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

niche, presiding over the elaborate, two-story Moorish garden room (fig. 17).
Interspersed amidst fountains, mosses, ferns and flowers is an array of other marble
sculpture, including two crouching sphinxes, a copy of the Roman bathing Venus in the
Vatican Museum in Rome, a nymph lifting a shallow bowl of water, and The Three
Graces, now positioned at one end of the long, rectangular room, in front of an enormous
window patterned with panes of stained and clear glass in a pseudo-oriental design (fig.
4). It is Flora, however, that enjoys the most prominent position in the room. Framed by
the main entrance to the conservatory, the sculpture appears to be just alighting atop a
moss-covered “hill,” her drapery still swirling in the wind generated by her swift descent
and her arms filled with flowers. The figure is, both formally and thematically, perfectly
suited to the space it occupies.
Following the death of their oldest son in a shipwreck in 1858, the Haights sold
their house and most of their possessions, intending to return permanently to Europe. In
1860, the family donated Flora to the art museum in the recently opened Central Park. A
writer for The Crayon demonstrated his or her firm belief in the elevating role of ideal
sculpture by expressing the hope that, in her new park setting, Flora would exert a
civilizing influence over the public.
…a marble female form, pure in fancy and material, may greatly assist in
preserving order. A fine ideal statue like the “Flora” would, wherever it could be
seen, be more effective in any given area than twenty policemen. We would have
one visible in the Park at every turn, and placed in the Park solely on account of
order. The noblest ideas of the past, the ideas which have ever exercised positive
control over the masses, have ever been associated with female forms, as is easily
recognized by studying the worship of Minerva by the noblest people of antiquity,
and of the Madonna by the millions of the middle ages. 97
97 “Sketchings. Domestic Art Gossip,” The Crayon 7 (August 1860): 231.
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