Marquis de Lafayette
9th Street and Park West, Prospect Park, Brooklyn
A view of the monument, top to bottom.
This monument to the Marquis de Lafayette sits like an enormous, eccentric toaster in a landscaped terrace at the end of 9th Street on the west edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It’s one of nine monuments inside the park, and the only figure of a war hero.
The attendant and the horse.
Lafayette stands in front of a quasicomical bas-relief scene depicting his horse and a groom standing under a tree. The groom is holding Lafayette’s horse with a look of shock or fear on his face, as if he half expected the horse to take a bite out of his face. The horse stands with an air of assuredness exceeded only by Lafayette himself, whose serene expression suggests he has no idea of the confrontation unfolding behind him. But more on that later.
The bronze sculpture of Lafayette and the bas-relief scene were made by Daniel Chester French. The architect Henry Bacon (he and French were collaborating on the Lincoln memorial in D.C. at the time) designed the stele and terrace, made of Milford pink granite. All told, it’s 19 feet tall.
A view of the monument, looking to the southeast.
It was dedicated on May 10, 1917, I think as part of a Liberty Loan drive. The French general Joseph Joffre was on hand for the festivities, but other than that it’s been difficult to find out more information. Press reports of the day are hard to track down, and sculpture-o-philes are usually more interested in the Lafayette statue by Frederic Bartholdi in Union Square. (He’s the guy who made the Statue of Liberty.)
However, there is this: The author Elmer Sprague, in his “Brooklyn Public Monuments,” writes that the monument took root when a Brooklyn businessman named Henry Harteau left $35,000 in his will for the purpose of building a memorial to Lafayette. Why did the Marquis hold so much interest for Harteau? A Times article relating the news of the will (which provides “handsomely” for his wife), from Sept. 20, 1895, said that Harteau wanted the monument to be an “expression of my admiration for that noble and patriotic man and of my appreciation, which my country shares, of his aid in establishing our Republic.”
;)
“Lafayette at Yorktown,” by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon.
Harteau’s will, according to The Times, called for a statue of Lafayette to be based on an engraving published with Washington Irving’s biography of George Washington. Sprague says this image is a painting, “Lafayette at Yorktown,” by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon. In the painting, Lafayette can be seen with James Armistead Lafayette, a slave who spied for Lafayette during the war who is flamboyantly depicted in a feathered hat and bright red pants. Lafayette later arranged for James’s freedom, which explains why James’s last name is Lafayette.
What all of that does not satisfactorily explain is the oddly menacing expression on the horse’s face. In Le Paon’s painting, the horse does have a strange, goggle-eyed expression, but it’s directed at Lafayette, not the slave/spy James. And James’s face seems determined, perhaps exasperated, but not fearful. My uneducated impression, whenever I approach the monument, is to believe that French, one of this country’s most famous sculptors, carelessly ran out of room on the left side of his composition. But that is so absurd that I shouldn’t even write it here.
The inscription on the base of the monument.
On the front of the stele, below the bronze relief scene, an inscription reads:
“THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE [—-] THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED AND PRESENTED BY HENRY HARTEAU A DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN OF BROOKLYN TO BE AN ENDURING TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF ONE WHO AS A FRIEND AND COMPANION OF THE IMMORTAL WASH INGTON FOUGHT TO ESTABLISH IN OUR COUNTRY THOSE VITAL PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTY AND HUMAN BROTHERHOOD WHICH HE AFTERWARD LABORED TO ESTABLISH IN HIS OWN
The inscription round the back of the monument.
On the back side of the monument, there is an inscription that reads:
“THIS MEMORIAL WAS UNVEILED AND DEDICATED BY MARSHALL JOFFRE AND M. VIVANI OF THE FRENCH WAR COMMISSION, MAY 10, 1917”
The monument was celebrated by the parks department in October 2007, mostly to mark the completion of another round of conservation of the statue paid for by donations from French-Americans. They trotted out the schoolkids and bureaucrats and everything.
A few years after the statue was dedicated in Brooklyn, French made a copy of the figure of Lafayette to be displayed at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. In fact, the school announced in September 2007 that they had completed renovations to the statue and built a plaza around it.
Updated October 2009
