Joe Gallo talks about "Boston Bronze and Stone Speaks To Us"

Joe Gallo will be speaking about his book Sunday 12/9/12 11:45 AM immediately after Old North Church's services and a book signing next door in the Old North Church Gift Shop.

George Washington, 1815 
Christ Church (Old North Church), Salem St. / North End Christian Gullager (d. 1827), Sculptor
Marble
The first Made-in-America sculpture is housed in the Old North Church. Boston not Philadelphia, nor New York, nor Washington D.C. can say it has the first American-made Carrara bust of George Washington, Father of our Country.
Had the American Revolution not intervened, more London-made memorials might have come to Boston to join the Scheemakers, Cheere, and Tyler works in King’s Chapel. As it was, the next significant memorial was a home-grown product, the bust of George Washington that was given in 1815 to Christ Church, Sa-em Street, by its senior warden, Shubael Bell. During Washington’s progressthrough New Eng-land in 1789 he sat for two hoursin Portsmouth, New Hampshire,on 3November for ChristianGullager (or Gülager), a Dan-ish artist, who came to Americaabout 1781, and lived in Boston,New York and Philadelphia un-til his death in the latter city in1827.
The not-very-flattering oil portrait that Gullager pro- duced now belongs to the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society. The Reverend William Bentley of Salem noted in his invaluable diary on 5 April 1790 that, ‘Mr. Gullager of Boston has completed a bust of General Washington in Plaster of Paris, as large as life,’ which was the prototype of the bust in Christ Church.

The church has placed nearby an inscription reading:  

“General Lafayette, standing here in 1824 and looking at the bust of Washington, said, ‘Yes, that is the man I knew and more like him than any other portrait.’’’ One hates to think that the anecdote is true, or that Lafayette was right. Shubael Bell’s gift by no means satisfied the Boston desire to memorialize Wash- ington, for a decade later a local committee sought to erect a full-length statue. For this purpose they had, as will shortly be seen, to turn to the British sculptor, Sir Francis Chantrey, whose work is the first to be illustrated in this series of Boston statues. (Whitehill,14,15).