Pompeo Luigi Coppini: The Most Famous Texas Sculptor You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

An Italian Immigrant in New York

Life began for Pompeo Luigi Coppini in Moglia, a small community north-west of Bologna, Italy, on May 9, 1870. His family moved to Florence, and at an early age, he was influenced by a neighborhood studio where he’d join them in creating copies of famous sculptures to sell to tourists. At 16, he secured a place at Florence’s renowned Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, where he graduated top of his class.

After serving in the Italian army twice and trying his hand at being a tutor, hydraulic engineer, sign painter, waiter, and bookkeeper, he received a contract to work on an eight-foot marble angel destined for a cemetery in Boston. A year later, at 26 years old, he boarded a ship bound for New York.

“He ran out of money fast, and went six days without food and was at death’s door when a kind Italian woman took pity on him,” said Janice Yow Hindes, a San Antonio artist, founder of the Hindes Fine Art Gallery and Art School, and former president of the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts. “But when he came to America, he adopted it as his love and was dedicated to it. He adored the place.”

Coppini got some work at a local wax museum sculpting figures when he met Roland Hinton Perry, an established sculptor of the time, and together they worked on the Fountain of Neptune, a monument installed outside the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1897. Through another well-known New York artist, Alexander Doyle, he worked on the memorial in Frederick, Maryland, dedicated to Francis Scott Key, who wrote the “Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812. The model for the piece was Elizabeth Maria Di Barbieri, who would become Coppini’s wife for almost 60 years.

 

Frustrated at his lack of success in New York, Coppini accepted an opportunity in 1901 to work with Frank Teich, a German-born stonecutter based in San Antonio. He became an American citizen a year later.

Coppini landed in Texas midway through the City Beautiful movement that had prompted U.S. cities to reform their architecture and urban planning to include parks with statues and civic centers celebrated by monuments. It was a sculptor’s dream, and Coppini received a lot of commissions during the next 15 years.

Building statues was an expensive and time-consuming process, especially casting them in bronze. Coppini would create statues in plaster and then look for patrons to pay the heavy costs of completion. In the first decade of the 20th century, the rich and powerful in Texas wanted to celebrate their heroes, many of whom had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Many of Coppini’s statues were installed at the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas. There, you can still find the Jefferson Davis statue as part of the Confederate Soldiers Monument (1903), the Terry’s Texas Ranger Monument honoring the 8th Texas Cavalry Regiment (1907), and Hood’s Confederate Texas Brigade Monument (1910). 

In Italy, Coppini had grown up living in a country recovering from bitter conflicts over the Italian unification. But as a new citizen of his newly adopted country, he had little opinion about a war that had been waged 30 years before. He wanted the commissions necessary to continue his art and put food on the table. Even at the time when he worked on Confederate statues, he also completed the Sam Houston Grave Monument, installed in the Oakwood Cemetery in Huntsville, in 1911. Houston was a strong Unionist who opposed secession and the Confederacy. 

During this time, he also worked on the first of three statues of George Washington. “It was installed in Mexico City in 1912, but a mob yanked it down after U.S. troops landed in Veracruz in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution,” Dr. McCaslin said. “Coppini had it shipped back to Texas, where it was repaired and then shipped back. It’s been there ever since.” 

Coppini’s second Washington statue was dedicated in 1927 in Portland, Oregon, but was pulled down and desecrated on the eve of Juneteenth 2020, and has not yet been reinstalled. The remaining Washington statue was erected in 1955, and it still stands on the south mall in the grounds of the University of Texas at Austin.

Coppini at Baylor University

“We have three Coppinis at Baylor—the statue of Rufus C. Burleson, which was dedicated in 1905, the Judge Baylor monument, and a plaster cast of Governor Pat Neff,” said Debbie Williams, art and collections coordinator at Baylor University. “The Burleson statue was recently refurbished, and the report I received told me that it was a great example of lost wax casting, where individual bronze plates are cast around a steel frame using a process called Roman joints, which predates modern welding.”

The Robert Emmet Bledsoe Baylor Statue was unveiled in 1939 and became a popular landmark on campus. “Oh yes, if you’ve graduated from Baylor, you’ve sat in his lap and had your picture taken,” Williams continued. “It’s a Baylor tradition. It’s quite a climb to get up there, especially in your cap and gown.”

Coppini received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Baylor University in 1941.

 

The Lost Art of the Galveston Flood

One of the low points of Coppini’s career happened when the City of Galveston commissioned a statue dedicated to the victims of the devastating flood in 1900 that took the lives of more than 6,000 people. Coppini created a plaster cast for their review.

“It’s an incredible piece of art. The anatomy is perfect, the design is lovely, and the story is wrenching,” Hindes said. “And I don’t know how he got the idea to put a single man’s hand under the water at the base of his family, but that’s really what art is. It’s both art and craft at its best.”

Galveston rejected it as being too sad, and the piece was stored away until a random exhibition in 1918, and has not been seen since. In 2020, local artist Doug McLean recreated the statue, now called “Hope,” and it stands behind Galveston City Hall.

