At the West Entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the elongated figures of Jacob Epstein’s Social Consciousness (1954) suggest sympathy, tenderness and sorrow for human suffering. The three parts of Social Consciousness are (left to right) The Great Consoler (or Compassion), The Eternal Mother (or Destiny) and Succor (or Death). At the base of the statue the last two lines of Walt Whitman’s poem, America, is engraved:
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
