Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ties That Bind: Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave" And Nineteenth-Century Marriage, Lauren K. Lessing

Faculty Scholarship

On an April evening in 1859, Louise Corcoran, the only child of fabulously wealthy banker, philanthropist, and art collector William Wilson Corcoran, married George Eustis Jr., a United States congressman from Louisiana, in her father’s Washington, D.C., mansion. A “select circle” of more than one thousand guests witnessed the ceremony, which took place in Corcoran’s private art gallery. Writing of the wedding for Harper’s Weekly, George Washington Jenkins noted that one of the original versions of Hiram Powers’s celebrated marble statue The Greek Slave stood at one end of the gallery, “in a bay window which forms a fitting shrine.” …