| This dissertation argues that portrait cameo carving, a specialized skill learned by a large and geographically diverse group of neophyte American sculptors before their European training in three-dimensional or monumental sculpture, must be investigated as a distinct movement in pre-sculptural apprenticeship training. Previous scholarship overlooked portrait cameo carving or assigned it to a category of minor arts of little importance. I argue that cameo carving served American sculptors-in-training as an apprenticeship in relief carving, an important branch of neoclassical sculpture. By tracing the import of cameo portraiture to America and the way it was taught as a beginning exercise in sculpture studios, I show its impact on the careers of such American sculptors as Henry Kirke Brown, John C. King, Margaret Foley, Erastus Dow Palmer, Launt Thompson, and Charles Calverley. I trace the practice from the first Cincinnati studio to teach cameo portraiture in the 1830s to the popularity of cameo portraiture in Boston from 1840 to 1860, identifying studios teaching cameo portraiture and students who, learning the art, practiced it. Those students then earned the funds necessary for sculpture study in Italy by working as cameo portraitists, a practice that continued through the 1860s in both Boston and New York, and was in some cases, the only way students could earn enough to complete their professional training. I demonstrate how the format of cameo portraiture influenced not only the relief portraits of the sculptors who practiced it, but eventually also affected the style of American relief portraiture throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. |
