Complicating the Confederate Monument: Enid Yandell’s 1894 Proposal for Louisville, Kentucky

Over the course of her career, sculptor Enid Yandell (1869–1934) created large-scale, commemorative monuments and fountains as well as decorative sculptures for domestic spaces and private gardens. She was among the first female members of the National Sculpture Society, and her work was featured in numerous international expositions and World’s Fairs, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Armory in 1913, popularly known as the Armory Show. Yandell’s art was highly acclaimed during her lifetime, and today her monumental public sculptures can be found scattered along the eastern region of the United States, from Rhode Island to Tennessee.

Enid Yandell (1869–1934).

enid bland yandell photograph collection, 987pc52x, filson historical society

After graduating from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1889, Yandell traveled to Europe with her mother, Louise Elliston Yandell (1844–1908), and younger sister, Elsie Yandell (1876–1939), before moving back to her home in Louisville, Kentucky, to begin her career as a sculptor. Between 1889 and 1891, Yandell completed several small commissions for family friends, community leaders, and local businesses; these included portrait busts and architectural decorations. Yandell found her break in August 1891, when she traveled to Chicago to work on the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She sculpted the twenty-four caryatid figures for the upper level of the exterior and crafted a large-scale sculpture of Daniel Boone for the Kentucky State Building. These two projects brought Yandell wide recognition, enough that after the fair ended, she was able to move to New York, where she found work as an assistant to the Austrian-born sculptor Karl Bitter (1867–1915). As Yandell and her work grew in popularity, she continued to receive commissions from the citizens of Louisville, including one major project that propelled her into the center of what turned into a citywide controversy.¹

Statue of Daniel Boone, Kentucky Bldg., World’s Columbian Exposition, stereoscopic photograph, Keystone View Company, c. 1893.

keystone-mast collection, ucr/california museum of photography, university of california, riverside

C. D. Arnold, Photographs of Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1891–1894.

courtesy ryerson and burnham archives, the art institute of chicago

In 1894, Yandell took part in a competition to design a monument sponsored and funded by the Kentucky Woman’s Confederate Monument Association (KCMA) that would honor Louisville’s Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. Yandell’s reputation in Chicago and New York had followed her back to her hometown, where “it was expected she would win the Confederate contest as soon as it was known that she had entered drawings.” Yandell did indeed win the initial competition by a unanimous vote, but when the award was announced, it was met with intense backlash from association members and the general public. This essay examines the very heated and highly publicized controversy that followed the KCMA’s decision to award Yandell the commission for Louisville’s proposed Confederate monument. Ultimately, Yandell withdrew her design from consideration, and the KCMA opted instead to sponsor a mass-produced statue featuring Confederate soldiers made by the local Muldoon Monument Company. However, Yandell’s design—and its ultimate dismissal by an organization of elite, white women—reveals much about the politics that surrounded this period of “statue mania” in the United States, as well as turn-of-the-century ideas about womanhood, both as it was represented in stone and the proprieties of a Southern, genteel woman carving that stone. If realized, Yandell’s Confederate monument would have been a subversive intervention into Louisville’s public landscape that centered the female body—instead of the heroic soldier—as an emblem of Confederate memorial culture. By analyzing her design and scrutinizing the controversy that her proposed monument caused, it becomes clear that even though Southern women of a certain status had been...