Frederick William MacMonnies

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Frederick William MacMonnies (September 28, 1863 – March 22, 1937) was the best known expatriate American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts school, as successful and lauded in France as he was in the United States. He was also a highly accomplished painter and portraitist.

He was born in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York and died in New York City.

Three of MacMonnies' best-known sculptures are Nathan Hale, Bacchante and Infant Faun, and Diana.

Nathan Hale

The life-size Nathan Hale was the first major commission gained by MacMonnies. Erected in 1890 in City Hall Park, New York, it stands near where the actual Nathan Hale was thought to have been executed. Copies are scattered in museums across the United States, since MacMonnies was one of the earliest American sculptors to supplement his fees from major commissions by selling reduced-size reproductions to the public. The Metropolitan Museum has a copy, as does the Art Museum at Princeton University, the National Gallery of Art, and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Bacchante and Infant Faun

Bacchante and Infant Faun is MacMonnies' second best-known sculpture. The life-size nude was offered as a gift to the Boston Public Library by the building's architect Charles Follen McKim in 1896, to be placed in the garden court of the library. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union caused such a public outcry citing its "drunken indecency" that the library had to refuse the gift, and McKim gave the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The spectacle that was made regarding this gift, a salvo in the American Culture Wars, gave MacMonnies and this sculpture a great deal of notoriety in the United States: examples of the Bacchante can be found in the permanent collections of most of the large museums in the United States and France. A reduced-size version of the sculpture, rendered in bronze, resides in a private collection in Provenance, New York. The miniature rendition, which stands 30 1/8" tall, of the work that once struggled to find a home sold for $4,800 at an auction.

A copy of the statue (illustration, left) has now taken its place in its intended original location in the Boston Public Library. The original statue, loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by George Robert White in 1910 and bequeathed to the MFA in 1930 by White's sister, Mrs. Harriet J. Bradbury, is now on display in the MFA's new Arts of the Americas Wing.

Apprenticeship and education

In 1880 young MacMonnies was taken on by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and soon promoted to studio assistant. This began a lifelong friendship with the acclaimed sculptor. MacMonnies studied at nights at the National Academy of Design and The Art Students League of New York. In Saint-Gaudens' studio, he met Stanford White, who was turning to Saint-Gaudens for the prominent sculpture required for his architecture.

In 1884 MacMonnies left for Paris to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, twice winning the highest award given to foreign students. In 1888 MacMonnies opened a studio in Paris and began to create some of his most famous sculptures, which he submitted annually to the Paris Salon. In his atelier he mentored such notable artists as Janet Scudder and Mary Foote. He married a fellow artist, Mary Louise Fairchild. (They were divorced in 1908, and he married his former student Alice Jones in 1910.)

Major commissions

In 1888, the intervention of Stanford White gained MacMonnies two major commissions for garden sculpture for influential Americans, a decorative Pan fountain sculpture for "Rohallion", the New Jersey mansion of banker Edward Adams, who opened for him a social circle of art-appreciating New Yorkers, and a work for ambassador Joseph H. Choate, at Naumkeag, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

In 1889 an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon for his Diana led to further and more public American commissions, including spandrel reliefs for Stanford White's permanent Washington Arch, New York, and the Nathan Hale memorial in City Hall Park, dedicated in 1893. Until the outbreak of World War I, when he gave up his grand household establishment in Paris, MacMonnies travelled annually to the United States to see dealers and patrons, returning to Paris to work on his commissions. His long-term residence at Giverny

In 1891 he was awarded the commission for the centerpiece of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the sculpture of Columbia in her Grand Barge of State, in the vast central fountain of the Court of Honor, was truly the iconic figure at the heart of the American Beaux-Arts movement. This large decorative fountain piece became the focal point at the Exposition and established MacMonnies as one of the important sculptors of the time.

In 1894, Stanford White brought another prestigious and highly visible commission, for three bronze groups for the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. The complicated figural groups occupied him for the next eight years.

Due to fame gathered from the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition, he was commissioned to produce a large public sculpture celebrating the pioneers of the American Old West, his only work on this subject. MacMonnies began the work in 1906, and the work was unveiled in 1911. The monument features a depiction of Kit Carson and marks the end of the Smoky Hill Trail, a popular route to Colorado taken by frontiers in search of gold located near the Smoky Hill River.

Commissioned in 1908, his Princeton Battle Monument, created in collaboration with architects Carrere & Hastings, located in Princeton, New Jersey was not completed until 1922.

Honors

At the Paris Salon, he was awarded the first Gold Medal ever given to an American sculptor. Elected to the rank of Chevalier in the French Légion d'honneur in 1896 MacMonnies was awarded grand prize at the Paris Exposition of 1900. This was a decade of enormous productivity and personal satisfaction.

A second career as a painter got a good public start in 1901, when he received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon for the first painting he entered.

He was selected for the Major General George B. McClellan statue in Washington, D.C., which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1906.

Later career

Returning to New York after 1915, he continued his stylish career. He executed the colossal group, Civic Virtue, at the City Hall Fountains in New York (1919). It was the subject of considerable controversy because it depicts a man trampling several female figures, representing evil sirens. This resulted in criticism on the part of many observers. The statue was moved in 1941 to distant Queens Borough Hall.

The American Monument

In late 1917 MacMonnies was commissioned by a group of influential citizens of New York city, to work on a sculpture in honor of those that died in the Battle of the Marne as a gift to the French people in exchange for the Statue of Liberty. The statue, located in Meaux, France was over seven stories tall, and while work started on the statue in 1924 it was not finished until 1932 and at that time of its dedication was the world's largest stone monument

When a medal was commissioned to celebrate Charles Lindbergh's solo Trans-Atlantic flight in 1931, MacMonnies was the obvious choice.

Frederick William MacMonnies died of pneumonia in 1937, aged 73.

Publications

Greer, in Brush and Pencil (Chicago, 1902)

Lorado Taft, History of American Sculpture (New York, 1903)
Pettie, in the International Studio, volume xxix (New York, 1906)