Bess, the rhinoceros statue that graces the entrance to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, holds her ground on stout, muscular legs. Her folds of thick skin give the impression of armor plates. Her bumpy hide, rubbed by countless student hands, attests to both her toughness and the skill of the alumna artist who sculpted her in such detail.

Yet the 38 years that Bess has spent at her outdoor post have taken their toll. Although she looks like she is made of unbreakable bronze, she is actually fiberglass, which, while durable and weather resistant, is not indestructible. In recent years, cracks and suspected water damage led the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG), which oversees the university’s permanent collection, to have concerns about her structural soundness. 

So in May, the almost 14-foot-long statue was carefully loaded onto a trailer and transported to a workshop in Rhode Island for some well-deserved restoration. The plan would have her back in place for SMFA at Tufts’ sesquicentennial celebration next year. 

“With the 150th coming up, it was an opportunity for us to honor our artists and their work in different ways,” said SMFA at Tufts Dean Scheri Fultineer, “and it just seemed really fitting to give Bess this—we call it her ‘spa day’—so she’d be looking her best.” 

A Restoration Challenge

The School of the Museum of Fine Arts officially became part of Tufts University in 2016, and the museum later gifted the Bess statue to the university in 2023. Since then, Laura McDonald, manager of collections for TUAG, has been overseeing the statue’s care. 

“As soon as Bess joined Tufts’ growing public art program as the only outdoor work on the Fenway Campus, we began planning for her eventual conservation,” McDonald said. She found the restoration expert she wanted by way of another pachyderm: A bronze conservator who was working on the statue of Jumbo the elephant on the Medford/Somerville Campus recommended Paul Amaral of Amaral Fabrications.

Amaral has been working with artists for more than 37 years. Originally a boat builder, he translated his skills with aluminum and fiberglass into a business fabricating the designs of the top sculptors in the world, starting with Claes Oldenburg, who worked with Amaral to create the spoon for his 1988 sculpture “Spoonbridge and Cherry.” No one knows the ins and outs of fiberglass art like Amaral. 

When Bess arrived at Amaral’s cavernous workshop on the Seekonk River waterfront this spring, she was in some pretty high-brow company. Steps away was a 30-foot-tall Roy Lichtenstein sculpture that Amaral fabricated in 2011, back in for a paint touchup. At the other end of the workshop, one of Robert Indiana’s famous “ART” sculptures was in the final stages of its conservation. 

Next to the clean lines and bright colors of those contemporary artworks, bumpy Bess might have seemed out of place, but Amaral said he had a soft spot for her. 

“It’s a very unusual piece for us,” he said, giving her an affectionate pat. “I really do love her.”

Plus, Bess presented a restoration challenge. Amaral knew about some problems he could see on the surface but did not know what might be lurking within. His first step would be getting a peek beneath that rough hide to assess the damage. 

Sculpture ‘Done by a Girl’

Along with Bess herself, the restoration celebrates the career of her creator. “Katharine Lane Weems was a remarkable artist and sculptor, technically unparalleled,” said Dina Deitsch, director and chief curator of TUAG. “She was a true pioneer in her field.”

She also, it seems, had a skin as thick as that of a rhino. Born in 1899 to one of Boston’s elite families, Weems often butted up against what was expected of her as a woman in the art world. 

The challenges began as soon as she started taking classes at SMFA in 1918. In her autobiography, frankly titled Odds Were Against Me, she told how her sculpture professor, the preeminent portrait artist Charles Grafly, gave her a tough review on her first clay model. “This is too poor to deserve a criticism,” he said. Undeterred, she kept bringing projects to him for feedback, and he eventually became her first mentor. 

She was particularly drawn to animal subjects. She made many trips to the Bronx Zoo, where she carefully studied the anatomy and behaviors of a lion, an elephant, and an Indian rhinoceros named Victoria. 

“The rhino, because of his size, immense power, horn, fringed ears, and wonderful wrinkles, is really a fascinating subject,” she wrote. 

Victoria apparently found Weems fascinating, too: At one point the rhino stuck her head through the bars of her enclosure, grabbed the sculptor by the smock with her teeth, and tried to pull her in. A shout and a smack from Weems quickly ended the encounter, and the artist, holding no ill will, went on to complete a small clay model of the rhino that she later cast in bronze. Even caustic Professor Grafly was impressed by it.

While art was an acceptable hobby for young women of her class, the time Weems spent in her studio bordered on impropriety. Her mother, eager to have her marry well and take her place in high society, asked her not to talk so much about her art. “People will think it odd that you take it so seriously,” she said.

But Weems was devoted to her career and went on to gain a reputation as a talented animal sculptor. In the 1930s, when Harvard University commissioned her to create artworks for its new biological laboratories, Weems thought of Victoria, and proposed a pair of bronze rhinos to flank the building’s entrance.

Although one of her artist friends commented that perhaps she had made “too many bumps” on her pachyderms, the pair, which she named “Victoria” and “Bess,” were unveiled to much acclaim in 1937. Sometime later, when Weems was visiting Harvard, she met a student who was sitting beneath one of the rhinos. “Did you know those were done by a girl?” he asked. 

