Bust of Oliver Wendell Holmes

Brooks, Richard Edwin (1865-1919) · 1896

The BPL original was “ordered by the Mayor of Boston, on authority of the City Council, and was paid for by the city,” according to Annual Report of the Trustees and received at that time (January, 1896). The Boston Medical Library copy was certainly in the library by 1900; incised “Richard E. Brooks, Paris, 1896” on side, and was possibly a gift of James Read Chadwick. A photographic series of studies was made of Holmes “aet. 75,” or circa 1884. According to the BMSJ (1894), v. 131, p. 376, “The portrait of Dr. Holmes which we publish this week is at once an excellent likeness and a very pleasing picture of him in his later years—for us by far the most so of any which we know. The photograph was taken by the Boston sculptor, Bartlett, with a view to making a bust. The design was given up, as the necessary sittings were irksome to the subject, and we are indebted to Mr. Bartlett and Dr. J. R. Chadwick for the right to the picture. It was not easy for the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s chisel to do justice to Dr. Holmes’s mobile features.” Bronze bust of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)