Artwork Details
- Title
- Walt Whitman
- Artist
- Jo Davidson (1883 – 1952)
- Year
- 1939; cast 1957; installed 1959
- Location
- Broad Street and Packer Avenue
- Medium
- Bronze, on granite base
- Dimensions
- Height 8'6", width 2'6", depth 3'6" (base: height 4', width 5'6", depth 6')
Artwork Description
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
So begins Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” and the bronze by Jo Davidson captures the spirit of the free-striding American bard. This is a second cast from a plaster original exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and the 1949 Sculpture International in Philadelphia.
Davidson made a career of portrait sculptures; his subjects included Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, and Gertrude Stein. In developing the sculpture of Whitman, Davidson created a life-size clay figure with an armature of movable parts that he could twist and bend until he found the right pose. “I wanted Walt afoot and lighthearted,” he explained in his autobiography, echoing the words of the poem; “I had to make sure a Whitman, a singing Whitman.” In later years this portrait remained one of Davidson’s favorites, perhaps because he himself looked much like Whitman and shared the poet’s salty appreciation of life. Philadelphia’s cast was purchased by the Association for Public Art (then known as Fairmount Park Art Association) as a gift to the City. It stands near the approach to the Walt Whitman Bridge, only a few miles from the home in Camden where the poet spent his last years.
Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.
Artwork Credits
Purchased by Association for Public Art (formerly Fairmount Park Art Association)
Owned by the City of Philadelphia