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Newsletter - Spring 2002
Interview

A Conversation about Plaster Casts

Student assistants Anna Kovacs ('02) and Yun Ku ('04) preparing plaster casts for installation

In the following interview, Marianne Doezema discusses Mount Holyoke’s
collection of plaster casts with museum research associate Diana Wolfe Larkin.

MD: Mount Holyoke was collecting plaster casts at a time when many other colleges, as well as major urban museums, were buying reproductions of great works of art. But I think the story of our collection is particularly fascinating. When did it begin?

DWL: A few casts were acquired as early as 1882, but the big push toward buying casts came beginning in 1900, in preparation for the opening of Dwight Hall, then called the Dwight Art Memorial. That building opened in 1902 and included extensive gallery space for plaster casts. Professor Louise Fitz-Randolph supervised the purchase of the casts and placed many of the orders, from Caproni and Co. in Boston as well as suppliers in London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

A fund-raising effort was organized to encourage alumnae to donate money for buying casts, and great care went into the purchases—just as they did when acquiring original works of art.

MD: What was her overall concept for this collection?

DWL: She wanted the most up-to-date teaching materials, and she wanted a survey collection. According to an essay written for the occasion of the dedication of Dwight Hall, the casts were intended to show “the development of artistic power” and to exemplify “the greatest productivity of Egypt and Greece and Italy.”

MD: The collection continued to expand for at least two decades after the opening of Dwight. We have some wonderful correspondence recording the ongoing process of ordering casts to be made and painstakingly packed for shipment to the United States.

DWL: Some of the letters are from Esther Van Deman, who earned her Ph.D. in 1898 from the University of Chicago and then taught at Mount Holyoke for three years. In 1901 she became the first woman to be a Roman field archaeologist, eventually spending 30 years of her life in
Rome. She stayed in contact with Louise Fitz-Randolph and went to great lengths to procure casts, including sections from the Ara Pacis. In December 1907, she wrote to “My Dear Miss Randolph: Finally, I have found the prices of the casts . . . it was not all my delay, for I have been hunting down various people for almost a month, in all my spare moments. . . . Hoping I may be forgiven for my delay—& the delay of these lazy Italians, too.”

The following April, she was still hard at work: “I’ve learned a lot about casts wrestling with these men. I confess now that it has been rather a nerve trying ordeal at times. But I was happy to do it for you & for the college.”

MD: We also have many of the original shipping receipts and customs documents.

DWL: These are revealing, too. For one thing, they indicate what was paid for these objects. The Beau Dieu of Amiens, an enormous sculpture from the façade of Amiens Cathedral, was purchased for 250 francs in 1903; and during that same period, the relief of Nike Adjusting her Sandal cost $5.60.

MD: According to the records we have, some replicas were made at the original monuments, but a number were made from objects in museums.

DWL: Yes, all of our Assyrian casts, for example, were made from reliefs in the British Museum. Some major European museums had their own plaster cast factory or funneled their business through an allied company in order to meet the demand for replicas, at a time when museums
throughout the United States were forming collections. The Metropolitan Museum alone had approximately 2000 plaster copies.

MD: Much of the Met’s collection is now in storage, though a substantial group was given to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, and other museums have been the beneficiaries of long-term loans. What has happened to Mount Holyoke’s cast collection since it was first assembled?

DWL: Interest in the casts has, indeed, fluctuated. In the mid-20th century, casts had fallen out of favor, and an auction in the 1960s resulted in a down-sizing of the collection. This occurred in preparation for the move in 1970 to the present Art Building, where gallery space was designated only for original works of art. The casts that had been retained were assigned to stairwells and to classroom corridors.

Today, the casts are again attracting attention. Mount Holyoke is one of a number of institutions that are realizing the continuing value of plaster replicas produced for an earlier generation. Although most teaching of art history is done with color slides today, slides don’t always give an adequate sense of scale. All of Mount Holyoke’s casts are the same size as the original. And, in some instances, casts reflect an original that is now missing or badly damaged.

MD: The casts were removed from the Art Building for safekeeping during the recent construction project. This provided an opportunity for us to reconsider their arrangement, and we very much appreciate your assistance in devising a coherent plan for reinstalling the 125 casts in our collection.

DWL: My goal was to display works from a single monument together, to keep works from one culture together, and to have a roughly chronological sequence within cultures. This wasn’t always possible to achieve given the configuration of the building, but the installation plans for both stairwells provide for instructive sequences as well as provocative juxtapositions. For the classroom spaces, faculty wanted to mix cultures for purposes of comparison, and so in one room the Amazon after Polykleitos and Verocchio’s David gesture to each other across the centuries.

MD: The most dramatic new spot for casts is visible from the museum lobby.

DWL: I agree. Figures from the east pediment of the Parthenon look down from a perch over the museum offices, providing visitors the opportunity to view them from below, as the originals would have been seen.