William Rimmer: The Falling Gladiator

"The Falling Gladiator" by William Rimmer

"Stephen Perkins, who had been deeply impressed with William Rimmer's 'St. Stephen,' strongly encouraged the doctor to now execute a full-sized statue. He advanced a hundred dollars towards the project with which the statue could be started. On the 4th of February, 1861, this important work was begun. It was executed without the assistance of models, except such aid as the sculptor could derive from the study of his own body, in two hundred hours stolen from days already fully occupied. It was completed on the 10th of June, 1861, in the sculptor's forty-sixth year.

Rimmer worked in a small, low-windowed basement room of the house in which he lived. The lower half of the window was covered, so that passers-by could not observe what was going on within, the house being almost on the line of the sidewalk. He worked without any of the facilities usually employed by sculptors for the setting-up of a statue in clay, bracing up with sticks the different parts as he built them with his hands. The difficulties he encountered were innumerable.

He had no fire in the room, The clay froze and dried, cracking and falling down, so that parts of the statue were made many times over. He also was not a modeller; he did not develop a statue by a general and gradual building-up, but piled up the clay or plaster, and cut from it the figure, after the manner of a wood or stone carver. It was finally cast in plaster and finished in that material. The workmen who performed this operation came near destroying the entire statue; and to their carelessness they added the charge of what Dr. Rimmer understood to be an extravagant price for their labor. Of this last complication he wrote: 'Such is the pressure of life everywhere, in all men, that truth is of less importance than gain, the soul less than the body.'

Mr. Perkins watched its daily progress with the liveliest interest. In fact, public interest was growing as well, and Rimmer began to receive more visitors than he wanted who wished to see what he was creating. One said, 'I had never seen anything like it, and I could not understand or explain the existence of such a person. We had never had such an artist in Boston. Everyone who cared a fig for art became interested in Rimmer, and it was determined to induce him to come to the city and give instruction.'

In 1862 Mr. Perkins sailed for Europe, taking plaster copies of the 'The Falling Gladiator' and 'St. Stephen.' These were first exhibited in London, and afterward in the Paris Salon of 1863. Amazingly 'The Falling Gladiator' was declared by certain persons who saw it in Paris to be a cast from life and the attempt to palm it off as a modelled statue ridiculed. Mr. Perkins had hoped, that, by taking these casts to Europe, he might win for his friend a recognition abroad which would greatly improve his standing at home. These good intentions came to nought. 

The original plaster cast of 'The Falling Gladiator' was exhibited in Boston on various occasions for several years before Dr. Rimmer moved to New York. It was also shown at the exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1865 or 1866, and was afterward removed to the Cooper Institute when Dr. Rimmer assumed the charge of the School of Design in that institution.  In the spring of 1880, it was sent to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where it now occupies an honored position."

 (Excerpts from "The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician" by Truman Howe Bartlett.)