"It is my will to have erected at a distance of 100 ft. apart on high granite pedestals of uniform size and shape, statuary emblematical of the History of America— ranging in time from the earliest settlers to the present era, arranged in chronological order. . . ."
For 25 years these words from the testament of Mrs. Ellen Phillips Samuel have been so many thorns in the flesh of the Fairmount Park Art Association of Philadelphia. Plump, exacting Mrs. Samuel died in 1913, leaving the association $765,000 to execute her row of dreamed-of statues along the Schuylkill's east bank. Mrs. Samuel's dream, however, gave the association the willies. They thought it smacked of waxworks.
In their effort to sit quietly on Mrs. Samuel's bequest, the Fairmount Park Art Association reckoned without frizzle-bearded Joseph Bunford Samuel, Mrs. Samuel's husband. For Statue No. 1 in the series, Mr. Samuel himself commissioned Icelandic Sculptor Einar Jönsson to do a heroic bronze Viking, presented it to the Park. It was left to languish in a toolshed. Mr. Samuel thereupon began to fight. After several years he got the Viking put up at the end of Boathouse Row.
In 1918 the association cautiously produced plans for a balustrade and terrace to serve as a setting for a group of statues on the bank. Mr. Samuel threw fits. His wife, he cried, had left her money for statues, not for balustrades. At this the association threw up its hands and settled down again to wait for Joseph Bunford Samuel to mellow with age.
Mr. Samuel, still adamantine, died in 1929. Four years later the Samuel Memorial Committee obeyed the first provision of Mrs. Samuel's will by holding a world competition for sculpture—to be grouped in three terraces designed by Philadelphia's smartest architect, Paul Philippe Cret. Last week the first completed piece of sculpture, Spanning the Continent, by Robert Laurent, was quietly installed in one completed terrace. A goodly distance from Mr. Samuel's lonely Viking, it consists of a stumpy, sun-bonneted female figure helping a gaunt pioneer youth push a large wheel in the direction of the Philadelphia Zoo. Critic Dorothy Grafly of the Philadelphia Record coldly reported: "Even the heads seem parts screwed on. . . ."