Sea Maidens (1930)

By Richard Kuöhl (1880-1961). The two bronze figures stand at 6’ high.

The placement of Kuöhl’s darkly patinated bronze figures at either side of a gravel pathway leading to the Brick Wall Garden nicely relates them to the meditative Girl with a Scarf just beyond. In Art Deco style, they are mounted frontally on John Allerton’s tall white fluted square columns.

Robert Allerton commissioned the statues after seeing a similar figure done by Kuöhl in Hamburg to advertise the Hamburg-American Line, a passenger-ship company. That figure stood atop a kiosk and held a Viking longboat, but Allerton had the artist change the accessory to a bowl of plenty, more in keeping with the spirit of the sculptures’ midwestern prairie destination. At first, the patron thought also of having a pair, male and female, and asked the artist to work up a masculine counterpart to the kiosk woman. But, John Allerton recalled, his father turned down the proposed mate as “too static and without the grace and charm of the female.”

Mirror images of each other, the maidens’ lithe, pubescent bodies show under transparent drapery, their watery origins suggested by seaweed-embossed embroidery and ropey seaweed garlands.

John Allerton wondered whether the male was ever made, and described other Kuöhl work: “We have here [in Hawaii] two small figures cast in ‘clinker,’ which is red terra cotta really. They were left over from a building in Hamburg called Chile Haus. l also have two bronzes of a mermaid riding a fish, also ‘right and left’ figures. Oh yes, and still more, ones he had done for a bank and were part of four window grilles. No wonder Kuöhl never became famous because we have so many of his creations hidden away.”

Terminal Busts, before 1900

These two marble statues are copies of late Renaissance models. They stand at 6’6” high.

Two odd marble statues-partially draped, truncated, demure armless female nudes on decorated, tapered shafts stand against the Library Terrace brick walls. Renaissance-type figures such as these are sometimes adapted by architects for purely decorative purposes, but they were used in antiquity as pillars to mark boundaries. Garden books refer to them as “herms,” for male and female heads or figures of the Hermes type; as “caryatids,” even if they do not bear structural blocks or vases on their heads; or “terms,” standing for terminal busts or figures on four-sided columns. John Allerton described them as terminal busts, “a rather poor name,” he added, “but it’s the official title.” In a 1952 memo, Par Danforth, the Park’s first director, attested that Robert Allerton purchased the pieces “in an antique shop in Rome some fifty years ago. They either came from the Pope’s Villa or are copies of those at the Pope’s Villa.”

Text from A Guide to Art at the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign, Robert Allerton Park, and Chicago by Muriel Scheinman. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission from the University of Illinois Press.