Weems made countless more animal sculptures in her long career, including a bronze sculpture of dolphins for the New England Aquarium in 1977. 

Dean Fultineer said the school takes great pride in the way Weems did defy the odds to gain a place in the arts. “Part of our heritage at SMFA is producing artists who have that talent and ambition,” she said. 

When SMFA was celebrating a renovation and expansion in the 1980s, Weems used the surviving cast from one of the original rhino sculptures to render a new statue for her alma mater, this time in fiberglass that was coated to look like bronze. Robert Shure, an SMFA alum, supervised the reproduction in his Boston studio with the help of more than 20 artisans. In 1987, Bess was installed outside of the SMFA’s main building. It would be Weems’ final project before her death in 1989.

Cracks, Rainwater, and a Loose Tail

Nearly four decades later, Bess was up on a forklift in Amaral’s workshop, getting a critical inspection. TUAG had long suspected that cracks in the statue’s seams were letting rainwater leak inside. And unsurprisingly, when Amaral drilled a small hole in Bess’ belly, five gallons of water came pouring out. 

But water is not necessarily a problem for fiberglass. As Amaral pointed out, “people are still sailing fiberglass boats from the 1950s.” The new hole in the rhino’s belly and another Amaral made at the bottom of the neck would allow future rainwater to drain out. No, the real concern was any metal inside the sculpture that the water may have corroded, leaving the fiberglass shell unsupported. 

Through that same small hole in the belly, Amaral inserted a tiny camera, much like a surgeon with an endoscope. He saw that there was indeed a metal armature, but it did not appear to be structural. 

“I think it was matter of holding pieces together as they assembled her,” he said, noting that Bess is composed of about 25 separate fiberglass pieces. Once the original fabricators adhered those pieces together, the armature was no longer necessary, but there was no reason to take it out. “It just kind of went along for the ride.”

The rectangular base that Bess stands on, however, was supported by steel crosspieces, and those had rusted. Amaral replaced them with dense fiberglass joists, well up for handling the statue’s 1,500-pound weight.

One of Amaral’s biggest concerns was Bess’ tail. The small, tufted appendage—so slight compared to the rhino’s bulk—curves away from the body, and must have been an inviting handle for mischievous passersby to tug. The cracks that had developed around it were so severe that Amaral could wiggle it back and forth. “I’m surprised she still had a tail,” he said.

To repair it, Amaral cut out swaths on both side of the tail, reinforced it with a fiberglass rod, and puttied everything over. He then took a casting from another part of Bess’ hide to match the texture and coated the area with resin mixed with powdered bronze. After repeated applications of a patina solution, the bronze took on the light-green verdigris of the rest of the statue. Amaral used a similar technique to treat holes and scratches that over the years had been hastily repaired with epoxy.

Years of dirt and wax, which is commonly applied to true bronze sculptures to protect them from oxidization, had built up on her surface, causing discoloration. That’s right—like so many of us as we age, Bess was going a little gray.

In an attempt to wash off the wax, “we tried every single detergent and solvent,” Amaral said. But in the end, he settled on “heat and elbow grease”: a heat gun to melt the wax and a brush to scrub it off a few square inches at a time. 

He had given her the kind of facelift that preserved every wrinkle and fold on her beautiful hide. 

Rhino as Muse

On September 19, Bess returned home to a warm welcome—and a new perspective. Instead of looking directly across the road, she is now angled so her head faces the entrance to the SMFA courtyard. 

“It will be nice to have Bess greet us every day,” said Fultineer, who is a landscape architect and artist. “It also means we can see the other side of Bess better,” she added, noting that as part of a redesign of the courtyard, tall bamboo that once obscured Bess’ left flank will be replaced by shorter, perennial grasses that will surround her.

Now that the work is complete, Bess’ condition will be monitored by a cohort of staff and students who wash and maintain Tufts’ outdoor sculptures during the summer months. 

What does Bess mean for SMFA at Tufts today? She has certainly inspired student artists over the years. She has been dressed up as Wonder Woman and draped in a granny-square sweater made by fiber artists. One artist projected a video of colors and images on her. Another built a giant shadow box around her with lighting that somehow reversed her shadow, among other tricks. 

Fultineer points out that Bess’ construction, with the bronze powder that so well mimics solid bronze, “was experimental and innovative, and that’s how SMFA is, too.” 

And Fultineer is not the only one who enjoys the unexpectedness of a pachyderm on the streets of Boston, which she calls “both wonderful and just absurd enough that you have to love it.”

At the same time, she said Bess reflects the philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the nearby Back Bay Fens, with its hawks, ducks, turtles, and other wildlife that often wander onto the SMFA campus. “It was this vision of the city, of knitting nature and people together,” Fultineer said. Seeing Bess every time she enters the SMFA building reminds her of that connection to the natural world, something Katharine Lane Weems would probably approve of.