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Chauncey Bradley Ives (American, 1810-1894)
Willing Captive, modeled c. 1862/68, carved 1871
Marble, 73 x 64-3/8 27-5/8 inches
Gift of James H. Ricau and Museum Purchase

Born in Hamden, Connecticut, Chauncey Bradley Ives learned the rudiments of his craft from the New Haven woodcarver Rodolphus Northrup. After additional study in New Haven with the more accomplished marble sculptor Hezekiah Augur, Ives built a reputation in Boston and New York for his portrait busts. Over the course of his career he produced more than 120 such images, and the list of his many subjects includes famous Americans such as Thomas Sully, Noah Webster, and Winfield Scott.

In 1844 Ives went to Italy, in part to improve his failing health (his family was prone to tuberculosis). At first he worked in Florence, where most of America's neoclassical sculptors had originally congregated to study. But in 1851 he settled permanently in Rome, which by that time had supplanted Florence as the center of the American neoclassical movement. In time he would vie with Hiram Powers (see objects 86.500, 86.501, 86.502) for leadership of the expatriate American school of sculptors in Rome.

In many of Ives's finest works, the idealism and purity of traditional neoclassical style is tempered by his taste for Victorian anecdote and naturalistic detail. This distinctive blend of divergent impulses is evident in The Willing Captive, the most ambitious of his creations and one of the few multifigure compositions in American neoclassical sculpture. Here, Ives brings his lofty Italianate aesthetic to bear on a popular story of the nineteenth-century American frontier. The sculpture depicts a young white girl who has been captured by Indians and raised as part of the tribe. When contact with her original family brings the possibility of rejoining white civilization, she rejects the pleas of her mother and chooses to stay with the Indians as wife of the tribal chief. The story is based on actual instances of whites being abducted by Indians along the frontier, several of which George Bancroft recorded in his seminal publication of 1846-75, History of the Colonization of the United States. Ives knew Bancroft's book and may have based his sculpture on an incident recounted in it. The incident took place at Sandy Creek, Ohio, and involved local Indians who, while negotiating a peace treaty, agreed to return a number of white captives to family and friends; however, several captives decided to remain with the tribe.

In Ives's striking composition an Indian stands nobly at center, his commanding pose and heroically nude body evoking such classical sculptural prototypes as the second-century Greek marble Poseidon (National Archaeological Museum, Athens). The Indian is flanked by his "captive" wife and her mother, who kneels as she pleads for her daughter's return. Embodying the nineteenth-century love of drama and moral conflict, the sculpture presents the story's emotional climax, as the young woman makes her decision.

Ives is known to have produced two marble replicas of The Willing Captive. The Chrysler's version, probably the later of the two, was commissioned by Peter C. Cornell of Brooklyn. In 1886 Ives had the sculpture cast in bronze. That version was purchased in 1895 by Jonathan A. Coles, who donated it to the city of Newark, New Jersey. Shortly thereafter it was installed in Newark's Lincoln Park, where it stands today.

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