Adams Memorial (grave marker)
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Adams Memorial
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The Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White
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| Location |
Rock Creek Cemetery Webster St. and Rock Creek Church Rd., NW. Washington, D.C. |
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| Coordinates | 38°56′50.5″N 77°0′37″W / 38.947361°N 77.01028°WCoordinates: 38°56′50.5″N 77°0′37″W / 38.947361°N 77.01028°W |
| Built | 1891 |
| Architect |
Augustus Saint-Gaudens Stanford White |
| NRHP Reference # | 72001420 |
| Added to NRHP | March 16, 1972 |
The Adams Memorial is a grave marker located in Section E of Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C., featuring a cast bronze allegorical sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The shrouded figure is seated against a granite block which forms one side of a hexagonal plot, designed by architect Stanford White. Across a small light-toned granite plaza, a comfortable stone bench invites visitors to rest and meditate. The whole is sheltered by a close screen of dense conifers, more dense and uniform in 2015 than in the photograph to the right.
Erected in 1891, the monument was commissioned by author/historian Henry Adams (a member of the Adams political family) as a memorial to his wife, Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams. Marian Adams, suffering from depression, had died by suicide through the ingestion of potassium cyanide, which she otherwise used to develop photographs. Adams advised Saint-Gaudens to contemplate iconic images from Buddhist devotional art. One such subject, Kannon (also known as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion), is frequently depicted as a seated figure draped in cloth. In particular, a painting of Kannon by Kanō Motonobu, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and shown to Saint-Gaudens by John LaFarge, is said to have played a major role in influencing the conception and design of this sculpture. Henry Adams, who traveled to Japan with LaFarge ostensibly to find inspiration for this memorial, particularly wanted elements of serenely immovable Buddhist human figures to be contrasted with the waterfall-like robe associated with Kannon. In addition to the still and flowing elements, the monument's dualism includes male-female fusion in the figure itself and blends Asian and European ideals of figure. These checks to the standard heroic figure combine to make a "countermonument" for a woman who disliked monuments generally. Saint-Gaudens may also have been influenced by Parisian funerary art from his stay in France.
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