The Angel of Death and the Sculptor

The Milmore Memorial, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Writing the other day of the brilliant sculptor Karl Bitter, who was struck and killed by an automobile at the age of 47 when he was at the height of his creative powers, reminded me of a marble sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is largely ignored by visitors, but which I consider to be one of the most important pieces in the museum’s vast collection.   It is “The Milmore Memorial,” otherwise known as “The Angel of Death and the Sculptor,” which is now displayed prominently on a wall in the recently renovated American Wing Sculpture Courtyard.

I used to pass right by the sculpture myself without giving it much notice, partly because its previous location on the second floor balcony was not to its advantage.  But one day I gave it a good long look, then read the wall text, and I was moved to tears by the tender and poignant drama depicted with enormous skill and insight by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), one of America’s greatest sculptors, who created The Lincoln Memorial in Washington and many other notable public monuments.  The Met’s sculpture is a replica of the original bronze statue installed in 1893 at the Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.  The replica was completed in 1926 by the Piccirilli Brothers of New York, the marble carvers of choice for French and other sculptors.

The Met says the marble version, commissioned from French, who was also a Museum trustee, “required certain changes to accommodate the structural needs of the medium.”  I haven’t seen the bronze original, so I can’t tell you what those changes might have been.  I’m not certain how I would feel about the original in bronze, which is a bit brassy for my taste, with details often garishly highlighted.  Marble, on the other hand, is the stone of Michelangelo.  It is alive.  It breathes.  Figurative sculpture expertly carved out of marble conveys to me the impression of the purest, palest, softest human flesh imaginable.   It is the perfect material for the mood of this sculpture.  French showed the plaster model in Paris, where the sculpture was cast in bronze, and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.  Those exhibitions sealed his reputation as one of the leading sculptors of the day.

Martin Milmore

 “The Milmore Memorial" is dedicated to two Irish immigrant brothers, the exceptional young sculptor Martin Milmore (1844-1883), and his older brother Joseph (1841–1886), a talented stonecutter who taught Martin how to carve.  Martin was a prodigious worker who had already completed a number of important public commissions when he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 38, shortly before his 39^th birthday.  His greatest achievement was the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Boston Common, which was dedicated in 1877.  French once described Milmore as “a picturesque figure, with long dark hair and large dark eyes…wearing a broad-brimmed soft black hat and a cloak.  His appearance was striking and he knew it.”

When Joseph died only a few years later, the family asked French, in accordance with Martin’s wishes, to create a memorial to honor the two brothers.  The statue that French produced was a masterpiece of Victorian sentiment that can’t help but move you to tears, especially, I think, if you have discovered that the creative way of life is the be all and end all of your own humble existence.

French depicts two standing figures in the memorial, a young sculptor and a winged messenger called The Angel of Death.  Martin Milmore is represented as a generic, handsome young sculptor.  The allegorical figure of Death is depicted, not in customary macabre fashion, but in the hooded and draped form of a beautiful woman. 

Martin and Joseph Milmore, “American Sphinx,” 1872,

 Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA

The sculptor is shown from the back, about to continue work with his mallet and chisel on a giant Sphinx similar to the one he and his brother actually completed some years earlier for the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  But the Angel of Death gently stays his hand with her own outstretched hand.  In her other hand she carries a bouquet of poppies, the symbol for eternal sleep.  The sculptor’s head is turned toward her with a superbly rendered, priceless expression of mild surprise and confusion on his handsome face, as if to ask, “Why are you interrupting me now?”  Death’s eyes are downcast.  Perhaps she is reluctant to answer his questioning gaze directly, but her countenance is gentle and calm.  She is the enduring and faithful mother of all, from cradle to grave, full of kindness and compassion.

An essayist in the November 1917 issue of  “The Art World” wrote that “it would be difficult to find a piece of modern sculpture in any country that surpasses ‘Death and the Young Sculptor’ in beauty, majesty and tenderness…observe with what dignity and sweetness the ugly theme (of death) is treated.”   This writer ascribed a “Greek spirit” to French’s handling of the theme.  “We see gravestones of Greeks in which calmness and composure and an almost smiling acquiescence in fate are the notes.”

Edwin A Rockwell, writing earlier in the September 1910 issue of “The International Studio,” comments that  the winged messenger appears to be bringing “peace and rest” to the young sculptor.  “Mr. French has preached a tender sermon on the immortality of the soul. .. It must be added that there is a technical triumph in the simplified and ethereal blending of the forms and in the overshadowing mass of drapery that lends added solemnity.”

French and Martin Milmore had both studied with the renowned New England sculptor Thomas Ball.  I can only imagine how filled with emotion French must have been while working on the concept for this memorial to Milmore,  his friend and fellow sculptor.

This work has found a perfect home within the Museum, a short walk from the Egyptian wing, which houses the oldest objects in the Museum, flint-stone tools from the Paleolithic era, some 750,000 years ago.  In the 19^th Century Milmore Memorial, French shows the young sculptor carving a sphinx, the emblem of that ancient civilization.  The Museum’s vast holdings -- more than two million objects -- can be studied as a series of connections, from millennium to millennium and from continent to continent.  The unifying element is the undying creative spirit of the human race.  We instinctively suffer collective grief when an artistic genius with a bright creative spirit is called away too soon.  In the Milmore Memorial, even Death’s messenger bows her head.