The Kamehameha I statue (original cast) is an outdoor sculpture by American artist Thomas Ridgeway Gould, cast in 1880 and installed in 1883. It stands in front of the old country courthouse in the town of Kapaʻau, located in North Kohala on the Island of Hawaiʻi. Made of cast brass and painted with lifelike colors, it depicts Kamehameha I, and represents an important cultural and spiritual object for the local community.
Description The Kamehameha I sculpture is an oversized painted brass casting of King Kamehameha I, the ruler credited with unifying the Hawaiian Islands in the early nineteenth century and establishing the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1810. Though the surface of the sculpture was originally finished with a brown chemical patina and gold leaf, it has become local tradition to paint the statue with lifelike colors, and it appears as such to this day. Originally commissioned to celebrate the centennial of Captain Cook's arrival to the Hawaiian Islands and to stand in front of the Aliʻiōlani Hale government building in Honolulu, extenuating circumstances during its delivery to Hawaiʻi delayed its arrival, and resulted in its being placed instead in Kapaʻau, near Kamehameha I's birthplace.
Historical information Commission and delivery to Hawaiʻi The statue had its origins in 1878 when Walter M. Gibson, a member of the Hawaiian legislature at the time, decided to commission a sculpture to commemorate the 100 year arrival of Captain Cook to the Hawaiian Islands. The legislature appropriated $10,000 for the project and made Gibson chairman of the Commemorative Monument Committee formed to oversee the process. While the committee did include Native Hawaiians, it was strongly directed by Gibson and by King David Kalākaua.McConnel. 1898. The Great Kamehameha. The Paradise of the Pacific 9 (9): 131–132, 137. After searching several prominent U.S. cities for an appropriate artist, Gibson contracted Thomas Ridgeway Gould, a Boston sculptor living abroad in Florence, Italy, to create the statue.
By 1880, Gould finished the full-size plaster model for the work and sent it to the Barbedienne Foundry in Paris, France to be cast in brass. The finished brass sculpture was shipped from Bremen, Germany in August 1880 en route to Hawaiʻi, but after encountering a storm in the south Atlantic, a fire broke out on deck and the ship sank near the Falkland Islands. Its entire cargo, including the sculpture, was presumed lost. When news of the shipwreck reached Honolulu, officials decided to commission a second cast using the $12,000 insurance collected after the loss of the original. Ironically, and unbeknownst to Honolulu officials, fishermen managed to recover the sunken statue, which was recognized and bought by a British ship captain who then sold it in 1882 to the Hawaiian government for $875. Now in possession of two identical statues, government officials decided to place the second cast, in considerably better condition than the original that had been damaged in the shipwreck, in the location originally intended to receive the statue, the Aliʻiōlani Hale government building in Honolulu. After some debate, the original was installed near Kamehameha I's birthplace in North Kohala. Due to the shipwreck, neither statue was on-hand in Hawaiʻi to fulfill Gibson's original plan of celebrating the 100th anniversary of Cook's arrival to the islands. However, Gibson was able to convince King Kalākaua to incorporate the unveiling of the Honolulu cast into his coronation ceremonies in February, 1883.
Features During the initial stages of the statue's design, Gould and Gibson made efforts to create an accurate likeness of King Kamehameha's face, body, and clothing. This proved to be a challenging task, as there was no consensus on what exactly Kamehameha I looked like. When in Boston, Gibson provided Gould with an engraving of King Kamehameha, a French copy of a Chinese copy of the king's official watercolor portrait by Russian artist Louis Choris in 1816. Gibson directed Gould to use this copy of a copy of a copy, but to portray Kamehameha at approximately age forty-five, much younger than he appeared in the original watercolor. Attention was also focused on the proper way to depict Kamehameha's body; it was eventually determined that to convey his heroic and larger-than-life status, Kamehameha should be depicted with typical Herculean features, including a broad back and shoulders, strong, powerful arms, and a commanding chin.
Some evidence exists to support the claim that Gould used the Roman sculpture of Augustus Caesar from Prima Porta (see Augustus of Prima Porta) as a model for Kamehameha the Great (original cast). The Augustus sculpture was well known throughout the United States and Europe at the time, and would most certainly have been known by Gould, whose neoclassical work was often inspired by Classical pieces. In addition, there are striking similarities between the Augustus of Prima Porta and Kamehameha the Great (original cast), including the raised right arm and the fact that Kamehameha holds his spear in his left hand like Augustus, even though Kamehameha was thought to have been right-handed. It has been argued that this fusion of Hawaiian cultural attributes with Roman heroic imagery was a deliberate attempt to portray Kamehameha I as a "Pacific Hero" and bolster the Hawaiian monarchy at a time of political and economic instability.
