Pairs of sculptures collected by James Ricau

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by H. Nichols B. Clark

Hero and Leander were brought together for the first time in the early 1960s when the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, acquired replicas. Ricau acquired his Leander in 1962 from Mrs. Thomas H. Balliere of Baltimore, who had it stored in her basement. He did not buy his Hero until 1984.

Ricau's last recorded purchase, also made in 1984, was a pair of statues acquired from its original owner, the Mercantile Library Association of New York City. Nothing is known about the inspiration for Mozier's Truth [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED] and Silence [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], but the subjects suggest that they were envisioned for a quiet, studious environment such as the Mercantile Library. Mozier was not only a former New York merchant but a member of the Mercantile Library. Association. His encouragement may account for the donation of these statues to an institution with which Henry A. Stone, who commissioned them, had no connection.

Mozier returned from Rome to oversee the installation of Truth and Silence in the library's reading room in September 1855. He recognized that these statues were central to introducing his abilities to New Yorkers, and the press did not disappoint him, for there were many references to the works in the ensuing months.

Truth and Silence were presented to the Mercantile Library. Association as companion pieces, but they were not seen as such in the earliest references to them that have come to light. The flint known mention was in the spring of 1853, when William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) reported back from his European travels, singling out Silence as a statue that would do Mozier much credit.(27) However, none of the many travelers making obligatory visits to artists' studios abroad mentioned Truth. Perhaps it was Stone's commission that instigated the pairing.

Even this brief survey of a single aspect of Ricau's collection underscores the magnitude of what he achieved while buying works no one cared about by artists few had heard of at the time. When the collection left his premises in 1986 he was alone without what he called his "children." As he rattled around his large and now empty Greek revival house in Piermont, New York, nothing gave him greater pleasure than animatedly recalling a detail of a sculpture he had collected - a curled finger by Rinehart, for example, or the translucent tambourine skin by Crawford. Let us hope that he also took pleasure in the thought that his extraordinary collection will be available to the public for generations, the legacy of a man of great vision and taste.

1 An article about the collection appeared in ANTIQUES, September 1964, pp. 291-298.

2 The receipt is on deposit in the archives of william H. Gerdts.

3 william H. Gerdts, American Neo-Classic Sculpture: The Marble Resurrection (Viking, New York, 1973), p. 39.

4 Lauretta Dimmick, "A Catalogue of the Portrait Busts and Ideal Works of Thomas Crawford (1813?-1857), American Sculptor in Rome" (Ph.D. diss, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1986), p. 41.