John Everett Benson carves an inscription on the facade of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington in 1978. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Archives
John Everett Benson, a stone carver whose lapidary inscriptions mark the grave of President John F. Kennedy and sites including the National Gallery of Art, conferring elegant permanence and permanent elegance with their stately strokes and serifs, died June 13 in Newport, Rhode Island. He was 84.
His son Nick Benson, who followed him in the trade, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
“By hammer and hand do all things stand,” goes an old craftsman’s ditty that provided a credo of sorts for Benson, who spent nearly a lifetime coaxing the written word from stone. Even the mallet he used to strike his chisel was engraved: “BY HAMMER & HAND,” it read.
Benson belonged to a distinguished family of New England artists and artisans. In 1927, his father bought the John Stevens Shop, a Newport stone-carving operation founded in 1705, and became one of the most renowned stone carvers of his generation.
John Everett Benson, known as Fud, began working for his father at age 15. He took over in 1961 and several years later received perhaps the most significant of many notable commissions in what would be a decadeslong career.
At age 25, following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Benson was entrusted with designing and hand-carving the inscriptions at his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.
Located on a sloping hillside, the site included a long, low wall made of Deer Isle granite to be inscribed with quotations from Kennedy’s most famous speeches. His widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, personally visited the Newport shop to inspect the progress of the project. Benson, his son said, donned a fresh pair of bell-bottoms for the occasion.
“This was the biggest job of lettering that our time had seen,” Benson said in a documentary, “Final Marks,” produced in the late 1970s. “Ninety percent of the impact of the memorial is communicated by carved lettering, the lettering of the speeches, which are the contemplative aspect, and the lettering on the gravestone, which is the immediate recording of this terrible fact of his death. And it was up to us as carvers and me as a designer to couch these emotions in handsome and perceivable form.”
Benson’s later commissions included inscriptions at the National Gallery of Art (both the original West Building and the East Building addition designed by I.M. Pei), Washington National Cathedral, the Boston Public Library and the Dallas Museum of Art, among many other public sites.
The gravestone for Rachel Lambert Mellon, carved by John Everett Benson and his son Nick Benson. Nick Benson via The Washington Post
He crafted hundreds of gravestones, including those for playwright Tennessee Williams, choreographer George Balanchine and arts patron Rachel Lambert Mellon.
Benson had a “profound insight” into the “clarity and the visibility of the letter,” said Charlie Duane, a retired lettering artist in Marion, Massachusetts, who knew Benson’s work. “There’s nothing about the lettering itself that gets in the way of the message.”
One of Benson’s final major monuments was the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, which was dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and includes a succession of open-air rooms representing Roosevelt’s life and time in office. It fell to Benson to record 22 quotations from Roosevelt’s presidency, among them his famous Depression-era promise to Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Benson’s specialty was Roman lettering, a classical form that he rendered in what is known in the profession as a V-cut – and with his own combination of calligraphy and carving.
He would first lay out an inscription on paper with a brush, perfecting each letter and line spacing. He then outlined the letters on tracing paper. Carbon or white transfer paper served to move the inscription onto the stone, where he brushed the inscription onto the surface. Only then did he begin taking his mallet to the chisel.
A single letter could take an hour or more to carve. Benson was partial to the letter R, which sent the chisel in vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curving directions in a motion that he described as “balletic.”
John Everett Benson at work on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. Charlie Duane via The Washington Post
For all the permanence of Benson’s inscriptions, his art form seemed to be disappearing, as new tools and technology offered speedier, less expensive alternatives to his craftsmanship.
But by all accounts, the product of mechanical methods lacked the beauty of Benson’s work. Many observers sensed light and shadow playing among his incisions in the stone.
“Hand-carved letters have a subtlety,” Benson once told Washingtonian magazine, “a vital quality absent in mechanical work.”
John Everett Benson was born in Newport on Oct. 8, 1939. His mother, Esther Fisher Smith, a Quaker who used the “thee” and “thy” of traditional plain speech, was engaged in the city’s civic life.
His father, an aspiring sculptor, bought the John Stevens Shop and began making gravestones as a means of supporting his family, which included three children. He would sometimes wander through Newport’s Common Burying Ground seeking inspiration for his lapidary work.
Benson studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before taking the helm at the shop. He handed the business over to his son Nick in 1993 and thereafter dedicated himself to figurative sculptural work. The John Stevens Shop is today one of the oldest continuously functioning businesses in the United States.
Nick Benson, a recipient of a 2010 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, did inscriptional work at sites including the World War II, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dwight D. Eisenhower memorials in Washington. He said his daughter Hope is now learning the family trade.
Benson’s marriage to Ruth Furgiuele ended in divorce. In 1988, he married Karen Augeri. Beside his wife and son, both of Jamestown, Rhode Island, survivors include another son from his first marriage, Christopher Benson, a painter, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and four grandchildren.
Nick Benson said his father could not bring himself to carve the headstones of family members who predeceased him, nor did he ever express any preference for the design of his own. That job, Nick said, would fall to him.
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