anteroom of the Women’s Court of the Jefferson Court House, the presentation says.
By 1919 it found a more permanent home in the Aldermanic Chamber (now the City Council Chamber). It exhibited long-standing damage.
By 2001, then-Councilmember Charles Barron had come to see the Jefferson statue as a symbol of the country’s original sin. Though Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence he was also the owner of 600 enslaved people over the course of his lifetime.
Barron pushed to have the statue removed, describing Jefferson, the man, as a “slave-owning pedophile,” according to reports. But he would have to wait two decades for political will to gather behind him.
In 2021, as monuments and statues were tumbling across the nation amid the Black Lives Matter movement, the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus argued that “the individuals memorialized within the confines of our People’s House (should) be reflective not only of the best traditions of our city’s history and its diversity but unquestionable character.”
The Public Design Commission voted unanimously to remove the statue from the chamber and place it on loan to the New York Historical. In the museum’s telling, council members asked that the statue be moved “to a location where it could be interpreted within a historical context.”
Reached by phone this week, Barron laughed when he learned of the broken quill and the statue’s display in an exhibit about Democracy.
“What democracy? This is a hypocrisy,” he said. “That statue should not exist anywhere, and if it’s broken it should stay that way.”
Barron doesn’t want Jefferson erased so much as he wants him left to text.
“He should be written in the history books,” he said. “But not a statue. Statues should be for heroes. Statues should be for freedom fighters.”
Bogart was among the scholars who argued against the move.
“I’m quite on record as opposing the removals of statues,” she said recently.
She suggested museum visitors examine the tiny incisions and crosshatching worked across the surface of the statue or Jefferson’s exaggerated forehead, an attempt to get at the seriousness of the man’s mind.
“The work of art gets sort of lost in all of these fights,” she said. “There are multiple layers of meaning embodied by this work of art, and pretty much all works of art.”
So what of the broken quill? Bogart has been to the museum to see the statue in its new place, though at the time she wasn’t aware it had been damaged in the move. She’ll have to go back, she said, to take a closer look.
“Any damage to a work of art matters,” she said.
This particular statue has had its share. According to the commission’s history of the piece, sculptor John Frazee had to tend to it upon its initial arrival in New York owing to “damages which occurred en route.”
Ryan Kost
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