From 1830 to 1870, Florence was an important epicenter for American sculptors. They were drawn to its wealth of artworks and proximity to marble quarries and carvers, and enjoyed the camaraderie they found in its expatriate artist colony. Some American sculptors, including Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough, felt at home in Florence and lived in the city for decades, while others, notably Henry Kirke Brown, felt uneasy and remained there for just a few months. Each sculptor was, nevertheless, marked by the sojourn abroad and their collective experiences there had an enormous impact on the early history of American sculpture. This paper explores how being an expatriate in Florence affected some of the artistic choices American sculptors made. Being abroad freed them, for example, to explore nude subjects in ways that were not permissible in the United States. It also conditioned them to think about ways to assert a distinctly American identity, albeit one that centered an Anglo-American male experience, and to sculpt works pointedly designed to appeal to American patrons. To this end, many sculptors turned to the trope of romanticized, fictive figures of Native Americans, a subject that was read as symbolic of the United States and that detrimentally impacted how many Americans regarded Indigenous peoples. This essay devotes special attention to Brown's uneasy experience in Florence and how it may have prompted him to sculpt his Young Indian as a way of grappling with his sense of estrangement while living abroad.
