PRESIDING DIVINITIES: IDEAL SCULPTURE IN ... - Indiana University

the genteel, spiritual and domestic qualities that ideal sculptures embodied with white
skin and, more broadly, white culture. 5
Both Acklen and Lockwood also expressed nationalist ideals through their
sculpture collections. Acklen’s collection of marble “True Women” demonstrated her
loyalty to antebellum, Southern gender codes and, by extension, the rhetoric of the “Lost
Cause.” Lockwood, on the other hand, used his ideal sculpture in conjunction with the
rest of his art collection to present American expansionist policies (in which he was
deeply invested) as a benign and divinely ordained project of domestication.
Stereographs provide important records of the interiors of both Acklen’s villa,
Belmont, and Lockwood’s summer estate, Elmwood. Stereographs, which juxtapose two
photographic images of an identical scene shot from slightly different angles, create an
illusion of three-dimensional space. They were also cheap and easy to reproduce. 6 These
photographs were thus ideally suited to convey a highly experiential impression of an
interior to a potentially wide audience. The fact that both Acklen and Lockwood
commissioned stereographs of their homes says something about their ambitions—both
collectors wanted to publicize their interiors. This idea is born out by the fact that both
Acklen and Lockwood allowed (and possibly invited) newspaper reporters to publish
5 For a cultural history of how whiteness was constructed through material goods in the
nineteenth century, see Bridget T. Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture
and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2003). On nineteenth-century racial hierarchy and marble sculpture, see also Jennifer
DeVere Brody, “Shading Meaning.”
6 See Jim Fowles, “Stereography and the Standardization of Vision,” Journal of
American Culture 17, no.2 (1994): 89-93 and Robert J. Silverman, “The Stereograph and
Photographic Depiction in the 19 th Century,” Technology and Culture 34 (October 1993):
729-56.
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