This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2025 Delight Month sequence, spotlighting moments from New York’s LGBTQ+ artwork historical past all through June.
Off to at least one facet of the Bethesda Terrace, some of the photographed websites in Manhattan’s Central Park, guests gathered for an impromptu salsa dancing session on Sunday, June 15, in opposition to the backdrop of “Angel of the Waters,” the sculpture that types the centerpiece of the landmark fountain. Vacationers crowded close by, capturing images of the paintings in opposition to the luxurious surrounding greenery.
The Neoclassical bronze, devoted in 1873, is the enduring work of Emma Stebbins, the primary girl to be commissioned to create a public paintings in New York Metropolis. The sculptor was additionally in a dedicated partnership with the favored actor Charlotte Cushman, and it’s speculated that she modeled the piece after her beloved.
Showing as if she may step ahead off her plinth with one hand softly prolonged outward, the sculpture bears massive angel wings and robes that seem to crease within the wind. From afar, it seems to be as if she is likely to be flying.
The fountain in 1901. (picture Detroit Publishing Firm through Library of Congress)
On the sculpture’s dedication, 10 years after its commissioning in 1863, Stebbins defined that the work referenced the biblical angel who infuses the waters of Bethesda with therapeutic properties within the Gospel of John, in keeping with historian Jessica MacLean of the Central Park Conservancy. The nonprofit oversees the Manhattan inexperienced house.
Stebbins devoted the work to the Croton Aqueduct, New York Metropolis’s first water provide system, which opened in 1842 and helped forestall the unfold waterborne ailments together with cholera and typhoid, MacLean stated. Considered one of Stebbins’s personal brothers had died of cholera simply years earlier than. Born in 1815, Stebbins was the daughter of a rich banker and located help for her creative ambitions amongst her well-to-do household. She was additionally the sister of Henry Stebbins, the president of the New York Inventory Change and Central Park commissioner, resulting in allegations that her choice for the fee was nepotistic.
A more in-depth view of “Angel of the Waters” in Central Park
The common New York Instances reader within the late nineteenth century might need understood Cushman to be Stebbins’s “friend” slightly than her romantic associate. On the time of the couple’s practically two-decade relationship, phrases to explain a romantic or sexual relationship between two ladies, similar to “gay,” “lesbian,” or “queer,” weren’t but widespread parlance. Stebbins and Cushman’s relationship might need been described as a “Boston marriage,” a home partnership between two ladies that was typically accepted within the Victorian period based mostly on the belief that ladies have been bereft of sexual want.
Charlotte Cushman (left) and Emma Stebbins circa 1876 (picture Houghton Library through Wikimedia)
In letters, MacLean instructed Hyperallergic, Cushman referred to Stebbins as her spouse. Cushman wrote that she wore the “badge” of her marriage to Stebbins on her left ring finger. The 2 fell in love in Rome, the place Stebbins moved in her 40s to reside in an expatriate group of artists and examine sculpture, MacLean stated. It was there that Stebbins created Angel of Waters.
Stebbins was shy, in keeping with MacLean, and relied on Cushman to advertise her work. The couple returned to the USA in 1870 after Cushman was identified with breast most cancers, after which Stebbins stopped working.
“Like many women of their time, they found greater personal freedom abroad, but even after leaving Rome, they continued to defy societal norms by openly living as a couple in America,” MacLean stated.
Upon the disclosing of “Angel of the Waters,” critics abhorred the work. A Instances article from 1873 described a “positive thrill of disappointment” that befell the general public because the “cloaking” was faraway from the sculpture.
“All had expected something great, something of angelic power,” the creator wrote, describing the sculpture as a “feebly-pretty idealess thing.”
Guests taking images of the statue and its guests in June 2025
Some 150 years later, MacLean describes the work as not solely lovely but in addition revelatory of a narrative of “healing and hope.” The statue and its historical past are featured on an ongoing Queer Central Park Tour facilitated by the Central Park Conservancy.
“Their relationship adds a meaningful dimension to the history of public art in New York City,” MacLean stated, “one shaped by women and queer artists whose contributions have often gone unrecognized.”
