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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The inside scoop on Billy Yank
In 1906, a 17-foot, 3,500-pound sculpture titled “Victory: Jewel of the Soul” was installed atop the Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument along the Great Miami River in downtown Hamilton.
Even though there was a national call for entries to create a Civil War memorial for the building, the commission went to Rudolph Thiem, a German-born artist whose studio was right across the river on A Street.
According to Thiem’s great-grandson Jon Thiem, who is a cultural historian at the University of Colorado, “Victory” was — and still is — so unlike other Civil War memorials that a historian at Chickamauga “gasped in shock” when Thiem showed him a photo of his great-grandfather’s work.
In a program titled “Rudolph Thiem and Billy Yank: What the Artist’s Life Tells Us About His Magnum Opus,” held Monday, Sept. 21 at First St. John’s United Church of Christ, Thiem told an audience of about 120 the story of his grandfather’s work.
“He was a short man who produced a bronze giant,” Thiem said.
Rudolph Thiem was born, raised and educated in Berlin, the son of a manufacturer of billiard tables. His mother died when he was 4 years old.
He was one of the first generation of industrial designers educated at the Royal School of Applied Arts, where there was an emphasis on imitating great works from the past rather than creativity. After his education, he set up a sculpture studio in Berlin making mirror frames and similar decorative products.
Rudolph Thiem may have left Berlin at age 23 and emigrated to the United States because he was angry at his 62-year-old father for marrying an 18-year-old woman, Jon Thiem said, possibly because he feared she would take over the family business or because he found it morally offensive.
When he landed in New Orleans in 1881, he went into business with another artist creating funerary art, but by 1886 the business was doing so poorly that he was considering returning to Berlin when he met a fellow Berliner, Lazarus Kahn, who convinced him to come to Hamilton to work at Kahn’s stove manufacturing foundry, where he worked for three years.
“Stove ornamentation was obviously not his true calling,” Jon Thiem said, “but Hamilton had become his home” when he married Anna Martin. He then managed a hotel for a few years before setting up shop as a designer in wood carving and modeling. He also made several war memorials and medallions.
His bid to create “Victory,” better known to locals as “Billy Yank,” was $3,250, but he probably lost money on the project because he underestimated the cost of bronze. The statue was controversal at the time because of its realistic portrayal of a soldier in a dynamic pose when other victory memorials were rendered allegorically as a goddess, usually with wings and usually scantily clad, Thiem said.
Thiem himself served as the model for “Victory.” He shouted the cried “Huzzah!” into a mirror and replicated the expression.
In addition to creating what was then the largest bronze statue made in Ohio, Rudolph Thiem also carved 79,000 letters in the marble of the Monument’s interior walls with the names of Butler County veterans who died in war.
His A Street studio has a special skylight built in it to maximize the sunlight. The studio and all of his tools were lost along with much of A Street in the 1913 flood.
First St. John United Church of Christ was Rudolph Thiem’s church, and he carved a hymn book and a dove in memory of his wife, who died in 1907, that is still part of the altar.
He was skilled at carving hard woods such as oak, and at the time of his death, he was working on a pair of oak lions for the Powell Crosley mansion in Cincinnati, but the sculptures were ruined when another artist attempted to take over the project, Jon Thiem said.
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