Edward Augustus Brackett

Edward Augustus Brackett (October 1, 1818 – March 15, 1908) was a self-taught American sculptor, author, and conservationist.

Brackett was born in Vassalboro, Maine to Reuben and Elizabeth (Starkey) Brackett, and moved with his parents in the spring of 1837 to Cincinnati, where he started work as a sculptor. In 1839 he showed a pair of portrait busts at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts, and subsequently moved to New York City. In 1841, after roughly two years in New York, he moved to Boston with an introduction from his friend William Cullen Bryant, where from 1843 he lived in Winchester, Massachusetts (at that time Woburn), from the early 1850s onward in the octagonal Edward A. Brackett House. In October 1859, after the raid on Harper's Ferry, Brackett traveled to the jail there, where he made sketches and measurements of John Brown's head, which he subsequently cast as a bust. After serving one year in the Civil War, he turned to horticulture and the scientific breeding of fish. In 1869 he was appointed to a state commission supervising inland fisheries, and became its head in 1873. From 1894 until his death he served as head of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Commission.

Selected sculptures

Washington Allston bust, 1844, Metropolitan Museum
Shipwrecked Mother and Child, 1848–51, Worcester Art Museum
Reverend Hosea Ballou, 1859, Mount Auburn Cemetery
Bust of John Brown, 1859, Tufts University

Selected books

Twilight Hours or Leisure Moments of an Artist, 1845
The World We Live In, 1903
My House, Chips the Builder Threw Away, Gorham Press, 1904
Materialized Apparitions: If Not Beings From Another Life, What Are They, Gorham Press, 1908

References

Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists entry
AskArt.com entry
Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900: A Biographical Dictionary, Mary Sayre Haverstock, Jeannette Mahoney Vance, Brian L. Meggitt, Jeffrey Weidman, Kent State University Press, 2000.
"Crows' Nests or Eagles' Aeries? The Octagon Houses of E. A. Brackett and H. P. Wakefield", James A. Newton, Old Time New England, Historic New England, Vol. 67, No. 247, 1977, pages 57-72. [1]
Edward Brackett (sculptor) made a cast of John Brown's features before execution, Library of Congress
"Edward A. Brackett visits John Brown", Ellen Knight, February 21, 2013. [2]