has not stood the test of time. "Famous in his day, he is almost forgotten now." According to his biographer Peter Nash, "You wouldn't go to Rome to make new, progressive art." "He could not accept modern art", and "rejected" Rodin, whom he considered "pretentious". After noting the awards he received during his life, Sue Eisenfeld noted: "As was his custom with his monuments, Ezekiel proceeded meticulously to reflect historical accuracy," according to the editors of his memoirs. "Lost Cause" movement Another factor possibly contributing to his "relative obscurity" today may be his devotion to the Confederacy. Ezekiel's sculptures of Confederate heroes are the most visible manifestation of, and a significant factor in the legitimacy of, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, in which he was a "true believer". It is a "romanticized vision of the South and the Confederacy in which soldiers fought honorably for states' rights and free trade rather than treasonously for the cause of slavery. [See Cornerstone speech.] In this narrative, slave owners are painted as benign protectors and providers for their African-American 'dependents.'" "Ezekiel's work is integral to this sympathetic view of the Civil War." He depicted Confederate leaders, like Stonewall Jackson, or fallen soldiers like the VMI students, as heroes. "But no monument exemplifies the Lost Cause narrative better than Ezekiel's Confederate Memorial in Arlington, where the woman representing the South appears to be protecting the black figures below." According to his relative Judith Ezekiel, "This statue was a very, very deliberate part of revisionist history of racist America." According to historian Gabriel Reich, "the statue functions as propaganda for the Lost Cause.… It couldn't be worse." On August 20, 2017 — immediately after and "in light of" the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — "nearly two dozen people from the extended Ezekiel family" sent a letter to the Washington Post, asking for the Arlington monument's removal: Works In the early 1880s, Ezekiel created eleven larger-than-life sized statues of famous artists. These were installed in niches on the façade of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's original building (now the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery). In the early 1960s, they were removed to the Norfolk Botanical Garden in Norfolk, Virginia. Among his noted works was a memorial at VMI, Virginia Mourning Her Dead (1903), for which he declined payment. It was installed in the small cemetery where six of the 10 VMI cadets killed at