Bird Girl is a sculpture
made in 1936 by Sylvia Shaw Judson in Lake Forest, Illinois. It achieved fame when it was featured on the cover of the
1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good
and Evil. It was sculpted at Ragdale,
the summer home of her family.
Details
Bird
Girl is cast in bronze and stands 50 inches tall (127 cm).
She is the image of a young girl wearing a simple dress and a sad or
contemplative expression, with her head tilted to the left. She stands
straight, her elbows propped against her waist as she holds up two bowls out
from her sides. The bowls are often described by viewers as "bird
feeders".
The sculpture was
commissioned as a garden sculpture for a family in Massachusetts. A slight, 8-year-old model named Lorraine Greenman (now Lorraine
Ganz) posed for the piece.
Only four statues were made
from the original plaster cast.
The first went to the Massachusetts garden. The second was sent toWashington,
D.C., and is now located in Reading,
Pennsylvania. The third was purchased by a family in Lake Forest and has never
relocated. The fourth and most famous statue was bought by a family in Savannah, Georgia, who named it Little
Wendy and set it up at her
family's plot in Bonaventure
Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. Judson donated the
original plaster model to the Crow Island School inWinnetka, Illinois.
The Bonaventure Cemetery statue sat virtually unnoticed until
1993, when Random House hired Savannah photographer Jack Leigh to shoot an image for the cover of John Berendt's new book, Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil. At the suggestion of Berendt, Leigh
searched the Bonaventure Cemetery for a suitable subject. He found the
sculpture next to a grave on the Trosdal family plot at the end of his second
day of searching, and had to make the shot quickly as dusk approached. He
reportedly spent ten hours in the darkroomadjusting
the lighting, giving the photo a moonlit feel and accentuating the halo around
the statue's head.
The cover image was an
immediate hit, and Berendt called it "one of the strongest book covers
I've ever seen." Published in 1994, the book became a bestseller, and soon people began
flocking to Bonaventure Cemetery to see the sculpture. Due to concern about the
amount of traffic at the grave site, the Trosdal family had it removed from the cemetery and later lent to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah for public display.
In 1995, Judson's daughter
Alice Judson Hayes (aka Alice Ryerson Hayes) had a fifth bronze statue created
from a mold. That statue was given to Ragdale,
an artists' retreat in Lake Forest. Later, an authorized fiberglass replica was made from the original
plaster model for use by Macy's in their display windows; it was later
moved to a museum in Savannah. Hayes holds the copyright for the Bird
Girl, and has actively defended it by filing lawsuits against
unauthorized reproductions, especially full-sized replicas. She destroyed the
mold that was used to cast the 1995 replica, although the original plaster
model still exists. Hayes has licensed smaller-scale replicas, which have sold
well. She died on October
13, 2006 , passing on the copyright to her daughter, author Francie
Shaw.
Warner Brosproduced a film adaptation of Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil in 1997, directed by Clint Eastwood. After purchasing the
rights to use the sculpture's likeness from Hayes, the studio created a
fiberglass replica. The movie incorporated shots of the Bird
Girl sculpture on its
posters and in the film itself. After the film was completed the replica was
sent to the Cliff Dwellers Club
in Chicago, Illinois.
Leigh sued Warner Bros. in
November 1997 for copyright
infringement over their shots of
the Bird Girl replica
in the cemetery, which were similar to Leigh's original cover photograph. The
lower court ruled that the movie's sequences with the statue were not
infringement, but an appeals court found that the photographs used for
promotional purposes, such as posters, bore significant similarities and
remanded the matter back to the lower court. Warner Bros. and Leigh then
settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
Sylvia Shaw Judson died in
1978. Although she did not see her Bird Girl sculpture achieve fame, she was
already a renowned sculptor whose pieces have been on display in such locations
as the Philadelphia Museum of
Art, the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York, the White House, and the Massachusetts State House. Jack Leigh
died of colon cancer on May 19, 2004, and is buried in Bonaventure Cemetery,
where he took his most famous photograph.
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