Background
Thomas Ridgeway Gould was born on November 5, 1818, in Boston, Massachusets. His parents were John Ridgeway Gould (1778 - 1826) and his wife, Ann Ridgeway.
Thomas Ridgeway Gould was born on November 5, 1818, in Boston, Massachusets. His parents were John Ridgeway Gould (1778 - 1826) and his wife, Ann Ridgeway.
Left fatherless at eight, Thomas and his three brothers began in boyhood to support themselves and their mother. Thomas eventually became the Boston representative of a mercantile firm established in New Orleans by his brother, John M. Gould.
In his early thirties, an amateur without any instruction other than hints from artist friends, he modeled his first figure, in the studio of Seth Wells Cheney. When the Civil War ruined his business, he turned to sculpture for support.
A cultivated, interesting man, he found financial success almost immediately within the circle of his own acquaintances. In a little Boston studio he produced busts of John A. Andrew, Civil War governor of Massachusetts; of Ralph Waldo Emerson; of the elder Booth, to whom he later paid a tribute by his book, The Tragedian; An Essay on the Histrionic Genius of Junius Brutus Booth (1868).
Both the elder Booth and his son Edwin were Gould’s personal friends. In 1863, he exhibited colossal heads of Christ and Satan in the Boston Athenaeum. These works won high praise from H. T. Tuckerman, a noted art critic of the day; and even from James Jackson Jarves, usually a caustic critic of American art.
Other lauded pieces were “Michael Angelo, ” “Imogen, ’' “Childhood. ” The unanimity of the critics was amazing. Fortified by their approval, Gould went with his family to Italy in 1868 and opened a studio in Florence.
Here, within a year, he modeled his most noted work, “The West Wind, ” a female figure lightly draped in a starry-belted skirt. Several marble replicas were made; the original passed to the Mercantile Library, St. Louis, Missouri.
Interest in the piece was heightened by press controversy (1874) concerning a false charge that except for the drapery, it was copied from Canova’s “Hebe. ” It was duly admired at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, but later judgments have been less favorable.
“He demonstrates in every line of this childish work his utter inability to conceive an artistic whole, ” wrote Lorado Taft in 1903. The attention attracted by “The West Wind” brought many orders to Gould, who therefore took a larger studio in Florence.
Having begun sculpture too late, he now produced it too rapidly. Among his works were a “Cleopatra” and an “Undine, ” both sent to Boston. His Shakespearean subjects included a high relief of a bearded, helmeted, plumed head called “The Ghost in Hamlet, ” a “Timón of Athens, ” and an “Ariel, ” the latter owned by the daughter of Edwin Booth.
His bronze statue of John Hancock, made for the Centennial celebration at Lexington, Massachusets, was placed in Lexington’s Town Hall in 1875. The same year, saw the erection of his statue of John A. Andrew in the cemetery at Hingham, Massachusets, the commission coming from the Grand Army of the Republic.
His nine-foot bronze figure of King Kameha- meha I is in front of the Government Building, Honolulu, and his “Ascending Spirit” in the Gould lot in Forest Hills Cemetery near Boston. His last work, a “Puritan” for the Common at Cambridge, Massachusets, was unfinished at his death, and was completed by his son Marshall Gould.
After a visit to the United States in 1881, he returned to Italy and died in Florence, in November of that same year.
Gould produced busts of John A. Andrew, Civil War governor of Massachusetts; of Ralph Waldo Emerson; of the elder Booth, to whom he later paid a tribute by his book, The Tragedian. In 1863, he exhibited colossal heads of Christ and Satan in the Boston Athenaeum. These works won high praise from H. T. Tuckerman, a noted art critic of the day; in Florence, he modeled his most noted work “The West Wind”. Today some of the places his work is on display are the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Athenaeum Library, University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery and the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Gould himself was a man of culture and sterling worth; his drawings and sketches had both force and poetic feeling, but his sculpture was based on too frail a foundation of knowledge and skill to have lasting value, except as eloquent testimony to the taste of the times.
Gould was married to Rebecca (Sprogell) Gould.
