Amandus Adamson

Biography

His first attempt to enter the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg failed. At fourteen Adamson ran away from his school in Tallinn to try, was brought back, and the affair ended in a severe punishment. A few years later he came again.

He was born on 12 November 1855 (31 October, Old Style) at the Uuga-Rätsepa farmstead near Baltic Port (now Paldiski), the son of a sailor and a farm owner’s daughter. In 1860 his father sailed to America and did not return; letters came until 1869, and then contact ceased. The boy attended the Toompea school in Tallinn (then Reval) for children from poor families, where a teacher, seeing how he carved little figures from wood, excused him from some of the household chores. From 1870 Adamson trained with a joiner in Reval, then worked in Saint Petersburg workshops making artistic furniture and wood carving. In 1873 the Academy turned him down.

It took him in 1875, on the recommendation of Count Lüdtke, president of the Academy of Sciences, and for the entrance examinations he submitted two wooden heads, of Apollo and Niobe. From 1876 he studied as an auditor in the class of Alexander von Bock. In the first weeks, so the story goes, he lived on sweet tea and slept on the floor of an attic room in the Academy’s office. He completed the course on 26 February 1879, receiving a large silver medal for the relief “The Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist”. He then taught at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and at Baron Stieglitz’s School of Technical Drawing. His first solo exhibition took place in Saint Petersburg in April 1887. With the proceeds he left for Paris and stayed there until 1891: he showed work at the Salon, received an honorary diploma and a gold medal at the 1889 World’s Fair, and for his pear-wood figure “Lyrical Music” a gold medal at the Salon of 1891. The sources disagree on the dates of his Paris years: according to some he lived in France from 1877, according to others from 1887.

On his return he worked in Saint Petersburg as a freelance artist. After 1896 he made reliefs for the frieze of the halls of the Russian Museum, then the Mikhailovsky Palace, with an allegory of the birth of painting, sculpture and architecture. Among his work for the city are the sculptures on the façade, dome and globe of the Singer House (1902–1904) and four allegorical statues on the façade of the Eliseev Brothers’ emporium. But most of his output consisted of small figures and groups, and many of them are known today only by their titles. In 1896 he bought a plot in Paldiski and built a summer studio there (finished by 1899), and in summer he worked on the islands of Pakri and Muhu.

From 1901 he began to make monuments. The first was the memorial to the sailors lost with the armoured ship Rusalka in Tallinn’s Kadriorg Park, unveiled in 1902: a bronze angel on a slender column. The model for the angel, it is said, was his maid. It was followed by the Monument to the Sunken Ships in Sevastopol (1905), for which he made the sculptural part; its image appears on the city’s flag and coat of arms. At about the same time he made the bronze statue “Champion”, depicting the Estonian strongman Georg Lurich.

In 1907 Adamson was made an academician for the sculpture “In Anxious Expectation”. In 1911 he took part in the Academy’s competition for a monument to the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, to stand in Kostroma. The committee chose his design, which had placed second: a structure about 36 metres high with dozens of figures of historical persons and reliefs. The foundation stone was laid on 20 May 1913 in the presence of Nicholas II. Adamson put all his money into the work. By 1917 the pedestal had been built and part of the bronze figures set up; after the revolution the finished sculptures were sent to be melted down, and a monument to Lenin appeared on the pedestal.

In 1918 Adamson moved with his family to Paldiski, taking with him only his tools and a few unfinished pear-wood sculptures. A two-storey house, built in his absence, awaited him there. In 1920 the Estonian government asked him to draw the coat of arms and flag of the republic. He made monuments to the War of Independence in Pärnu, Valga, Suure-Jaani, Viljandi, Kuressaare and Tartu, a monument to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald in Võru and a monument to Villem Reiman in Tartu. He spent most of 1922 in Italy, where he carved in Carrara marble a three-metre group, “Christ, the Blind Man and Mary Magdalene”, for St Paul’s Church in Tartu. He was a painter as well: his canvases are held in the Art Museum of Estonia. A year before his death he sent four pear-wood sculptures to the Paris Salon.

Adamson died on 26 June 1929 in Paldiski. As he had wished, he was buried in Pärnu, in the Alevi cemetery, beside his own monument to those who fell in the War of Independence.

After 1940 most of his monuments on this theme were destroyed, and many were restored after 1991. Since 2010 his studio in Paldiski has operated as a museum.