Charles Calverley (1833-1914) [Section 107, Lot 109]
Sculptor and Stone Carver
Charles Calverley was born on November 1, 1833 in Albany. He was one of four children to Charles Calverley, a carpenter and machinist, and Elizabeth Chalton. The death of his father in 1846 led him to drop out of school as age 13 to support his family.
Calverley apprenticed for John Dixon, a local stonecutter who is responsible for some of the carvings for the New York State Capitol, and Albany City Hall. For the first year he cleaned out the stoves and made fires, earning him $1 a week. Over the next seven years he studied under Dixon mastering the skills and techniques of a stonecutter.
In 1853 his work came to the attention of another local artist, the neoclassical sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. Palmer bought Calverley’s contract from Dixon and worked for him over the next 15 years. Alongside other apprentices such as Jonathan Scott Hartley, and T.H. Matteson, together they carved marble following models Palmer had first assembled using plaster and clay. For a brief period of time Calverley’s brother John worked for Palmer. However, he ended up a casualty as a Union Soldier during the Civil War.
In 1868 he moved to New York City with his wife, Susan Hand of Sandy Hill (later Hudson Falls), whom he married two years prior. He opened a studio in the Madison Square Park neighborhood on 25th Street where he submitted a bust of President Lincoln to the National Academy of Design. The bust received much acclaim wherein he became an associate member of the group in 1874.
Calverley became well-known for carving medallions or bas-reliefs, like “Little Ida” which is still on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He stumbled upon this his source of inspiration by accident in 1881, as the young girl was taking care of a boy whom he was doing a portrait of, noticing the “string of alabaster beads around her long neck and large red ear-drops.” “Little Ida” is one of his most well-known medallions. He revised the portrait in 1899 to include the inscription “The Race John Brown Died For.”
Throughout his life Calverly did over 250 busts, medallions, tablets, and statues. Some notables include President Washington, President Garfield, and Lafayette Foster, a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, who later served on the Supreme Court. Calverley’s statue of him is on permanent display in the U.S. Capitol. He also did 19th century literature masters like Sir Walter Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. His most famous is Scottish poet Robert Burns which he did in 1888 for Washington Park in Albany and later Central Park. It garnered the attention of Andrew Carnegie who had a life size bust commissioned for himself and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Calverley died on February 25, 1914 of pneumonia in Essex Fells, NJ 1914. He is interred at Albany Rural Cemetery and his plot has a self-portrait bronze bust on the main monument. His wife has a bas-relief as on the same monument. A medallion of his mother, and brother, John are nearby in the family plot.