Both plaster models acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1968

The plaster models are part of the extensive studio collection of casts, tools, and documents that passed to Powers’s heirs upon his death. In 1952, Life magazine published an article with a photograph by David Lees showing the plasters in the former studio. Lees took a number of additional photographs, which are now held at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. The collection remained in Florence until 1967, when it was offered to the Smithsonian Institution. Art historian Richard P. Wunder, at that time curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), helped negotiate the transfer.[1]  The collection was accessioned in 1968. It has since been catalogued online, and a large number of plasters are on view at the Luce Foundation Center for American Art. Powers’s archive is at the Archives of American Art.