For use as reference for Gould, King Kalākaua commissioned a series of photographs of Hawaiians modeling King Kamehameha's. A man served as model dressed up in the royal feather cloak (), feather helmet (), feather sash () (also referred to as a "(feather) " or "feather baldric" ).). Although the figure in the photograph had been identifiable as Robert Hoapili Baker, according to Gibson's writings, in the particular photo[s] which survived, the man is asserted to be his half-brother John Tamatoa Baker, since John's photos were mixed in the furnished photographs in all likelihood, and the one made to hold the spear is purported to have been John., note 8, citing Taylor, Clarice B. (1949), "A Nuuanu Valley House," Paradise of the Pacific". Holiday Edition. pp. 22–25. There is also a photomontage version (see photo right), where the top half of John Baker in royal dress is composited with the legs of a native Hawaiian fisherman. produces a vintage photograph of the native fisherman held by Bishop museum, which matches the legs. The garments worn by the models, i.e. the sash(kāʻei), tied around the figure's waist and draped over his left shoulder, his feather helmet (mahiole), and his cloak (ʻahu ʻula), are now on display at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum., note 5 The sash consists of a central band of tiny red feathers, likely from the , the Hawaiian honeycreeper (Vestiaria coccinea), surrounded on either side by bands of yellow feathers from the (Moho nobilis). The ʻahu ʻula is composed of nearly 450,000 golden feathers from the now-extinct .
In order to deflect criticism from both American and Native Hawaiian opinion, Gould and Kalākaua made an effort to observe the many complex customs and ritualistic insignia needed to produce an accurate representation of a high-ranking Native Hawaiian chief. Still, some aspects of Kamehameha's depiction draw heavy criticism to this day. The main point of contention is the pair of sandals adorning Kamehameha's feet. While at the time, Hawaiians did wear sandals, it was only for traveling long distances or over heavy terrain, and the obviously Western Classical style of the shoes only compounds their inaccuracy. Additional problems include the fact that Kamehameha's sash drags on the ground behind him like a royal European train (an arrangement that would be considered degrading by Native Hawaiians and that would also damage the delicate feathers composing the sash), and Gould's decision to adorn the cloak with a European-style tassel. Although no early criticisms on the subject have been found, contemporary critics also take issue with Kamehameha's open-hand gesture, since traditional Hawaiian beckons are made with the palm down, not the palm up.
Conservation history Throughout its history, maintenance of the sculpture has proven to be challenging to carry out due to jurisdictional confusion—though the statue is located on county land, it is unclear if it belongs to the state or not, and therefore deciding who should be responsible for caring for it can be difficult to determine. Older residents of the island claim that during the plantation era, the sugar company bosses maintained the sculpture. Sometime after World War II, the County Department of Public Works in Hilo, Hawaii assumed responsibility for the statue's care; after government reorganization in 1973, the crew tasked with cleaning and repainting the sculpture was transferred to state control. Having little to no experience caring for public works of art, the crews often utilized materials and techniques that would be considered aggressive and potentially damaging by modern art conservators, including wire brushes, power washers, and house paint. When funds for this maintenance dried up in 1992, state crews stopped repainting the sculpture. Though the Art in Public Places Division of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts maintains most Hawaiian public art, including Kamehameha the Great (second cast), it does not allocate funds to care for the North Kohala cast. Local residents suspect this may be due to the agency's disapproval of painting the sculpture. Between 1992 and 2001, any repainting and general maintenance the statue received was from local volunteers working with common household materials.
In early 2001, Honolulu-contracted and the California-based conservator Glenn Wharton, who led an effort to conserve the statue. After helping to regild Kamehameha the Great (second cast) in 1994, Wharton visited the North Kohala statue in the spring of 1996 with the initial intent of determining and then restoring the statue to its original nineteenth-century appearance. Upon visiting the sculpture for the first time, Wharton discovered that the statue's current coat of paint had faded due to ultraviolet (UV) light from the Sun, was lifting in many areas, and in some places had flaked away completely to reveal underlying corrosion. Wharton later identified this as bronze disease, a detrimental form of corrosion that can occur on copper, brass, and bronze surfaces when exposed to chloride salts, water, and oxygen, and, when left untreated, can eat away into the surface of the metal. In addition, Wharton noted signs of corrosion of the interior iron armature (See armature (sculpture)), and stress cracks in the metal base, all issues which would need to be dealt with in the final treatment plan.