By CONNIE ZEIGLER / Contributing editor
Rudolph Schwarz, the sculptor of the stone figures of the city’s most famous landmark, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, died “practically penniless,” on April 14, 1912, according to his friend, Karl Bitter. The Indianapolis Star, which quoted Bitter, as well as two other newspapers – The News and Times – all reported the death. Schwarz was only 46.
The death certificate gave the cause of death as “cardiac dropsy,” or heart failure. Karl Bitter, a sculptor working in New York, whose figures, The Races of Man, now adorn the ruins at Holliday Park in Indianapolis, came to the city with the “sole object to see that the widow of his friend [and her three children] was not in want.” He tried to ensure that Schwarz’s family was cared for and according to him, “several wealthy persons in the city” had assured him that they would take care of the needs of the family.
Schwarz, the scion of a notable family in Vienna, Austria, studied at the Imperial Academy in Vienna and then moved to Berlin to work in the studios of several different sculptors. There he met Berlin native Anna Alexander, who became his wife, and also the man who would change his life’s course. Bruno Schmitz was “Germany’s foremost architect of national monuments,” according to the State Soldiers and Sailors Monument page in the Indiana University, Indianapolis digital archives.
Schmitz had landed the architect’s contract for the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, and he hired Schwarz and brought him (and Anna) to the city to sculpt the War and Peace grouping on it. When Schwarz completed those figures, he went on to carve the groups above the monument’s fountain cascades, The Dying Soldier and The Return Home, and the figures at the entrances to the shaft, according to his obituary in The Indianapolis News on April 15, 1912.
He landed more commissions after completing the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, notably the bronze statue of Gov. Oliver P. Morton that now stands at the intersection of Capitol and Market streets. He also crafted Civil War monuments for three Indiana cities – Terre Haute, Mt. Vernon and Franklin – as well the Governor Pingree Monument in Detroit and even tables for Wabash College in Crawfordsville.
In Indianapolis, Schwarz had studios at successive locations; according to the 1912 City Directory, he was then working in a lumberyard garage behind the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad on Caven Street. An Indianapolis Star article noted that Schwarz could be found in his “secluded studio” most days. There, he was the “broad-shouldered man in clothes smeared in clay, and smoking a corn cob pipe” that the rare visitor might easily mistake for a shop helper. Schwarz worked every day in his “disordered” studio, assisted by a model dressed in the costumes he needed for his sculptures.
Obituaries and articles all mention Rudolph Schwarz’s devotion to his art. It was his life. The Indianapolis Star article published on April 15, the day after he died, states that “the only other interest Schwarz seemed to have, aside from his studio, was a class that he taught at the John Herron Art Institute.” Those may have been difficult words for Mrs. Schwarz and his children to read, but they seem to have been true ones.
After Schwarz’s death the noted sculptor George Julian Zolnay, known as the “sculptor of the Confederacy,” took his position at Herron.
Among Schwarz’s students at Herron was Myra Reynolds Richardson, whose Pioneer Family sculpture adorns Fountain Square.
Evans Woollen, president of the Art Association of Indianapolis, spoke at Schwarz’s funeral, where, according to The Indianapolis Star, attendees include a “small company of German friends and a number of Indianapolis artists.” No mention of wife or children. Woollen spoke of Schwarz’s idealism of his art and the financial adversities that he had faced.
Following her husband’s death, Anna Schwarz continued to face adversities, both financial and emotional. Whether any of the wealthy friends who had pledged to Karl Bitter to help her actually did so or not is not shown in historical records. In 1915 she was still living at their home at 910 Raymond St., but by the following year she had moved to 2126 S. East St. according to the death certificate of her son, Rudolph, who died of pneumonia that year at age 17.
By 1916 she had moved again, with her remaining children, daughter Helen and son Carl, to 433 N. Walcott. The length of her stay at this address suggests that she may have purchased this home, for she was still living there in 1920 with her children. Helen was 19 by then.
Anna was still on Walcott Street in 1932 when she made headlines for shooting her daughter Helen’s husband, William H. Kolthoff, in the head as he lay on the daybed sleeping in Anna’s home. Kolthoff survived and the Indianapolis Times reported that deputy sheriffs were told, presumably by Anna, that the shooting “climaxed attempts of Kolthoff to turn his romantic attentions to his mother-in-law.” The Times characterized the event as the result of “a domestic triangle.” However, coverage in The Indianapolis Star stated that there was “no particular reason” given for the shooting and treated it as an act of mental illness.
After shooting Kolthoff, Anna then turned the gun on herself, trying twice to commit suicide, but failing in both attempts. She was arrested for attempted homicide. Adding to the intrigue of the incident, her son-in-law, Kolthoff, was arrested for vagrancy.
Both charges were eventually dropped. A grand jury decided that she had hallucinated the advances she claimed. But Anna appeared again in local news just six months later.
On Oct. 25, 1932, she committed suicide. It was her third or fourth attempt. Shortly before she had been treated at the hospital after inhaling fumes from a gas stove. On Oct. 25 she folded her coat and lay it on the bank of White River near Washington Street, just a few blocks from the monument that brought her to the city as a bride, and then walked into the river, disappearing beneath the gray water. Although there were witnesses who tried to reach her, she drowned. Her body was identified by her son-in-law, who was still living in her home.
Rudolph and Anna’s daughter, Helen, remained married to William Kolthoff for many more decades. She survived him after his death in the 1960s. She died in 1983 in a Greenwood nursing home. Her obituary does not mention the sordid story of the shooting, for obvious reasons. Sadly, neither does it mention that her father was the sculptor of the city’s best-known landmark, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
