The Crusader: Victor Lawson Monument

The Crusader: Victor Lawson Monument, 1931

Lorado Taft

East central section

Graceland Cemetery

4001 North Clark Street

            Although Lorado Taft was educated in the Beaux Arts style and remained conservative in his approach through most of his career, this monument signals a slight shift in that he moves away from classicizing tendencies and complex compositions to a simpler approach to the human form, emphasizing its sheer bulk and smooth surfaces. A 10-foot high medieval knight wearing cloak and mail, featuring the cross of a crusader on his shield, the figure commemorates the “crusading” career of Victor Fremont Lawson, publisher of the politically independent Chicago Daily News from 1876 until his death in 1925. Lawson was a pioneer in the practice of sending reporters to distant locations to find news and he established a chain of correspondents that became the Daily News Foreign Service.

            Visitors to the site will notice that the grave and monument are unmarked, reflecting Lawson’s tendency to make anonymous donations to a variety of charitable causes. The impact of the work is accentuated by the surrounding landscape, replanted during the 1990s as part of the cemetery’s ongoing effort to recapture the design of earlier years, particularly the style of O. C. Simonds. He served as cemetery superintendent during the 1880s and 1890s and continued on as landscape consultant for many years.

Other works: 

• George Washington—Robert Morris—Haym Salomon Monument
• Eternal Silence: Dexter Graves Monument
• Fountain of the Great Lakes
• Fountain of Time

The Young Lincoln

The Young Lincoln, c. 1945

Charles Keck

Senn Park

South of West Thorndale Avenue and east of North Clark Street

            The re-designed Senn Park sits upon land that once belonged to the Kransz family and Abraham Lincoln is rumored to have stopped at Nicholas Kransz’s Seven Mile House during his 1860 campaign for president. This 13-foot tall bronze version of Lincoln, showing him as a humble, barefoot young man sitting on a tree stump with a book, was created by Charles Keck, one-time apprentice to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor responsible for what was once voted the “greatest work of sculpture in America,” the Standing Lincoln located in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

            The Keck family donated this work to the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) collection at the Chicago Public Library, located at the time on N. Michigan Avenue. In 1997, it was loaned to the Chicago Park District so that it could be installed in Senn Park in the Edgewater community. Following the construction of Ridge Avenue in the 1960s, intended as a temporary link between Lake Shore Drive and the Edens expressway, the road widened and lengthened and contributed to a cycle of disinvestment in the area. Edgewater residents hoped to increase the green space and improve overall living conditions so they appealed to the Park District to purchase this plot, otherwise slated to house a muffler shop. Landscape architects incorporated the monument into the design for this triangular corner. 

Other statues of Lincoln in Chicago: 

• Abraham Lincoln (The Chicago Lincoln)
• Lincoln, the Railsplitter 
• Abraham Lincoln, the Head of State (Seated Lincoln) 

Hope and Help

Hope and Help, 1955

Edouard Chassaing

International Museum of Surgical Science

1524 North Lake Shore Drive

            French-born sculptor Edouard Chassaing (1895-1974) emigrated to the United States in 1928 to participate in the development of the 1933 Century of Progress exposition. Subsequently, he became supervisor for the sculptural program of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where he completed the Babylonian Seals and Assyrian Frieze. Following his tenure there, he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and produced sculpture for public and corporate buildings until his retirement in 1965.

            Hope and Help, Chassaing’s two-figure limestone composition in front of the International College of Surgeons Hall of Fame and Museum of Surgical Science, was dedicated on February 19, 1955. During the ceremony the president of the Society of Medical History, Ilza Keith, stated that “the statue of the surgeon extending his helping hands to a suffering fellow man is eternally and universally representative of the spirit of medicine.” Viewers may find the surgeon stiff and impassive, however, toward a patient whose exaggerated musculature seems an indication of robust health rather than suffering. The stylized lines of the drapery and aloof demeanor of the surgeon are more characteristic of the Near Eastern relief sculpture that Chassaing imitated for the Field Museum than more modern approaches to figurative sculpture.

Kwa-Ma-Rolas

Kwa-Ma-Rolas, 1956

Tony Hunt

East of Lake Shore Drive at Addison Street

Since 1929, a 40-foot Kwanusila totem pole has stood in this location, although not the same one. Many Chicagoans first learned of the Kwakiutl Indians of western British Columbia, Canada during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They, along with the Haida tribe are renowned for their woodcarving skills. George Hunt, a Tlinglit Indian, was in charge of collecting hundreds of objects for the Exposition for the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest exhibit. Then, in 1929, cheese baron James L. Kraft, the founder of Kraft Foods, who often traveled to the Pacific Northwest, donated a totem pole to the city. Carved from a single cedar log, it stood 40 feet high.  Harsh Chicago weather and repaintings damaged the original. 

In 1972, vandals set it on fire and badly damaged the bottom figure. Ten years later, when the Field Museum opened its permanent exhibit dedicated to Maritime Peoples of the Artic and Northwest Coast, experts suspected the 1929 totem pole was of greater historic and cultural significance than previously realized. The totem was removed and sent to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia to be conserved. Kraft, Inc. then commissioned a new pole to go its place. This pole was carved by Tony Hunt, the chief of the Kwakiutl tribe and descendent of George Hunt. This replica of the original, carved from a single Western red cedar, was unveiled on May 21, 1986. Conservation by the Chicago Park district in 1996 was done to fill in some cracks and repaint.