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  • Aluminum Pigs and Bronze Generals:Outdoor Sculpture in Washington, D.C., from Adam to Zapata
  • Kathryn Allamong Jacob (bio)
James M. Goode . Washington Sculpture, A Cultural History of Outdoor Sculpture in the Nation's Capital. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. vii + 830 pp. Photographs, maps, appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index. $75.00.

For this revised and expanded version of James Goode's 1974 The Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C.: A Comprehensive Historical Guide (Smithsonian Institution Press), all those who care about the urban landscape of the nation's capital can only shout, "Hooray!" Goode's earlier book—which has been out of print and hard to come by at any price for years—displayed his broad knowledge and love of the capital. He is thus the perfect person to bring the story of outdoor sculpture in Washington up to the present. The Johns Hopkins University Press is to be commended for taking on this massive (over six pounds) update that has resulted in an attractive volume of 830 pages. There are more than 800 black and white photographs, of which nearly 700 taken by Clift A. Seferlis—a stone carver as well as a photographer—are new.

Why a revised version of the 1974 book? While those who visit Washington frequently have noticed that there is more and more outdoor sculpture on display, the actual figures are quite astonishing. During the 174 years from the spring of 1800 when the federal government moved in and Washington's life as the nation's capital began, until 1974, when Outdoor Sculpture appeared, 325 monuments, memorials, and public sculptures were installed in the city and in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. During the mere thirty-four years from 1974 until 2008 when Washington Sculpture appeared, that figure doubled to more than 650, as a remarkable 325-plus additional pieces popped up like mushrooms after a rain.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant's 1799 plan for the capital, with its grid system of numbered and lettered streets pierced by wide diagonal avenues named for the states, created a multitude of circles, triangles, and squares in which he intended public monuments, "ornaments," to flourish. His dream has been realized in spades. Sculpture is everywhere, sometimes several installations [End Page 487] to a block, but it arrived at a trickle for decades before the cascade of the late twentieth century began. In 1861, six decades after the government had settled in, few "ornaments" were to be found. One had already come and gone. The very first monument in Washington, the 1807 Tripoli Monument, had been moved from the Navy Yard to the Capitol grounds and, in 1860, to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. The truncated stump of the Washington Monument was left sitting on the Potomac Flats after construction halted in 1854 for lack of funds. (It is a mystery why the Washington Monument, the most famous landmark in the capital, merited two pages of text and two images in the 1974 volume but is nowhere to be found in this one.)

In Lafayette Park, a bronze statue of Andrew Jackson by Clark Mills waved from atop his implausibly rearing horse in the first equestrian statue cast in America; Mills' equestrian statue of George Washington stood in Washington Circle; and completing the capital's entire inventory of antebellum outdoor statuary was Horatio Greenough's colossal white-marble seated George Washington. Never intended as an outdoor work, the statue had been installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841 but was soon moved outside when the floor was on the verge of collapse. Viewed as a colossal embarrassment by many, critics suggested that the father of his country, bare-chested in toga and sandals, appeared to be signaling for a blanket.

Anecdotes like these dot all of Goode's informative entries, each of which also includes a description of the subject and the artist. Most entries are about 500 words in length and accompanied by a photograph; but several, such as the magnificent Ulysses S. Grant Memorial and the collective art works at various sculpture gardens, merit longer entries and several images. A glossary of terms, appendices (including "Selected Biographies of Sculptors" and the...

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