The statue of
Roger Conant, by sculptor Henry Kitson, completed in 1911, stands outside Salem’s
Witch Museum. Photo credit: John
Andrews
It’s been a tough time for
statues, especially in 2020. Many of them must be wondering whose turn it will
be next, to be unceremoniously toppled from their plinth.
But a year or so ago, a group of
East Budleigh residents decided that they wanted to honour Roger Conant, the
mill owner’s son who left England in 1623 to found the city of Salem.
How the Conant family mill in East Budleigh, sadly
demolished in the early 20th century, might have looked. Frontispiece illustration
from Upper Canada Sketches by
Thomas Conant, Toronto: William Briggs 1898
And a mini version of Salem’s statue, perhaps
located near the Conant family mill, seemed an obvious tribute.
The unveiling of the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh
in East Budleigh, 7 February 2006. L-r: HRH The Duke of Kent, East Budleigh Parish
Chairman Steve Baker, Hugo Swire MP, the sculptor Vivien Mallock FRBS
However even a small statue would
have been expensive. The above statue of Sir Walter Raleigh was famously
financed by British American Tobacco. And that source of funding, as you can
imagine, was controversial. The charity Action on Smoking and Health even
called it ‘a cynical publicity stunt’ by the company.
Detail
of Henry Kitson's statue of Roger Conant as seen at
Further research into Roger
Conant’s life has revealed a man whose character was somewhat different from
the impression given by the Salem statue with — in descendant Jeff Conant’s
words — its ‘stern
wind-burned face’.
The American lawyer and historian
John Wingate Thornton (1818-78). His book The
Landing at Cape Anne or The Charter of the first permanent colony on the
territory of the Massachusetts Company was published in 1854
Biographers have written of Conant’s attitude of tolerance
and conciliation, of his self-effacing but meticulously honest character and of
his mild and moderate views: he was, wrote John Wingate Thornton, quiet,
unobtrusive and unambitious, ‘preferring the public good to his private
interests’.
Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in
All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh. It shows
Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I.
Rather different in character from the flamboyant and
ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh!
As in Europe, the nineteenth
century saw a proliferation of imposing statues in American towns and cities.
In some cases, nationalistic
pride was allied to a moral crusade, clearly inspired by reverence towards people
seen as the nation’s Puritan Founding Fathers.
Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804-64 by Charles Osgood
A minority took a different view.
Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, wrote of his Puritan ancestors as ‘stern
and black-browed’ members of ‘the most intolerant brood that ever lived’.
This statue, ‘The Puritan’ created by the American sculptor
Augustus St Gaudens (1848-1907) and unveiled in 1887, stands in Springfield, Massachusetts.
I’m not the only one to be struck by its grim face: art historian Dr Dianne
Durante describes it as ‘a figure of authority, somewhere between militant and
menacing’.
Here is a later 1904 version of
the same figure sculpted by St Gaudens, this time entitled ‘The Pilgrim’ and
carrying a clearly labelled Bible. It stands in Philadelphia, and I find the
face just as unappealing as the earlier ‘Puritan’!
The sternness of the Salem statue’s
facial features has inspired an interesting view of why and how it was erected
in the city so closely associated with Conant.
The sculptor, it seems, according to Professor Joseph
Conforti, was sending a conservative message to Salem residents at a critical
time in the city’s history during the early 20th century.
‘Labor unrest provoked fears of mounting violence
and radical political protest’, he explains in his book Imagining New
England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century, published by the University of North Carolina Press
in 2001.
Anglo-American
sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson (c.1864-1947) Photo by J.P.
Purdy in Henry Hudson and Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson papers, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution
‘Amid a rising tide of immigrants and growing
alarm over labor unrest, a new monument to Salem’s past was erected — a grand
human figure that, in Professor Conforti’s words, ‘hovered like a moral sentry
over Salem’s changed social order’.
‘In 1911, noted sculptor Henry Kitson completed a statue of Roger Conant, the
first permanent settler in Salem. Situated next to the common in the center of
the city, the magnificent figure rivaled Saint-Gaudens’s statue of The Puritan,
to which it bears a striking resemblance. Bestride an eight-foot boulder, the stern, manly Conant towered
over pedestrians’.
In Professor Conforti’s view, Kitson’s sculpture
had a political purpose. It ‘served to inspire the native-born minority and to
encourage respect for Salem’s heritage among the city’s immigrant throng.’
The idea of a painting by Budleigh artist John
Washington was chosen as a tribute to Roger Conant rather than a statue.
John’s
painting, still a work in progress, focuses on the famous 1625 incident at
Fishermen’s Field on Cape Ann, near the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts. It
is there that Roger Conant is recorded as having averted a bloody confrontation
between two groups of settlers.
You can follow John’s progress on
the project at https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html
The artist’s portrayal of Conant
the Peacemaker will strike, it is hoped, a completely different note from Kitson’s
statue, and one that is more in keeping with what we know of the character of
Salem’s founder. There is, sadly, no portrait
of Roger Conant in existence.
And of course, thanks to John’s
generosity, East Budleigh’s Conant 400 Group has not had to appeal again to a
company like British American Tobacco.
