Edward Ludwig Albert Pausch was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of Henry and Annette P. Pausch. The family emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut when he was a child. In 1870, at the age of 14, he began an 11 year apprenticeship under Carl Conrads in Hartford, working for the New England Granite Works. He spent most of the 1880s working first as an assistant to Domingo Mora in New York City and later with Karl Gerhardt in Hartford. In 1889, he joined sculptor James Gilbert Claude Hamilton at the Smith Granite Company in Westerly, Rhode Island. He would work for the Smith Granite Company as their chief sculptor for the next decade.
One of his most ambitious works, the George Washington Memorial (1889-91), is located in Allegheny Commons Park, Pittsburgh, PA. The equestrian statue was carved from Smith Blue granite and depicted Washington as a 23-year-old colonel in the French and Indian War.
At about the same time he created a sculpture known as the Angel of Peace. The sculpture entailed an angel with spread wings standing in front of a rock face cross The entire sculpture was to be carved from a single block of granite. During his time working for the Smith Granite Company, orders for at least a dozen Angel of Peace monuments were placed.
In 1895, The Smith Granite Company allowed Pausch to travel to Buffalo, NY to reproduce his Angel of Peace sculpture for John Crawford and Son’s granite works. They had received an order from Derek L. Boardman, retired manager of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York City. The monument was to be set at the Boardman family lot in Oakwood Cemetery, Troy, NY.
On 3 June 1895, the Buffalo Evening News ran an article:
Fine Piece of Sculpture, “The Angel of Peace” Done by Edward Pausch, Attracting the Attention of Art Lovers.
Buffalo is honored just now by the presence of a great artist who is attracting merited attention from art lovers…Mr. Pausch’s creation represents “The Angel of Peace.” It is a draped figure with outstretched wings before the cross. The whole piece represents a height of something like 10 feet. The figure is exquisitely proportioned, with perfect lines and a poise grandly transcendent. Its drapery clings with a delicate freedom that is expressively etherial. Mr. Pausch has drawn with the divination of a great artist and executed with a master hand. Nearly every artist and art lover in Buffalo has been a frequent visitor to the Crawford works to watch the progress of the work and to praise. The figure was first created in the nude, Mr. Pausch drawing from the imagination and afterward perfecting the lines from a model.
Then the drapery was added and now the whole has been cast in plaster. From this perfected cast the subject will be duplicated in stone. Artist Pausch has been engaged upon the work for over three months.
It will be the work of 18 months to cut the figure in stone. In duplicating a great work of this kind the cutter is aided by an instrument after the order of the surveyor’s tripod, wherein three posts are secured which serve as a basis. By placing his instrument at any given point on the model the cutter can get that exact spot on the stone. So, in speaking of duplicating in this sense, it is literal. It will require a block of granite weighing 28 tons to finish the design.
The placement of the angel’s left hand is different from another of his “Angel of Peace” statues found in River Bend Cemetery, Westerly, RI.
In addition to his Washington equestrian and Angel of Peace statues, the Smith Granite Company created over 100 monuments scattered across the Gettysburg, Chickamauga and Antietam National Military Parks. Nine of these have been documented as sculpted by Pausch.
by Kristopher D White, June 4, 2015)
When he wasn’t busy sculpting during the years he spent working for the Smith Granite Company, he found time to train sculptors Robert D. Barr and Stanley Edwards.
After leaving the Smith Granite Company in 1899, Pausch opened his own studio in Hartford, CT. Within hours of President William McKinley’s assassination on September 14, 1901, he was summoned from Hartford to Buffalo, New York to make the death mask. He made a plaster cast the following morning, and completed the mask in about a month. He settled permanently in Buffalo, opening a studio at Delaware & Delavan Avenues. He used his McKinley mask to model a bust of the late president for the Philadelphia Main Post Office (1902), and his McKinley statue (1903-05) in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, Pausch was approached by John Salter and Son, a granite company located in Groton, CT, to produce a bronze replica of one of the most famous funerary bronze statues every made to memorialize the passing of a loved one. The monument in question is the famed bronze sculpture, The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth, created by famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the behest of Henry Brooks Adams to memorize his wife, Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams. The sculpture rests on a granite monument designed by Stanford White in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC.
As the story goes, John Salter and Son had won the order for a replica bronze monument placed by General Felix Angus in 1906. The bronze statue was to be placed on a granite monument built by Salter and set in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, MD. According to the Angus family, Salter assured them that he had obtained permission from Saint-Gaudens to reproduce his famous statue. Salter then hired Pausch to execute the work. It didn’t take long before word got out that no one had given Salter permission to replicate Saint-Gaudens work. The Angus monument was declared a fake and there was talk of lawsuits. Finally in 1967, the Angus family descendants donated the bronze statue to Smithsonian Institute which in turn donated it to the National Courts Building in Washington, DC.
Whether Pausch believed Salter or not, his reputation never fully recovered from the affair.
Pausch passed away in 1931 and was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Hartford, CT. In 1933, his wife, Julia H. Pausch, ordered a base and die monument made of Smith Red granite from the Smith Granite Company at a cost of $576.
