Early Artistic Inclinations
Helen was born into an especially talented and well-regarded family. Her mother, Elizabeth Farnsworth Mears, was one of Wisconsin’s first published novelists and a published poet. One of Helen’s sisters was a writer and historian, the other an illustrator. Her father, John Hall Mears, who gave her anatomy lessons (a prolific inventor, he once studied and practiced surgery) and turned his woodshed into a studio for her. With such creative and supportive spirits around her, Helen, “the little, big-eyed girl who went quietly about our city,” as one account depicted her, began her career as a sculptor at an early age.
She started by molding bread into figures of dogs and horses and by cutting out paper dolls that bore uncanny resemblances to the neighbors. One of her early creations was the putty and clay modeling of a miniature theater with marionettes made to represent well known society people of Oshkosh.
At age 9, she displayed a head of Apollo the Sun God at the Winnebago County Fair. Throughout her high school years, she worked in agriculture and painted as an avocation.
In her early 20s, one of her statues was exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The nine-foot-tall statue earned the developing artist the pride of a paycheck and her first taste of acclaim.
She then entered the Art Institute of Chicago to study for three years under Lorado Taft (1860–1936); but after six months’ work, this artist reportedly told her there was nothing more for her to learn in Chicago. She was a nimble study, and Taft directed her to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ studio in New York City. Helen became Saint-Gaudens’s assistant and made important contributions to the work of this master.
A Trip to Europe
Literally trailing in the footsteps of Saint-Gaudens, Helen, with her younger sister Mary in tow, traveled to Europe and studied sculpture throughout the Continent with a number of notable sculptors of the period. Contemporary art publications took notice of Mears exhibiting her work in Paris in 1897 and making a tour of Italy the following year.
Around this time, she removed to New York City once again and received a commission from the State of Illinois to make a statue of suffragist and temperance reformer Frances E. Willard (1839–1898). For this work, she was paid the handsome sum of $18,000. Perhaps her finest extant effort, she once said that she worked at it for at least five years. Titled “The Fountain of Life,” the 14-foot-high bas-relief in the Grecian mode “tells the truth of life,” she once explained to an interviewer. It was initially unveiled on exhibit in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol in Washington in 1905. Saint-Gaudens praised the piece as “strong” and “in addition has a subtle, tangible quality exceedingly rare and spiritual,” he said.
“The Fountain of Life” was later donated to her home state as the “Wisconsin Women’s Memorial” and stands in the State Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, today.
Mears worked towards the conclusion of the classical romantic period and, excluding a very few pieces, they are in the classical mold. One of her other most famous works is a bronze relief of her mother, Elizabeth Farnsworth Mears, constructed in 1907 and later exhibited at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition where it received an award. One European art critic commented fawningly, comparing that work in “pose” and “beauty” with the famous painting of his mother made by James Whistler.
Her other notable works include a bust of Saint-Gaudens, a bas-relief of composer and pianist Edward Alexander MacDowell (1860–1908), and bronze busts of military officer George Rogers Clark (1752–1818) and dentist and inventor William T. G. Morton (1819–1868). She was also the sculptress of the Adin Randall Memorial Fountain in Eau Claire, Wisconsin which was completed in 1914. It still stands today.
On Threshold of Success
Although she attended the much-celebrated Armory show in 1913 in New York City—the first significant exhibition of modern art in America—it had no appreciable influence on what she was doing. Indeed, the early to mid-1910s found Mears leading a creatively productive life in her Manhattan studio, often using her sister, Mary, as a model. She also painted a good number of portraits with marked success. A letter written by Mears now in the archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society referenced her desire to depict something greater than the material form:“I am progressing towards a freer, more interpretative sense of form in the effort to express the inner life—the energy of spirit, in the groping sometimes blind, sometimes inspired, and I feel that art to be representative of this age must express the real life of the soul as well as the marvel of the material envelop, and to me it is the mystery of the inner life that give to form its significance and its grandeur.”
Little has been written on the personality and personal life of Mears, though writers who were privileged enough to meet her described the artist as “elusive” and “quiet and shy” and as someone who possessed “an unaffected kindliness of manner and nature” and who was “determined in doing what she desired.”
The life of Helen Farnsworth Mears was cut dramatically short on Feb. 17, 1916. One afternoon she was “acting as a hostess of a tea party” in her glass-roofed bungalow and abruptly fell ill. She was 44.
“Death made a raid in the art district of New York city last night and robbed that section of one of its most notable and successful residents,” stated the New York Herald.
Mears was claimed to have “suddenly expired from overwork and exhaustion,” according to one source, while another contemporary account blamed “an unheralded attack of heart disease,” and her sister, Mary Mears, later stated that the cause of death was “malnutrition.” Helen, noted the New York Herald, was highly regarded among the art colony of New York, “because of her earnest methods and undivided devotion to her profession.”
Obituaries in newspapers largely concentrated in New York and Wisconsin referred to the “prominent American sculptress” as one who had led a worthy life. One of them even asserted that she “was just at the threshold of highest success.”
One of her “most intimate friends” was Mrs. B.C. Gudden, who had known Helen and her family since the artist was an adolescent.
Immortality of Art
In the years following her death her work continued to be exhibited in mostly urban centers and generally to positive response. In 1939, the Barnard club, one of the most celebrated art clubs of New York City, exhibited Mears’s work in a two-week exhibit of paintings and sculpture by contemporary artists. It would be the only work by an artist no longer living to be included in the collection.
Though her once burnished star has somewhat faded into the annals of time and space, enough examples of Mears’s art survive to illustrate and illuminate the monumental moments of her life. In addition to “The Fountain of Life” and the Adin Randall Memorial Fountain, several of her works are in permanent collections of The Paine Art Center and the Oshkosh Public Museum, both in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
