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The Falling Gladiator
William Rimmer (born Liverpool, England 1816-died South Milford, MA 1879)
1861
- Medium
- plaster
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 64 x 43 1/8 x 40 1/4 in. (162.5 x 109.5 x 104.8 cm.)
- Culture
- Rome
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Caroline Hunt Rimmer
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
William Rimmer based this sculpture of a mortally wounded man on works from ancient Greece and Rome. But its subject echoed the suffering of the United States on the eve of war. When the artist began work in January of 1861, six states had seceded from the Union, and the attack on Fort Sumter was just three months away. Rimmer worked as a doctor, and his critics at first accused him of casting the sculpture on a real human body. As the conflict wore on, however, they praised his representation of torment and suffering, relating it to the grim fate of Americans at war with one another.Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
