Heinz Warneke (1895-1983)
Jessie Warneke (1889-1982)
Carving a Home: Heinz Warneke's East Haddam
The National Cathedral got the stone. East Haddam kept the model.
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Heinz Warneke carved a lion for Penn State, elephants for the Philadelphia Zoo and a Last Supper for the Washington National Cathedral. But from 1932 until his death, home was The Mowings, a farmhouse the Olmsted family built around 1730 at the northeast edge of East Haddam. He and his wife, Jessie, bought it with a suitcase full of cash, rescued it from decades of neglect, and filled it with ponds, oaks and pines. The farm crept into his work, from a bronze of four men moving a boulder to the local plants carved into the Cathedral stone. Joe Clark lives there now. He talks about the land, the sculptor who planted it, the day Warneke's model for the Cathedral finally left the studio and his plan to protect the farm for whoever comes next.
Heinz Warneke paid for his beautiful East Haddam farm with the contents of his suitcase.
"Heinz took a suitcase full of money to a lawyer in New York on the train and bought the house," says Joe Clark, who owns the place today. "They lived here for 50 years and absolutely adored it."
The house off Wickham Road was already about 200 years old. A member of the Olmsted family built it around 1730. The Olmsteds had come to Hartford with Thomas Hooker, and by the third generation they had moved on to East Haddam. It was hard ground to farm, hilly and full of rock. The rock is still there in stone walls running in every direction. Jonathan Olmsted rented sheep and paid for them in wool.
By the early 1900s the Olmsteds were long gone. The house had become a summer camp for New Yorkers, with no heat, no running water and no indoor plumbing. It passed from family to family and picked up porches and Victorian trim along the way. The Warnekes found it while visiting friends in town. "Out really in the middle of nowhere," Clark says, "and somewhat run-down. And they rescued it."
They called it The Mowings.
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Bremen to East Haddam
Warneke was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1895. He studied sculpture there and in Berlin, and during World War I he served on the staff in charge of war memorials. He came to America in 1923 and found work in St. Louis. There he met Jessie, who became his research assistant, his business manager and his companion for 55 years. After some years in Paris they came back to split their time between New York and the farm. Later a string of commissions kept them in Washington for two decades. But summers belonged to East Haddam.
"When he wasn't in Washington or some other place, being a sculptor, he was here, either working in the studio or just admiring the land," Clark says. "I think it had a huge effect on his work."
The Big Commissions
The farm was where he worked things out. The commissions paid for it.
He won his first major non-federal job, The Immigrant, for Philadelphia's Fairmont Park, at a 1933 competition where he was chosen alongside modernists like Gaston Lachaise. It took seven years to see through. In 1941 and 1942 he carved the Nittany Lion, which still crouches on its rock at Penn State as the school's best-loved landmark. In 1958 he won the Philadelphia Zoo's competition with a granite mother elephant and calf. Life magazine later photographed the artist, the sculpture and a family of real elephants all together.
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In Washington he headed the sculpture department at the Corcoran School of Art. At the National Cathedral, his Prodigal Son stands in the Bishop's Garden and his carvings decorate the Mellon Chapel. The tympanum above the south transept doors, The Last Supper and Road to Emmaus, was finished in 1959.
East Haddam Gets Big Thing
Warneke made the tympanum full size in his studio at The Mowings. It barely fit. As each section was finished it went to Washington, where stonecutters carved the real thing by eye from his model. "There are photographs in some of the books of the stonecutters, obviously really talented people, just hammering away, looking at Heinz's work," Clark says. "Just astounding."
The pieces came back to East Haddam and went up on the studio wall. They didn't quite fit there either. "Corners and pieces were lopped off to get it into the place," Clark says.
That's how it stayed for nearly 50 years. In 2007 Clark gave it to the East Haddam Historical Society. Getting it there meant taking it off the wall, moving it in large chunks, "very gently," and having Bob Casner reassemble it at the museum. The Middletown paper summed it up in a headline: "East Haddam Gets Big Thing."
Clark points out that it was never meant to be seen as finished art. "It's a pattern, in effect, for a piece of stonework."
What He Left Behind
Very little of Warneke's art is still on the property. The studio holds a few small objects. Down by the pond, set into a stone wall, is a relief called Stag by Moonlight.
The bigger work, Clark says, is the land itself. With seedlings and advice from the Agriculture Department, the Warnekes reshaped the ponds and planted trees. The big oaks around the pond are theirs. The towering white pines by the house were planted by Priscilla Norton, Jessie's daughter, when she was a child. She still remembers doing it.
When Warneke's family visits, Clark says, "their eyes glaze over, and they remember it having a kind of magic."
The Placeholder
Clark first saw The Mowings in the dead of winter, in the early 1990s, under two or three feet of snow. The old part of the house had been shut off to save heat. "There were huge icicles coming down the chimney stacks into the rooms," he says. "And I immediately fell in love with it."
He moved in the next summer. He now keeps an ox team, bees and chickens, and there's always something to fix: fallen trees, a pond, a roof. He doesn't think of the place as his so much as in his care.
"I feel as though I'm sort of a placeholder," he says. "I'm just here to caretake the house and the land as much as I can, and eventually somebody else will have to do the same thing."
To make sure of that, he worked with the East Haddam Land Trust on a conservation easement that will take effect once he's gone. It won't turn the farm into a preserve. "It shouldn't become a dead museum," Clark says. "It should just be a place where people can live and fall in love with every aspect of it."
Heinz Warneke died on August 16, 1983. He and Jessie are buried in the Town Street Cemetery under a bronze he designed. In it, the two of them plant a tree together.
