Dancing Bacchante with an Infant Faun: fountain at the Boston Public Library

Frederick William Macmonnies (Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn September 28, 1863 - New York 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.

Three of Macmonnies' best-known sculptures are Nathan Hale, Dancing Bacchante with 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 sculptors to supplement his fees from major commissions by selling reduced-size reproductions to the public. The Metropolitan Museum has a copy, as do the Art Museum at Princeton University and the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College (Amherst, Mass.).

Dancing Bacchante with an Infant Faun

Dancing Bacchanteis 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 Women's Christian Temperance Union caused such a public outcry citing its "drunken indecency" that the gift had to be refused by the library. McKim gave the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York instead. 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: there is an example of the Bacchante in the permanent collections of most of the large museums in the United States and France. A copy (illustration, above right) has now taken its place in its intended original location in the Boston Public Library.

Life

Macmonnies showed his talent early. 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 in New York. In 1884 he left for Paris to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, winning the highest award given to foreign students twice.

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. He married a fellow artist, Mary Louise Fairchild. (They were divorced in 1908, and he married his former student Alice Jones in 1910.)

In 1889 an Honorable Mention at the Salon for his Diana led to important American commissions, including the Nathan Hale memorial and the 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. 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.

In 1891 he was awarded the commission for the centerpiece of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the sculture 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. 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 Legion of Honor in 1896 and 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.

Returned to New York after 1915, he continued his stylish career. When a medal was commissioned top celebrated Charles Lindbergh's solo Trans-Atlantic flight in 1931, Macmonnies was the obvious choice.

Macmonnies died of pneumonia in 1937.

References

Mary Smart, A Flight With Fame: The Life & Art of Frederick MacMonnies 1996. Biography and a catalogue raisonné

Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture 1989. photographs of three of MacMonnies' best works, the Nathan Hale, Bacchante and Infant Faun, and Diana, along with some brief biographical information.

External links

• Biography (http://www.bronze-gallery.com/sculptors/artist.cfm?sculptorID=87)
• A good analysis of the qualities of Macmonnies' Nathan Hale compared with a lesser sculpture by Bela Lyon Pratt (http://www.forgottendelights.com/essays/Nathan%20Hale.htm)
• Macmonnies sculptures and paintings, well-represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/result.asp?Artist=MacMonnies&collection=entire)
• Insecula (French language): Pan of Rohallion by Macmonnies (http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/O0004922.html)