The partial government shutdown has brought the predictable lamentations that, with most of the town’s museums on lockdown, visitors are being deprived of culture. But you don’t need a museum to take in remarkable art in Washington.
Just about every traffic circle in the city — and given D.C.’s hub-and-spoke layout, there are plenty of them — features at its center a statue. The most impressive of them are equestrian, making the District of Columbia one of the best places in the world for bronze horses and riders.
Those of us who live in the city drive around them every day and pay them no mind. Such is the habit of taking things, even wonderful things, for granted. But it’s also a matter of self-preservation: What with all the cars dodging and weaving their way around a roundabout, a traffic circle is the last place you want to take your eyes off the road.
It’s worth finding a place to park.
Statues of men (or women — don’t forget Joan of Arc in Washington’s Meridian Hill Park) on horseback enjoy an appearance of motion and energy hard to convey with a simple standing figure. Or at least they should. When John Quincy Adams Ward was hired to sculpt Philip Sheridan, he drew up plans portraying the Civil War general as a fat, old officer on a torpid mount. Sheridan’s widow was having none of it. She had Ward sacked and chose instead Gutzon Borglum, who succeeded in capturing Sheridan in action, rallying his men — body wrenched around, right arm reaching out straight back, beckoning his troops to follow.
Ward had better luck with his portrayal of Gen. George Henry Thomas: easy in the saddle, reins loose in his left hand, slouch hat in his right resting lightly against the horse’s side. Thomas comes across a cool customer not to be underestimated.
Also serene is the statue of George Washington in the circle that bears his name. His horse may be hesitating — tail and mane blown by a wind from behind — but the general is all confidence, riding tall, sitting straight as the sword in his hand, his face a determined glare.
Go a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue and you arrive at Lafayette Square, in the center of which Andrew Jackson waves his cocked hat as he commands a rearing steed.
Far less jaunty is the haggard portrayal of Ulysses S. Grant at the foot of Capitol Hill.
The general sits high on his horse, watching troops rush into battle below. From the right comes a team of horses racing cannon to the action; from the left thunders charging cavalry. Riding to the guns, one soldier waves a saber, one blows a bugle, another struggles to keep the colors aloft. One of the two lead horses has stumbled and is crashing down. His rider, thrown into the mud, looks up as he is about to be trampled under the crush of hooves.
And then there is the rare equestrian statuary in Washington that doesn’t feature a military man: “The Court of Neptune.” Visitors to the Library of Congress are greeted at the entrance by a fountain featuring a bronze king of the ocean flanked by mermen who, unashamed of their indiscreet nakedness, blow conch shells. Horses with bodies that morph into fishtails burst from arched niches in the grotto wall. Riding them are ecstatic nymphs who make it clear that old Neptune runs a swimsuit-optional grotto.
The “nude question” worried bureaucrats — “the female nude is not as bad as the other persuasion,” one bluenose commissioner wrote another. They hassled the sculptor till he quit. The replacement brought in to finish the work, however, went through with the fishy full monty as originally envisioned.
It’s one of my favorite works of art in all of art-stuffed Washington, a declaration of independence from self-seriousness at a building designed to prove America’s intellectual ambitions.
And did I mention the nymphs?
