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

allet in his sculptures. He used rotating pedestals to make motion an integral part of
many of his compositions. The gracefully disposed and rhythmically repeated legs, feet,
arms, hands and heads of The Three Graces endow the sculpture with a balletic quality
that must have been enhanced when the group was turned.
Unfortunately, Josephine died before Canova completed The Three Graces. When
the sculpture was finished in 1816, it passed into the hands of her son, Eugène
Beauharnais (later known as The Duke of Leuchtenberg) who took it with him into exile
in Munich. There, it became part of Beauharnais’ collection of art and memorabilia,
which he installed in the semi-public gallery of his palace. Meanwhile, even before 1816,
Canova had begun a second copy of The Three Graces for another friend and patron,
John Russell, the sixth Duke of Bedford. 61 This version is nearly identical to its
predecessor with the exception that Canova reduced its size slightly, and reduced the
supporting rectangular plinth to a more slender column (fig.8). Throughout the first half
of the nineteenth century, American tourists visited both the Duke of Leuchtenberg’s
palace in Munich and the Duke of Bedford’s country estate, Woburn Abbey, sixty miles
outside of London, to view the two original versions of Canova’s Three Graces. 62 The
well-traveled Haight family may have seen both sculptures.
61 For information about this second version, see Alison Yarrington, “The Three Graces
and the Temple of Feminine Virtue,” Sculpture Journal, 7 (2002): 30-43; Malcolm
Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture
(Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 159-68; John Kenworthy-Browne, “The
Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey and the Architecture of the Temple of the Graces,”
in The Three Graces, 61-71.
62 After 1837, the plaster model of the sculpture that had once resided in Canova’s studio
in Rome was also on view, in the Gipsoteca Museo Canoviano in the sculptor’s home
town of Possagno.
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