Missouri Life September 2023

ARTIST

Mr. Benton Comes from Washington A sculpture leaves Statuary Hall for a new home in Columbia. STORY Joan Stack

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etween 1899 and 2022, the seven-and-a-half-foot marble effigy of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton watched over Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. The flesh-and-blood senator first entered the Capitol in 1821, the year Missouri became a state. Known as “Old Bullion,” he championed currency backed by gold and silver, as well as the development of western states and territories. He was the first senator to serve six terms, and it was fitting that his sculptural likeness should spend the 20th century in the building he fre quented in the 19th. In 2023, the sculpted senator’s tenure in Washington ended, as Benton’s stone likeness left the Capitol and journeyed 900 miles west to a new home in the Center for Missouri Studies in Columbia. He now stands looking westward over the State Historical Society of Missouri’s famed art gallery. The story of the sculpture’s commission began in July 1864, when Congress decided to reconfigure the former chamber of the US House of Representatives. Congress asked the president to invite each state to sub mit sculptures of two of its most distinguished citizens to decorate the new Statuary Hall. Missouri Governor Thomas Fletcher suggested allocating money for the sculptures in his farewell address of 1869, but it was not until 1895 that the state appropriated $12,000 to commission statues of two Missourians, both of whom had served in Congress: former Senators Thomas Hart Benton and Francis P. Blair. On May 7, 1895, a commission of Missourians from around the state, which included the sitting governor, William J. Stone, was organized to decide who should create the sculptures. The committee consisted of Governor Stone, Judge Oliver M. Spencer of St. Joseph, General Odon Guitar of Columbia, Colonel Peter Foy of St. Louis, Benjamin B. Cahoon of Fredericktown, and Colonel James H. Birch Jr. of Plattsburg. Eager to be considered for the commission, the Ohio-born, New York sculptor, Alexander Doyle, traveled to Jefferson City

and appeared before the commission during their May 7 meeting. Doyle, who had Missouri ancestors, would be one of four sculptors to submit models for consideration by the committee later that year. Doyle first won the commission to sculpt the Frank P. Blair statue in June 1895. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that some of Missouri’s leading sculptors resented Doyle and had suggested that the awardee’s

JOAN STACK Author Joan Stack is the Curator of Art Collections, The State Historical Society of Missouri, at Columbia.

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