Chicago, New York, and Home Again

By 1910, Waldine Tauch was a part of Coppini’s life, first a student, then an apprentice, and finally as his partner. She was a noted sculptor in her own right, probably best known for the First Shot Monument (1935) in Cost, Texas, commemorating the first shot of the Texas Revolution, and the bronze, life-sized relief at Baylor University entitled “Pippa Passes” (1956). 

 

Although Coppini had already left for Chicago, he worked on the Charles Noyes Memorial (1919), commissioned by grieving parents for their son who fell from his horse. It was originally supposed to be for Tauch, but she thought Coppini would do a better job than her since she’d never worked on a large equestrian statue before. The monument, also known as “The Spirit of Texas Cowboy,” can be seen on the courthouse lawn in Ballinger, Texas.

“Coppini was in Chicago to chase commissions for statues commemorating World War I, but he found little success. Also, a sculptor named Lorado Z. Taft dominated the artist community there, and, you know, there wasn’t room for two gunfighters in one town,” Dr. McCaslin said. “He didn’t stay long, moving to New York, where he had a very rough experience when he first landed. He never felt like he broke back into the New York circles. He kept his studio there, but ended up getting a huge job from Texas multimillionaire, George W. Littlefield, to build a monument at the University of Texas at Austin.”

The Littlefield Fountain (1933) began life as a monument to Texans who had died fighting in the Civil War. Coppini argued and convinced Littlefield that the memorial should instead commemorate those who had lost their lives in World War I. Having paid for the monument to be built, Littlefield died, and a new architect, Paul Phillipe Cret, was brought in to coordinate the final work. Although the original design incorporated six statues surrounding the fountain—including Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan, and Jim Hogg—they were relocated to the campus’s south mall, and have since been removed entirely because of their association with the Confederacy. 

Although his vision for the Littlefield Fountain was never fully realized, in 1934, Coppini was honored by the Texas Centennial Committee, winning the commission to design the Texas Centennial Half Dollar. Three years before, Coppini had received the Commendatore of the Order of the Crown of Italy.

Celebrating the Heroes of the Alamo

Dedicated in November 1940, the Alamo Cenotaph is the work Coppini would probably most like to be remembered for. Also known as “The Spirit of Sacrifice,” the monument celebrated the Battle of the Alamo. “I know I was chosen, not only for my artistic merits, but also because of my proven love and almost fanatic admiration for the heroes of the Alamo,” said Coppini during a radio interview at the time. 

 

The original design of the sculpture, from a local architecture firm, featured a 60-foot-high shaft and sloping capstone, leaving Coppini triangular areas to complete his figural work. By having some standing, others kneeling, Coppini included his heroes Jim Bowie, James Bonham, David Crockett, and William B. Travis. 

“Coppini had this urge to create grand lasting monuments to heroic achievement, but he got stuck working with committees,” said Karen Pope, Ph.D., now retired from teaching art history on the Baylor University faculty. “The Cenotaph was lambasted by critics, not for Coppini’s work, but the shape that was likened to a grain elevator. Coppini wanted to create his frieze of heroic figures in bronze, but the committee insisted on marble that now, 85 years later, is in need of serious attention. Thank goodness, Coppini was using a pneumatic drill to help him carve all those figures—he was in his late sixties at that point and it was an immense project.”

 

The Coppini Academy of Fine Arts

Coppini worked in his studio on Melrose Place in San Antonio while he completed the figures for the Cenotaph, and in 1945, established it as the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts.

“We have workshops during the week, and fine arts instructors who focus on representational classical style genres,” said Tom Ellis, president of the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts. “We also have a small museum, the apartment the Coppinis lived in, and somewhere we call the ‘Bone Room’ that’s full of casts and chipped and broken plaster casts. It’s under lock and key, but anyone can call us to make an appointment and see it all.”

When Coppini died on September 26, 1957, he was buried in a crypt he had designed four years earlier in Sunset Memorial Park in San Antonio. His wife was buried there seven weeks later, and when Coppini’s protégé Waldine Tauch died in 1986, she was also interred there. 

 

The Unknown Texas Heroic Sculptor

“He was a great sculptor, but he was also a talented opera singer. Madame Luisa Cappiani, president of the Vocal Teachers Association of New York, heard him singing in his studio, suggesting he should quit sculpting and she would make him a star,” Watkins said, who, for one, is happy he didn’t quit. “It’s sad when his statues are being taken down, but sometimes that’s okay.”

Coppini’s statue of Arkansas Senator James P. Clark had stood near the coat check at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. since 1921. No one knew who the senator was anymore, and so a year ago, Arkansas decided to replace him with a statue of Johnny Cash, a Country star from Kingsland, Arkansas. “Times change,” Watkins added.

Times were indeed changing, Dr. Pope agreed. “Here he was in the middle of the 20th century, there had just been another horrific world war, and there was a sea change in the art world with Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and others,” she said. “Coppini’s way of doing things—creating heroic sculptures of convincingly realistic figures—was over.”

One of the last pieces that Coppini worked on was called “Martyrs of War,” a monument dedicated to the end of all wars. The memorial now stands in his hometown of Moglia, Italy, where they have renamed a street “Pompeo Coppini Avenue.”

“I think Coppini was part of what redefined the historical landscape in Texas,” Dr. McCaslin said. “When Texans think of their history, quite often the images they have in their mind are images created by Papa Coppini.”