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

century. 83 The bone of contention was not the nudes themselves, so much as the
appropriate spaces in which they could properly be displayed. Public spaces, where
people of different ages, sexes and classes could mingle, were suspect. Even within a
private home, the more discreetly a nude painting or statue could be displayed the better.
When Rosalie Stier Calvert ordered two plaster casts of the Apollo Belvedere and the
Venus de Medici for the drawing room of her Maryland plantation house in 1807, her
father objected. In a letter to her sister, Calvert mused that “…if I cannot put them in the
drawing room, I shall put them in my husband’s study.” 84 Libraries and studies were ideal
for the display of nudes because these spaces were set apart from the social traffic of the
household and reserved for serious, masculine concerns, or for the family to use in
isolation. 85 The Haights’ library was also a suitable setting for The Three Graces because
it was an educational space, and thus framed the sculpture, not as a hedonistic display of
female flesh, but as an instructional tool and a sign of the family’s erudition.
In order to understand how the Haights intended The Three Graces to function in
their library, one need only look at how the sculpture appears in Calyo’s gouache, which
after all, is as much an idealized portrait of a room as it is a portrait of a family. In the
portrait, The Three Graces appears as the centerpiece of the Haights’ library. It sits
slightly back in a frescoed niche, bathed in raking light from the conservatory on the left.
It dominates the space of the portrait, and its influence over the family is conveyed by the
formal parallels between the sculpture and the Haights themselves. The three figures in
83 Fowble, “Without a Blush.”
84 Quoted in Cooper, Classical taste in America, 65-66.
85
Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill and
London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 40.
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