Displaying items by tag: Hiram Powers

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is featuring one of the 19th century's most famous sculptures with a new exhibition about artist Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave."

The new exhibition "Measured Perfection" opens Friday. The museum says the exhibit reveals the inner workings of the artist and innovator who adapted long-established traditions in sculpture to new technologies of the 1800s.

Hiram Powers (1805-1873) was one of the most celebrated American sculptors of the nineteenth century. His full-length nude marble statue The Greek Slave (1844), one of his best-known works, earned him international acclaim. A retrospective exhibition of Powers' work at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, hopes to restore attention to the work of this "American Michelangelo." The exhibition, which focuses on his Cincinnati connections, represented in part by portraits he executed of its citizens, offers a rare opportunity to study his portraiture over the course of his career: from his first essays in wax to marble busts done mid-career and some of the last portraits to be produced by his studio.