Herbert Barbee (8 October 1848–22 March 1936), sculptor, was born in Luray, the eldest of four sons and three daughters of William Randolph Barbee and Mary Jane McKay Barbee. Barbee's father, after many years practicing law in order to save enough money, took the family to Florence, Italy, in the mid-1850s to study sculpture in a studio near American sculptors Hiram Powers and Joel Tanner Hart. Herbert Barbee learned the rudiments of sculpture from his father and his father's associates, but little else is known about his education.
The family returned to the United States in 1858 and settled in Washington, D.C. After the Civil War began the Barbees moved to their home in Luray. Following his father's death in 1868, Herbert Barbee worked briefly in partnership with his uncle Gabriel Thomas Barbee, of Bridgewater, and then moved to New York, where he opened his own sculpture studio in 1874. He almost immediately began planning to transfer his father's plaster sculptures, left in the Washington studio during the Civil War, to marble. In 1878 Barbee traveled to Italy, where he made two copies of his father's Fisher Girl, as well as a number of bas-reliefs and an original work, Happy Visions. Returning to America, Barbee worked in New York, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington before settling in Hamburg, near Luray, in 1890. He married Blanche E. Stover, of Luray, on 20 February 1895. They had two sons and two daughters.
Much of Barbee's work consisted of portrait bas-reliefs and portrait busts. By 1883 he had completed eight life-size statues, fifteen bas-reliefs, and a number of portrait busts, including one of his father and one of George Washington, both of which George Washington University acquired during the twentieth century. Barbee's reputation rests largely on his marble copies of sculptures that his father had designed: Coquette, Fisher Girl, The Lost Pleiad, and The Star of the West, a romanticized image of Pocahontas that won him the first premium at the Louisville Exposition in 1883. He explained the statue as a memorial to the beginning of Virginia and the nation as Pocahontas looks eastward over the Atlantic Ocean for the arrival of the English settlers.
Barbee's original work includes a twenty-eight-foot monument to the rank and file of the Confederate army. Depicting a Confederate soldier on picket duty, the statue was unveiled at Luray in a very elaborate ceremony on 21 July 1898. Barbee also completed sculptural portraits of Confederate commanders Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and John Singleton Mosby, and Genius of the Confederacy, a memorial in Culpeper County that includes a five-foot figure of a woman with a bullet-riddled flag around her shoulders, a saber in her hand, and a wreath of eleven stars representing the Confederate states.
Barbee's work is solid but generally uninspired, extending the classical tradition of mid-nineteenth-century American sculpture, exemplified by Powers and Hart, into the twentieth century. Herbert Barbee died on 22 March 1936 in Centreville, Fairfax County, at the house of one his sons. His body was cremated and the ashes buried in the Stover family cemetery at Luray.
Sources Consulted:
National Cyclopędia of American Biography (1891–1984), 18:424; Jennie Ann Kerkhoff, Old Homes of Page County, Virginia (1962), 133–136; William Randolph Barbee & Herbert Barbee: Two Virginia Sculptors Rediscovered, exhibition catalog, Dimock Gallery, George Washington University (1977); Barbee-Summers family Bible record, Accession 27917, Library of Virginia; Barbee Collection, Page Co. Heritage Association, Luray, Va.; vertical files, The Valentine, Richmond, Va.; Richmond Dispatch, 22 July 1898; feature article in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 Jan. 1935 (portrait); Herbert Barbee, Retrospection: "The Star of the West," or Princess Pocahontas<—>Idealized (n.d.); obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 Mar. 1936, and Luray Page News and Courier, 24 Mar. 1936.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Barbara C. Batson.
How to cite this page:
Barbara C. Batson,"Herbert Barbee (1848–1936)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Barbee_Herbert, accessed [today's date]).
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