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1958
Riohmond Barthe
Evelyn Reid Griffith
BAY' ST. LOUIS has a claim to International fame through Richmond Barthe, native Negro sculptor whose statues in marble, bronze and stone are in museums and private collections in France, England, Germany, India and half-dozen other foreign countries.
His works are permanently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as many other major museums in the United States. His great American eagle is used at the entrance of the Social Security Building in Washington, D. C.
Barthe won two Julius Rosenwald fellowships and two Gugenheim fellowships on merit alone. lie holds the Audubon Artist Medal of Honor and numerous awards and citations from the American and National Academy of Arts and Letters.
With two honorary art degrees he says, ?I didn?t get to High School. My mother was a widow and I was taken out of the 7th grade to help support the family in Bay St. Louis.? His mother, Mrs. Marie Robertson Barthe, was a seamstress and when Richmond was small she would put him on the floor with pencil and paper while she was at her tasks.
As he grew, beauty and form always attracted him. His pockets held pretty bits of broken glass, sea shells or a dried leaf of unusual shape and his one ambition was to be a painter, not a sculptor.
During the summer months and on week-ends he worked for the Harry S. Pond family who had a summer home on the corner of South Beach and Ballen-tine Streets. In 1917 when he was 16 years old he went to New Orleans with them as a butler and Mrs. Pond gave him his first oil paints for a Christmas gift.
?I had never seen an artist at work? Barthe says, ?and didn?t even know how to apply oils to canvas. He learned composition by copying old masters from a volume of reproductions which cost him a hard-earned $25.00.
Lyle Saxon, author of ?Fabulous New Orleans? discovered his work and encouraged him by posing and then criticizing the result. Occasionally Saxon would send him to the Delgado Art Museum with a note and these few occasions gave Barthe his first opportunity to see good original pictures.
Barthe?s first exhibit was at a church festival in New' Orleans. His life-size painting of the Head of Christ so impressed Father Harry Kane of the Blessed Sacrament Parish that he helped Barthe to study at the Chicago Art Institute.
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His first attempt at sculpture was in 1928 when he. modeled the heads of two friends just as an experiment. He was requested to exhibit these in a Chicago art exhibit called ?The Negro in Art?. These were reproduced on a New York magazine cover and Barthe was on his road to fame as a sculptor. Under pressure from his landlady he gave up his brushes and canvas for the remunerative chisels and stone.
The theatre has long interested Barthe and some of his best known works have been in this field. One New York critic says Barthe has the entire New York theatre to himself as a sculptor. His model of Katherine Cornell as ?Juliet? is in a private collection in Argentina and he has modeled Sir Lawrence Olivier, Judith Anderson, John Geilgud, Maurice Evans and Gvpsy Rose Lee among others.