Shobal Vail Clevenger, the third child of a family of ten, was born on October 22, 1812 on a farm in Middletown, Ohio, United States where his father, a New Jersey weaver, had settled in 1808. His mother is said to have been related to John Hancock. The year following Shobal’s birth his parents moved to Ridgeville and later to Indian Creek.
Clevenger received the meager education.
Until his fifteenth year Clevenger worked on the farm in summer and later he was sent to learn stone-cutting with his brother who was employed on the canal at Centerville. Here young Clevenger contracted a fever and was forced to return home. When he had recovered he went to Louisville and then to Cincinnati. On the market house of the latter city was a female figure in wood which aroused his admiration and a desire to emulate it. He placed himself under a stonecutter, David Guion with whom he remained about four years. Tradition records that Clevenger criticized an angel’s head carved by his master who thereupon challenged him to do better. Clevenger did, and was thereafter entrusted with the ornamental work of the shop.
In order to procure models to study he crept into the graveyard on moonlight nights and took impressions in clay from some of the sculptured tombstones, especially of allegorical reliefs and a statue of Grief by John Airy, on the monument to General Ganno. Soon he went to Xenia where he set up for himself, but receiving only a few commissions he returned to Cincinnati and again worked for his former master. He soon, however, formed a partnership with a man named Basset. E. S. Thomas, editor of the Evening Post, attracted by some of his work, gave him a commendatory notice in his paper. When Hiram Powers was about to return from Washington with a model of Chief Justice Marshall from which he was to carve a bust, Clevenger said he “would cut the first bust from stone in Cincinnati, if he couldn’t cut the best, ” and accordingly made one of Thomas, cut directly from the stone without any model. From this time on his reputation seems to have increased, and commissions multiplied.
Nicholas Longworth became interested in him and enabled him to follow a course of anatomical lectures at the Ohio Medical College. During this period he made a number of busts from the fine-grained freestone of the region, among them one of William Henry Harrison. At Lexington, Kentucky, he made those of Clay and Governor Poindexter. Visiting Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, he modeled, in plaster, busts of Washington Allston, Isaac P. Davis, and Joseph Ilopkinson which are in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and busts of Clay, Edward Everett, W. IT. Harrison, and Webster, plaster casts of which are in the New York Historical Society’s collection. Marbles of Allston, John Davis, and Lemuel Shaw, the two latter dated 1839, are in the Boston Athenaeum. Besides these he is said to have made busts of J. Q. Adams, Van Buren, Biddle, Woodbury, Dr. James Jackson, Jeremiah Mason, IG. Otis, and Joseph Tilden. His bust of Webster was represented on the fifteen-cent stamp.
In the spring of 1840 he went again to New York where he made busts of Samuel Ward, Ward’s daughter, Governor Wolcott of Connecticut, and Chancellor Kent (plaster casts of the last two are in the New York Historical Society’s collection), and in October 1840, Longworth having supplied the means, he sailed for Havre. After spending a few days in Paris he went on to Florence. In the spring of 1842 he had trouble with his eyes, but after visiting Rome he returned to Florence and made busts of Powers and Louis Bonaparte as well as an idealized bust called “The Lady of the Lake. ” He began, in October of that year, what was to prove his last work. It was a nude, life-size figure of an Indian warrior, which has since entirely disappeared. On account of the subject it caused, at the time, a considerable sensation and was even called the first distinctively American sculpture. When the model was practically completed, the sculptor’s health failed, and in June 1843 his physician pronounced the disease consumption, brought on, some say, by the inhalation of marble dust. On September 17 he sailed for home with his wife and his three children. A day or two after passing Gibraltar he died.
Clevenger executed a number of portrait busts, including one of United States Senator Henry Clay and in these, he showed a carefulness and exactitude in portraiture and a skillful use of the chisel. Though somewhat deficient in general education, he profited by association with his sitters, some of whom were men of culture.
Clevenger was frank and unaffected, industrious and patient in the pursuit of his art. In appearance Tuckerman described him as “a compact and manly figure, with a certain vigor of outline that promised more continuity of action than is often realized by artists. ”
Clevenger was married to Elizabeth Wright of Cincinnati. His youngest son, Shobal Vail Clevenger, attained some distinction as a psychiatrist.
