With the installation of Audrey Flack’s bust of Adrienne de Noailles, Lafayette College’s sculpture landscape has a new resident. She joins a small but visible cast of bronze and stone figures scattered across campus.
The Marquis de Lafayette (I)
Artist: Daniel Chester French
Installed: 1921
A youthful Marquis de Lafayette stands with one hand on his sword and another on his hip; a tri-corner hat fits snugly under his arm. The statue in front of Colton Chapel was once visible from Easton’s downtown, though new constructions now block the view.
The statue matches that of a Daniel Chester French-created relief scene in New York City’s Prospect Park, where the same depiction of the Marquis stands near a horse. When an alum found the plaster mold for French’s depiction of the Marquis, college President John MacCracken had it cast in bronze. The college had been after a more spry representation of the Marquis; a little over a decade earlier, the elderly Lafayette on the college seal was swapped for a more youthful one.
The Marquis de Lafayette (II)
Artist: Jean-Pierre Gras
Installed: 1938
The stone statue of Lafayette once stood outside the flagship Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, according to early coverage by The Lafayette. When the store replaced the statue with a bronze version, it presented the stone edition to the college.
The statue behind Hogg Hall, which has been a victim of student abuse during past rivalry seasons, has a twin in Paris, installed in an exterior alcove in the Louvre Museum’s Aile de Rohan-Rivoli alongside 15 other French military figures.
The Leopard
Artist: Bedi-Makky Art Foundry
Installed: Late 1950s
Commissioned by the Class of 1958 as a senior class gift. Members of the class — nicknamed the “Leopard Class” — still gather at the statue for reunions, and commissioned a slightly smaller copy for Metzgar Fields for its 50th reunion.
Transcendence
Artist: Melvin Edwards
Installed: 2008
A 16-foot-tall and four-ton stack of heavy, abstract shapes lies to the north of Skillman Library, created to honor the college’s first Black graduate: David McDonogh, class of 1844. Within the brushed stainless steel, viewers can make out an arc “transcending” the length of a chain and an open book.
Soldiers’ Monument
Artist: Batterson Monumental Works
Installed: 1872
Erected by the Lafayette College Alumni Association seven years after the Civil War’s end, the granite and limestone monument honors 16 Lafayette students who died for the Union.
The statue, near the top of the stairs connecting campus to downtown Easton, depicts a Union soldier with his rifle. The soldier seems to match that of Carl Conrads’ “The American Volunteer,” of which several depictions exist across the East Coast, including on a nearly 45-foot-tall monument in a Maryland national cemetery.
Abstract art
Two other abstract pieces exist on campus, including an unlabeled slab of marble on the path between Colton Chapel and Pardee Hall, and nine large, blocky shapes on a patch of grass outside Oeschle Hall.
The blocky metal items were installed in the mid-80s, “a gift from a local patron of the arts,” according to a 2000 walking tour of campus created by now former economics professor Jerome Heavy.
The college’s art galleries did not respond to requests for additional information on the pieces.
