Larkin Mead

January 3, 1835 (age 75)

Chesterfield, New Hampshire, United States

After two years there, he returned in 1855 to Vermont, where he soon was awarded a commission for a monumental Ceres (1857), symbolizing the state, to crown the capitol dome in Montpelier. During the first year of the Civil War he worked for Harper's Weekly as an illustrator at the front. In 1862 he sailed for Europe with his sister to attend her wedding in Paris. Mead then settled permanently in Florence but often visited the couple in Venice and occasionally served as acting United States consul there in his brother-in-law's absence. His popular marble Venezia (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, c. 1865), an ideal bust, realizes an unusual subject, for few American sculptors took an interest in that city. In 1866, on the first of several return visits to the United States, Mead brought with him the model for his colossal memorial to Abraham Lincoln. The 117-foot-tall ensemble features a standing image of Lincoln below a towering obelisk, with ancillary figures at a lower level. Although it was dedicated in 1874, the finishing touches were not put in place until 1883. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Mead designed The Triumph of Ceres (destroyed) for the pediment of the Agricultural Building designed by the firm of McKim, Mead and White. By this time, however, his style seemed old-fashioned, supplanted by taste for the livelier French mode of the late nineteenth century. He subsequently completed few major pieces, and by 1900 his artistic career had essentially come to an end. Larkin Goldsmith Mead died on October 15, 1910.