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| Kasebier portrait of Evelyn Nesbit (1903) |
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Susan Wilson, Garden of Memories: A guide to historic Forest Hills. Boston: Forest Hills Educational Trust, 1998—
As you ascend [Milton Hill at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston], you’ll see on the left one of the cemetery’s most unsual portrait sculptures. A winged, iron-clad archangel Michael stands by a beautiful young man, resting one hand on the youth’s shoulder, and another on a sword. The monument commemorates aviator Edward Thaw Jr (1908-1934) of Milton, who crashed in the mountains of New Mexico, while piloting a private plane from Quincy to San Diego.
Edward was the nephew of Harry K. Thaw, the millionaire who murdered handsome society architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden in 1906. White’s crime was his tempestuous affair with showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt—his “Girl on the Red Velvet Swing”—prior to her marriage to Thaw. Thaw was aquitted on grounds of insanity.
Nephew Edward’s memorial at Forest Hills, commissioned by his mother, Jane Thaw, was sculpted by Gerome Brush. Son of well-known painter George DeForest Brush [and early aviator and airplane camoufleur Mittie Taylor Brush], Gerome studied art as a child in Europe [he was named in honor of French Academy painter, Jean-Leon Gerome, his father’s teacher], and was apprenticed to a Florentine marble carver. Upon returning to America, he worked on the World War I military [ship] camouflage program, and became a respected portraitist and painter, as well as an architectural and memorial sculptor.
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Below Roy R. Behrens, Death Announced, digital montage (2021), in which various vintage public domain graphic components have been altered and recombined. In the center background is a digitally-colored photograph of an enshrouded Evelyn Nesbit, being steadied by an assistant, as she appears in public for the first time after the death of Stanford White.
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| Digital montage © Roy R. Behrens 2021 |