HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#205 :: Bronze life cast of Walt Whitman's hand

Vacation. A return to the old family sod in Connecticut, to that magic last hour of lush August sun and before autumn's alarming kaleidoscope of decay cools it to a brown land of mud and slush. We are staying with my parents in the big, old clapboard house where I grew up, its interior festooned with art and mirrors and a wealth of heavy little objects. I've captured some to show you over the next few weeks. Perhaps the heaviest, though certainly not the littlest is this bronze life-cast of Walt Whitman's hand. Taken on April 18, 1881, it was probably made first by covering the poet's great right paw with plaster of Paris. The hollow impression would have been then filled with liquid wax to produce a wax positive of the hand, and then cast by one of several methods used to cast bronze, in an edition of 500 or so. My father acquired it in trade for, as he recalls, one of his paintings (though perhaps not this one) of Gertrude Stein. At just under a foot long - the outside size limit for heavy little objects - Mr. Whitman's right hand weighs around 15 pounds. It is dense and cold, and wonderful to handle.