Benjamin Paul Akers was born on July 10, 1825 in Saccarappa (now Westbrook), Maine, United States. He was the eldest of the eleven children of William Akers. When he was still a boy his family moved to Salmon Falls, where his father kept a wood-turning shop or, according to some accounts, a sawmill.
Akers was sent to school in Norwich, Connecticut, but became intensely homesick and only too glad when he could return to work with his father, showing considerable ability in ornamental woodwork. Later in life he studied sculpture in Boston and Florence.
Akers was in search of broader intellectual fields, so he went to Portland to work as a printer and even considered taking up writing, an occupation he occasionally indulged in later, as essays in the Atlantic Monthly and the Crayon testify. His final choice of sculpture as a profession, whether inspired by a cast seen in Norwich, by a marble bust by Brackett in a Portland shop, or by Chantrey's "Washington, " seems to date from this period.
In 1849, at any rate, he went to Boston and learned plaster-casting from Joseph Carew, after which he returned home and tried his hand at a medallion, a bust, and a head of Christ. Some months later he and Tilton, a landscape painter, opened a studio in Portland.
Among his commissions were busts of Longfellow, Samuel Appleton, and John Neal. After two years of this work he spent a year of study in Florence, there producing two bas-reliefs, "Night" and "Morning. " On his return to Portland he made his first statue, "Benjamin in Egypt, " which was later destroyed by fire. The winter he spent in Washington doing several busts--President Pierce, Judge McLean, Linn Boyd, Gerrit Smith, Edward Everett--and a medallion head of Sam Houston.
He then went to Rome, where he produced his best-known works--"Una and the Lion, " "St. Elizabeth of Hungary, " the "Dead Pearl Diver" (now in Portland), and a head of Milton. His works exemplify the taste of the period--a cold neo-classicism with its accompanying meticulous finish. His Roman stay was broken by a trip through Switzerland, Germany, France, and England. Owing to failing health he returned home for a year. On his way back to Rome he was taken seriously ill at Lyons, but managed to continue his journey.
He was again forced to return to America in 1860. He was too ill to do much work, and his bust of John Frothingham was completed with the help of his brother Charles. Advised to go to Philadelphia for the winter, he died there of tuberculosis in the following spring.
In August of 1860 Akers married a minor poet, Elizabeth Anne Chase of Portland, Maine.
