One statue of set returns to Martin House complex
‘Spring’ returns in replica to Darwin Martin House
On her wedding day 86 years ago this month, Dorothy Martin Foster posed for a photograph in front of a rectangular stone sculpture on the east lawn of the Darwin D. Martin House.
The work titled “Spring,” by Richard W. Bock, showed cherubs emerging from their winter’s sleep beneath newly leafed foliage. The smiling bride of James Foster, spring flowers in her left hand and a white lace train swept to her right side, perfectly complemented the allegorical theme.
As far as the Martin House Restoration Corp. can determine, the sculpture was the only one of a set commissioned by Frank Lloyd Wright that actually ended up at his extraordinary “prairie house” complex in Buffalo.
And it had been gone for more than a half-century before a replica was placed at the same spot Monday to commemorate the architect’s 142nd birthday.
The 2-foot-high, 5-foot-long copy now resting on a brick pier near the veranda was cast from the original at the Richard W. Bock Sculpture Museum at Illinois’ Greenville College by a team from Skylight Studios of Woburn, Mass. The studio also had reproduced “Nike of Samothrace,” which has adorned the conservatory of the restored 1907 Martin House for the past two years. The original Nike vanished decades ago.
Bock, who made sculptures for many Wright buildings when both worked in Chicago in the early 1900s, presumably was hired to do four for the Buffalo project, each representing a season. The restoration group believes he may have completed one other, “Winter,” that was never delivered and the whereabouts of which are unknown.
Wright’s drawings did not indicate where the second piece, if it indeed existed, was supposed to be placed, said Mary F. Roberts, executive director.
It may be that Darwin Martin’s wife, Isabel, simply stopped the installation of “Winter” because “she thought there were enough memorials to winter in our city,” Roberts said.
“There’s a little bit of mystery surrounding the sculptures,” she added.
Indications are that Bock never finished the remaining two Martin House pieces because he was busy making sculptures for the Larkin Building, which Wright designed around the same time for Martin, an executive of the huge Buffalo mail order company.
The original “Spring” was removed from the Parkside complex in the 1940s by Darwin R. Martin, who was executor of his parents’ estate and along with them had fallen on hard times during the Depression.
It remained at the son’s Summer Street house until 1975, when he donated it to Greenville College for the Bock Museum.
The Darwin Martin House would love to have brought back the original, but the museum was not willing to part with it, “as is their right,” Roberts said.
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