John Everett Benson, a grasp stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, in addition to generations of American households — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, authorities buildings and homes of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.
His son Christopher stated he died in a hospital however didn’t specify the trigger.
Mr. Benson practiced the traditional and exacting artwork of carving into rock; slate was his most well-liked medium. He did so, exactly and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had earlier than him, understanding of an atelier in Newport known as the John Stevens Store. Based in 1705, it is without doubt one of the oldest constantly run companies within the nation.
The artwork Mr. Benson practiced is generally dedicated to mortality, the transient span of a life, although it’s designed for eternity, or one thing near it. It’s usually described because the slowest writing on the planet. Mr. Benson may spend a day carving a cross; a headstone would possibly take three months.
For the inscriptions for the East Constructing of the Nationwide Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei within the Nineteen Seventies, he averaged an hour and a half carving every letter, a few of that are practically a foot tall. He and his staff on the time, two younger carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months finishing the painstaking work.
He carved the phrases on the pedestal that helps Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he additionally carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo right into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Middle. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are the place lapidary artists exhibit their chops, their calligraphic feats and thrives — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He additionally labored on the Nationwide Cathedral in Washington, Yale College and the Boston Public Library, amongst different establishments.
Mr. Benson, who was generally known as Fud, was 25 when started his first main fee: to mark John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery and carve alternatives from his speeches onto a low wall comprised of seven granite blocks. (He become clear bell bottoms when Jackie Kennedy got here to the store in Newport to approve his design.)
Stone carvers on public websites invariably draw a crowd. And, inevitably, somebody will ask, “What should you make a mistake?” As Mr. Benson, Mr. Hegnauer and Mr. Roberts labored at one other web site, the Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts, onlookers requested and requested, a lot in order that Mr. Benson requested {that a} flyer be made to place an finish to the incessant questioning.
Q: What occurs in the event that they make a mistake?
A: Don’t fear, they received’t.
“Why go to all this type of hassle to get a reputation on a constructing?” Mr. Benson stated in “Last Marks: The Artwork of the Carved Letter” (1979), a documentary about his work made by Frank Muhly. “Why carve it into the stone? Why carve it on this specific vogue?” He added: “There’s an amazing emotional attraction a couple of carved letter. It partakes of the substance of the constructing. And of the carved letters, this specific type” — Mr. Benson favored what is called a V-cut — “reveals very clearly that the letter is product of the identical stuff because the constructing itself. There are heaps simpler methods to do it, let me inform you.”
John Everett Benson was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Newport, R.I., one among three youngsters, and grew up in an 18th-century clapboard home overlooking Narragansett Bay. His mom, Esther Fisher (Smith) Benson, generally known as Fisher, was a Philadelphia-born Quaker who used “plain speech” at dwelling, deploying “thee,” “thy” and “thine” for “you,” “your” and “yours.”
His father, John Howard Benson, was an artist who had develop into enamored of the stone carver’s artwork. He purchased the John Stevens Store with a $1,200 mortgage in 1927, when he was 26, and commenced to revive its enterprise.
The elder Mr. Benson was, like his son, a polymath expert at calligraphy and carving, and he elevated the follow, reaching again to the Roman custom of carving giant, elegant capital letters designed first with a brush and ink on paper. In his time he was generally known as the nation’s best stone carver, and he labored on many commissions, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and the Rhode Island College of Design, the place he was a professor.
Fud was 15 when he started apprenticing within the store, and his first commissions had been gravestones for 2 shoppers’ pets. He was 16 when his father died of a coronary heart assault in 1956. His mom ran the enterprise whereas he studied sculpture on the Rhode Island College of Design, and he took over the store after he graduated in 1961.
Mr. Benson was eloquent, erudite and liable to grand gestures. He was agile sufficient to carry out a Fred Astaire chair trick — stepping from seat to chair again in a swish arc — although he generally overestimated his skills. Throughout a youthful fascination with firearms, he shot himself within the leg. He was higher on the fiddle, and performed conventional Irish music and sea chanteys with an area band, the Reprobates, in Newport’s bars.
Along with his son Christopher, a painter, Mr. Benson is survived by his spouse, Karen Augeri Benson, a lawyer, whom he married in 1988; one other son, Nick, a stone carver; and 4 grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Furgiuele in 1959 resulted in divorce within the early Nineteen Seventies. Mr. Benson’s older brother, Thomas, a sculptor and artwork and antiques restorer who died in 1987, was a founding father of the Newport Museum of Yachting. His youthful brother, Richard, generally known as Chip, a famous photographer and printer, died in 2017.
Mr. Benson’s final monumental work was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, designed by Lawrence Halprin as a collection of out of doors “rooms” comprised of crimson South Dakota granite onto which Mr. Benson carved the president’s notable quotations and speeches, together with the “4 Freedoms” speech.
In 1993, Mr. Benson turned the enterprise over to his son Nick and returned to sculpture. Like his father, Nick started his apprenticeship at age 15. His father’s reward was onerous received, Nick recalled, and was delivered form of sideways: “Properly, Jesus,” he would possibly say, “it doesn’t seem like you want me.”
Nick Benson carved the World Battle II, Martin Luther King and Dwight D. Eisenhower memorials in Washington, and he received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010 for preserving the artwork of hand letter carving.
Mr. Benson’s headstones had been his bread and butter. His orders, from a who’s who of People, had been backlogged for months and even years. He made Tennessee Williams’s gravestone out of pink Tennessee marble, as he did for George Balanchine. Lillian Hellman’s, a flat slate marker on Martha’s Winery, is engraved with the years of her beginning and demise and is embellished with a fragile feather quill. (Curiously, he ended up carving the headstone of Ms. Hellman’s nemesis, Mary McCarthy, when she died in 1989, 5 years later.)
Jean Stafford declared in an article for The New York Instances in 1971 that she had ordered hers forward of time, “as a result of I knew they’d make me one thing lovely.” (She died eight years later.) Rachel Lambert Mellon, generally known as Bunny, ordered hers in 1999, when she commissioned one for her husband, the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who died that yr. She stored hers in her library in Virginia till her personal demise in 2014.
“They’re easy, well-established objects,” Mr. Benson instructed the author Philip Kopper in 1977. “All you are able to do is attempt to make the lettering as lovely as you may. And that’s a darlin’ option to spend a day or two.”
