Thomas Ridgeway Gould

United States·1818-1881

Thomas Ridgeway Gould (1818–1881) turned to sculpture in mid-life, leaving the Boston dry-goods trade to study under Seth Wells Cheney from 1851. His early busts of Christ and Satan, shown at the Boston Athenæum in 1863, established his reputation before the Civil War cost him his fortune and prompted a move to Florence in 1868, where he built a productive studio practice among the city's American expatriate sculptors. There he created his best-known ideal work, West Wind, which weathered accusations of copying Canova's Hebe before being vindicated and later exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial; he eventually produced seven versions of it. Gould is remembered in Hawaii for his statue of Kamehameha the Great, and elsewhere for figures such as Cleopatra, Ariel, and John Hancock, alongside portrait busts of Emerson, John Albion Andrew, and others made during a return visit to Boston in 1878. He died in Florence in 1881; his grave at Forest Hills Cemetery bears his own sculpture, Ascending Spirit.