Look Again! – Week 8
Week 8 – January 19, 2026: Paul Wayland Bartlett’s Exhausted Victory-Sculpture, Benjamin Franklin & Scrimshaw Powder Horn
Similar to Bartlett’s sculpture of Benjamin Franklin, Exhausted Victory demonstrates the undeniable fatigue experienced in the fight for liberty as well as the gravitas of diplomatic efforts and the many contradictions and paradoxes in establishing a new nation.Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865-1925), born in New Haven, was an American sculptor, painter, and animalier. Bartlett’s family moved to France when he was young, and he had a chance to study under a variety of French sculptors, including Rodin. At fifteen, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied under Emmanuel Frémiet, the gifted and successful animalier, where he developed an affinity for sculpting animals. Wayland’s equestrian Statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, ca. 1900 islocated in the museum’s Smith Gallery.
Bartlett maintained sculpture studios in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C., and completed a number of popular public monuments for the United States, such as the pediment on the U.S. Capitol, House of Representatives. One of the prominent Beaux-Arts artists of his day, he received the Cross of a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1895. Shortly after, in 1916, he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. While he specialized in public portrait and equestrian statues, he also was an accomplished painter and a member of The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.
The Grecian clad female in Exhausted Victory lies almost supine against a craggy rock instead of a scrolled neoclassical daybed. She seems to welcome and embody a much-earned reverie and respite from the passion of revolutionary struggles Bartlett surely was familiar with on both sides of the pond. She is in comedic opposition to ubiquitous images of Lady Liberty, such as this one inscribed on a powder horn from the mid- eighteenth century. Powder horns were of critical importance to soldiers in the mid -18th century. Prior to the development of wooden cartridge boxes in the late 1770s they provided a safe dry place to store the gunpowder used in rifles. Usually made from cow horn or sperm whale tooth they were often inscribed with the owner’s name, the date, and highly inventive designs.
