Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/327



HAT one generation fails to appreciate, and therefore decries and sneers at, a subsequent one comprehends and applauds. It is conspicuously so in discovery, in science, in poetry, and in art; so much depends upon the point of view and the environment of the observed and the observer. Were this not so, the very remarkable collection of busts from life masks taken at the beginning of the second quarter of this century by John Henri Isaac Browere, almost an unknown name to-day, would not have been hidden away until now, while the circumstances that led to their discovery are as curious as that the busts should have been neglected and forgotten for so long.

I was familiar with the tragic story told by Henry S. Randall, in his ponderous life of President Jefferson, of how the venerated sage of Monticello, within a year of his decease, was nearly suffocated by "an artist from New York," Browere, who attempted to take a mask of his living features, and how, in fear of bodily harm from the ex-President's irate black body-servant, "the artist shattered his cast in an instant" and was glad to depart hence quickly with the fragments which he was permitted to pick up.



With this statement fixed in my mind, I came across a letter from James Madison to Henry D. Gilpin, written October 25, 1827, in which Madison writes, respecting Jefferson's appearance, "Browere's bust in plaster, from his mode of taking it, will probably show a perfect likeness."

I was struck, of course, by the utter inconsistency of Randall's circumstantial account of the shattered cast picked up in fragments and Madison's pointed observations upon "Browere's bust" as then in existence, fifteen months after Jefferson's death. Thus it became important to ascertain the exact status of the subject; a task I