POWERS, HirtAm (1805-73). An American sculptor. He was born July 29, 1805, on a small farm in Woodstock. Vt. As the farm proved insufficient for its support, his family moved to Ohio, where the boy first worked in a clock factory. Later he was employed for seven years to model and repair wax figures in a museum in Cincinnati. This occupation led to the making of wax portrait busts of leading men of the time, General Jackson, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Chief Justice Marshall, and others, which, being modeled from life, brought him into intimate relations with his famous subjects, especially with Webster at Marshfield. In 1837 he carried the plaster casts of his busts to Italy, and to superintend their execution in marble, lie established a studio in Florence, where he spent the rest of his life. Within a year he bad completed a statue, "Eve Tempted," which met with the approval of Thorwaldsen, and in 1843 lie finished the well-known nude female statue, the "Greek Slave," of which many dupli cates were made. A bust of "Proserpine." a
statue of a "Fisher Boy" (1846), an "American" (1854), and a "Californian" (185S), are in the same style as the "Greek Slave." He made also statues of Franklin (1862), in the Capitol at Washington, and "Jefferson" (1862), of Wash ington for Louisiana. Webster for Illassaehu setts. and Calhoun for South Carolina (1850). His best work, however, is in busts. Among the best, besides those mentioned above as modeled in wax, are those of John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren (1835), Edward Everett and John Preston (1845), Longfellow and General Sheri dan (1865). He had a strong mind and was a realist by temperament, accustomed to face the facts of nature and to represent them in a truth ful matter-of-fact way. Consult Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New' York, 1867).