Source: George Washington Monument
George Washington Statue, State Capitol, Raleigh
This life-size bronze statue of George Washington stands inside a gated area between two cannons at Union Square. Washington is in military dress and holds a civilian walking stick in his right hand as he looks to the south. He rests his left hand on his cloak, which is draped over a pillar of 13 rods. Jean-Antoine Houdon, a French sculptor and contemporary of Washington, depicted the statesman, patriot, and military hero with realism and naturalism, displaying his quiet American grace and strength at the height of his maturity and accomplishments. The monument is flanked on both sides by cannons produced in France before the American Revolution.
Images (by Natasha Smith): Contemporary front view | Back view | Side view
GEORGE WASHINGTON
The State of North Carolina
July 4, 1857
35.779950 , -78.639120 View in Geobrowse
"George Washington Monument, Capitol Square," in Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, (accessed December 29, 2011) Link
Bishir, Catherine W. "North Carolina’s Union Square," from “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina”, http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/, (accessed May 15, 2012) Link
Connor, Robert Digges Wimberly. Canova's Statue of Washington, (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1910), (accessed February 8, 2012) Link
Draper, Howard, 2006. "Washington, Statues of," NCpedia.org, (accessed October 1, 2013) Link
Kramer, Tracy L. and Nolley, Scott W. "Rediscovering an American Icon," CW Journal Autumn 03 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 2003)
Leigh, Catesby. "Our First President, in Three Dimensions," The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2011, (accessed October 17, 2012) Link
Mann, Rebecca C. Walking Raleigh/Durham, (Guilford, CT: Falcon, 2001)
Shaffer, Josh. "If This NC Statue Had Survived the Fire of 1831, It Would Be One of the Country's Masterpieces," The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), www.newsobserver.com, (Raleigh, NC), May 03, 2018, (accessed December 3, 2019) Link
Yes
Bronze statue, granite base
State of North Carolina, City of Edenton
$13,454
July 4, 1857
This monument was commissioned to replace the sculpture of Washington by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova that burned in the Capitol fire of 1831. While the cornerstone of a new capitol building was laid on June 4, 1833, efforts to replace the destroyed statue stalled until citizens in the city of Edenton subsequently sponsored the casting of a replacement statue and gave it to the state government. The new sculpture was a casting of a copy of Jean-Antoine Houdon's 1796 statue of Washington from a bust he had produced in 1785. Houdon's statue was originally commissioned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and installed in the rotunda in the capitol in Richmond in 1796, a few years before Washington died. The Raleigh sculpture was cast in bronze from Houdon's marble sculpture. The Houdon casting depicted Washington as the mature general, wearing his military attire, but holding a civilian walking stick.
[Additional information from NCpedia editors at the State Library of North Carolina: This person enslaved and owned other people. Many Black and African people, their descendants, and some others were enslaved in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. It was common for wealthy landowners, entrepreneurs, politicians, institutions, and others to enslave people and use enslaved labor during this period. To read more about the enslavement and transportation of African people to North Carolina, visit https://aahc.nc.gov/programs/africa-carolina-0. To read more about slavery and its history in North Carolina, visit https://www.ncpedia.org/slavery. - Government and Heritage Library, 2023.]
The selection of Houdon's statue as a replacement was a signficant departure from the damaged rendering by Canova. The Canova statue from 1821, a product of more modern neoclassical European tastes, had been suggested by Thomas Jefferson in an 1816 letter to Nathaniel Macon as a more desirable rendering than the quiet, modest, and very American depiction of the general by Houdon from twenty years prior. On its arrival in Raleigh, the bold Canova statue had met with some public criticism of its romanticized and Romanized depiction of Washington. According to R. D. W. Connor, it was criticized as a better likeness of Caesar than of Washington (Connor, p. 11). Ironically, Thomas Jefferson had apparently recommended Houdon to Virginia's governor Benjamin Harrison during his time as the American minister to France in the late 1780s. The Houdon depiction may still have better suited Victorian era tastes in 1857.
The monument is located outside the south side of the Capitol building in Raleigh's Union Square, NC.
The statue sits on the lawn just outside the Capitol building, surrounded by a low gridiron fence and flanked by two small canon. Also nearby are statues of Zebulon B. Vance and Charles B. Aycock, two former governors of North Carolina.
The statue is frequently used as a starting point for tours of the grounds of the North Carolina State Capitol.
The town of Edenton agreed to sponsor the creation of the statue after the Canova statue was destroyed. The legislature granted approval to locate and unveil the statue on the Capitol Square grounds, rather than inside the Capitol where the Canova sculpture had been located.
The casting cost $13,454, and the necessary renovations to accommodate the monument in Capitol Square cost $1,821.