Thursday, October 6, 2016

November 6, 1866 -- Will, Shakespeare



November 6, 1886 – A simple note in the “Of Interest to the Art World” section of the Chicago Daily Tribune announces, “The will of Mr. Samuel Johnston contained an appropriation of $10,000 for a statue of Shakespeare to be erected in Lincoln Park.  The executors are John DeKoven and Wiliam Elliot Furness.”   Eight years later the statue is unveiled in Lincoln Park after the sculptor, William Ordway Partridge, travels to Stratford and London in an effort to come to some reckoning with what the Bard may have actually looked like.  The statue sits today in Grandmother’s Garden to the west of the Lincoln Park Zoo.  For more information on the statue and its benefactor, please head here.

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