William the Silent, Bronze statue at Voorhees Mall, Rutgers University, United States.
William the Silent is a bronze figure of William I, Prince of Orange (1533–1584), standing along Seminary Place at the western end of Rutgers University's Voorhees Mall in New Brunswick. The statue is a replica of Lodewyk Royer's 1848 monument in Het Plein, The Hague, cast by Toon Dupuis at the Fonderie Nationale des Bronzes in Brussels. It stands near the Graduate School of Education, Van Dyke Hall and Milledoler Hall.
The statue was brought to the United States from the Netherlands after World War I by Dr. Fenton B. Turck and reached its current campus location in 1928. It represents one of the authorized copies made before the destruction of the original mold.
The statue is nicknamed Willie the Silent and Still Bill by Rutgers students. It stands where Voorhees Mall has hosted graduation ceremonies, pep rallies, festivals and protests, and it has been vandalised in the Rutgers–Princeton rivalry. Turck's ancestor Dr. Paschasius Turck treated William after the 1581 assassination attempt.
The statue stands along Seminary Place, the street at the western end of the Voorhees Mall, beside the Graduate School of Education, Van Dyke Hall and Milledoler Hall. Visitors reach it on foot from the College Avenue Campus; the open mall setting lets you walk around the bronze on its base.
The plaster mold of Lodewyk Royer's 1848 statue in The Hague was kept in Brussels during World War I; after the war the Dutch government allowed Toon Dupuis to cast one copy at the Fonderie Nationale des Bronzes before the mold itself was destroyed. Turck's statue is that single copy.
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