Unsettling statues: why a painting was chosen for Roger Conant’s birthplace of East Budleigh

 

The statue of Roger Conant, by sculptor Henry Kitson, completed in 1911, stands outside Salem’s Witch Museum.    Photo credit: John Andrews

It’s been a tough time for statues, especially in 2020. Many of them must be wondering whose turn it will be next, to be unceremoniously toppled from their plinth.  

But a year or so ago, a group of East Budleigh residents decided that they wanted to honour Roger Conant, the mill owner’s son who left England in 1623 to found the city of Salem.

How the Conant family mill in East Budleigh, sadly demolished in the early 20^th century,  might have looked. Frontispiece illustration from Upper Canada Sketches by Thomas Conant, Toronto: William Briggs 1898

And a mini version of Salem’s statue, perhaps located near the Conant family mill, seemed an obvious tribute.  

The unveiling of the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh in East Budleigh, 7 February 2006. L-r: HRH The Duke of Kent, East Budleigh Parish Chairman Steve Baker, Hugo Swire MP, the sculptor Vivien Mallock FRBS

However even a small statue would have been expensive. The above statue of Sir Walter Raleigh was famously financed by British American Tobacco. And that source of funding, as you can imagine, was controversial. The charity Action on Smoking and Health even called it ‘a cynical publicity stunt’ by the company.    

Detail of Henry Kitson's statue of Roger Conant as seen at  https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html

Further research into Roger Conant’s life has revealed a man whose character was somewhat different from the impression given by the Salem statue with — in descendant Jeff Conant’s words — its ‘stern wind-burned face’.

The American lawyer and historian John Wingate Thornton (1818-78). His book The Landing at Cape Anne or The Charter of the first permanent colony on the territory of the Massachusetts Company was published in 1854  

Biographers have written of Conant’s attitude of tolerance and conciliation, of his self-effacing but meticulously honest character and of his mild and moderate views: he was, wrote John Wingate Thornton, quiet, unobtrusive and unambitious, ‘preferring the public good to his private interests’.

Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh. It shows Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I.  

Rather different in character from the flamboyant and ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh!

  

As in Europe, the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of imposing statues in American towns and cities.

In some cases, nationalistic pride was allied to a moral crusade, clearly inspired by reverence towards people seen as the nation’s Puritan Founding Fathers.

Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-64 by Charles Osgood

A minority took a different view. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, wrote of his Puritan ancestors as ‘stern and black-browed’ members of ‘the most intolerant brood that ever lived’.

This statue, ‘The Puritan’ created by the American sculptor Augustus St Gaudens (1848-1907) and unveiled in 1887, stands in Springfield, Massachusetts. I’m not the only one to be struck by its grim face: art historian Dr Dianne Durante describes it as ‘a figure of authority, somewhere between militant and menacing’.       

Here is a later 1904 version of the same figure sculpted by St Gaudens, this time entitled ‘The Pilgrim’ and carrying a clearly labelled Bible. It stands in Philadelphia, and I find the face just as unappealing as the earlier ‘Puritan’!   

The sternness of the Salem statue’s facial features has inspired an interesting view of why and how it was erected in the city so closely associated with Conant.  

The sculptor, it seems, according to Professor Joseph Conforti, was sending a conservative message to Salem residents at a critical time in the city’s history during the early 20th century.     

‘Labor unrest provoked fears of mounting violence and radical political protest’, he explains in his book Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2001.     

Anglo-American sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson (c.1864-1947)  Photo by J.P. Purdy in Henry Hudson and Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

‘Amid a rising tide of immigrants and growing alarm over labor unrest, a new monument to Salem’s past was erected — a grand human figure that, in Professor Conforti’s words, ‘hovered like a moral sentry over Salem’s changed social  order’. 

‘In 1911, noted sculptor Henry Kitson  completed a statue of Roger Conant, the first  permanent settler in Salem. Situated next to the common in the center of the city, the magnificent figure rivaled Saint-Gaudens’s statue of The Puritan, to which it bears a striking resemblance. Bestride an eight-foot boulder, the stern, manly Conant towered over pedestrians’.  

In Professor Conforti’s view, Kitson’s sculpture had a political purpose. It ‘served to inspire the native-born minority and to encourage respect for Salem’s heritage among the city’s immigrant throng.’

  

The idea of a painting by Budleigh artist John Washington was chosen as a tribute to Roger Conant rather than a statue. 

John’s painting, still a work in progress, focuses on the famous 1625 incident at Fishermen’s Field on Cape Ann, near the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts. It is there that Roger Conant is recorded as having averted a bloody confrontation between two groups of settlers.

You can follow John’s progress on the project at  https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html

The artist’s portrayal of Conant the Peacemaker will strike, it is hoped, a completely different note from Kitson’s statue, and one that is more in keeping with what we know of the character of Salem’s founder.  There is, sadly, no portrait of Roger Conant in existence.

And of course, thanks to John’s generosity, East Budleigh’s Conant 400 Group has not had to appeal again to a company like British American Tobacco.

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.