O bject Le sson
Evelyn Longman’s Tender Allegory of the Toll of War By Karen Parsons
Loomis Chaffee History Teacher & School Archivist
Photo: Loomis Chaffee Archives Sculptor Evelyn Longman planned to send the plaster cast of her sculpture Victory of Mercy to the Modern Art Foundry in Queens, New York, over the summer of 1947. There the design would be fabricated into a five-ton bronze monument in larger-than-life scale. Her husband, Loomis Headmaster Nathaniel Batchelder, later explained in a letter to the foundry that the cast’s arrival would be delayed: “Important people are coming to see it.” Victory of Mercy, Loomis Chaffee’s war memorial, is arguably one of the most historically significant objects on the school’s campus. It derives
48
Loomis Chaffee Magazine Winter 2022
the deepest, most important meanings from its location. Placed on the east side of its sculptor’s studio, Chiselhurst-on-Farmington (now called Longman Hall), where Evelyn Longman worked for 27 years of her highly acclaimed career, it is also in view of the home she shared with her husband and of Founders Hall, where every man the monument honors crossed the threshold as a Loomis student or teacher. The object’s design intersects with national debates surrounding war memorials and, surprisingly, resided from 1923 to 1945 as a two-foot model on a tabletop in Chiselhurst before finally being cast in large scale. Business correspondence, embedded with deep
