Statue of Alexander Hamilton | |
Italic Title: | no |
Artist: | William Rimmer |
Medium: | Granite sculpture |
Subject: | Alexander Hamilton |
Metric Unit: | cm |
Imperial Unit: | in |
City: | Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Mapframe: | yes |
Mapframe-Zoom: | 13 |
A statue of Alexander Hamilton by William Rimmer is installed along Commonwealth Avenue, between Arlington and Berkeley Streets, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The 1864–1865 granite statue measures approximately 10 ft. x 3 ft. 4 in. x 3 ft. 4 in., and rests on a granite base measuring 8 ft. 5 in. x 5 ft. 4 in. x 5 ft. 4 in. The base has three relief portrait busts depicting Hamilton, John Jay, and George Washington.
The artwork was surveyed by the Smithsonian Institution's "Save Outdoor Sculpture!" program in 1993.[1]
The statue was widely regarded as a failure by nineteenth-century commentators. The critic George B. Woods stated that Hamilton appeared to be "swathed like an infant or a mummy."[2] William H. Downes wrote that it "suggested a snow image which had partly melted." Lincoln Kirstein, writing in 1961, offered a more favorable assessment, commenting that "the mass and its drapery are powerfully suggestive, anticipating Rodin's Balzac in the looming treatment of the rising form."