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Frederick MacMonnies
1863–1937
BirthplaceBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographyFrederick MacMonnies was one of the most successful and popular of the early twentieth-century American sculptors working in the so-called Beaux-Arts mode of figural representation that blended idealism, naturalism, and references to the classical past. Born in Brooklyn, New York, MacMonnies showed an early talent for modeling and at the age of eighteen he became a studio assistant to rising sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848–1907), with whom he enjoyed a close, if sometimes contentious, relationship. MacMonnies also studied at New York's National Academy of Design and Cooper Union. In 1884 he traveled to Paris to enroll at the Académie Colarossi, but an outbreak of cholera in the city prompted him to leave for Munich, where he studied at the Royal Academy before resuming work in Saint Gaudens's New York studio.
MacMonnies returned to Paris in 1886 and completed his training at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, studying under French sculptor Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900). His works first appeared in the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris in 1889. Thereafter MacMonnies's career flourised. His bronze statue of American Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale for a New York City park won a medal at the Salon in 1891, and he was awarded a commission for the most important sculptural work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the monumental, multifigural Triumph of Columbia. The controversy over his exuberant nude sculpture Bacchante and Infant Faun, commissioned for the courtyard of the new Boston Public Library building but rejected as decadent, only brought the artist more work. He received numerous private and public commissions over the next three decades.
In 1888 MacMonnies married a fellow American art student in Paris, painter Mary Fairchild, with whom he shared a studio. In 1890 the couple began spending time in the rural Normandy village of Giverny, a burgeoning artist's colony, and in 1898 they moved there, purchasing an old priory with a walled garden that soon became the social heart of the community. Briefly, around the turn of the century, MacMonnies temporarily abandoned sculpture for painting, but poor reviews sent him back to his primary medium. As both a painter and a sculptor, the charismatic MacMonnies was a highly successful and popular teacher, especially among young American women who traveled to Paris and to Giverny for study. His successive romantic involvements with several of them, combined with long absences from his family while he traveled for commissions or worked in his Paris studio, contributed to the MacMonnieses' divorce in 1909.
MacMonnies remained based in France until the outbreak of World War I, when he established a studio in New York. Feted on his return to his native country, he soon found himself sidelined as his traditional style and approach became outmoded. Financially ruined by the stock market crash of 1929, MacMonnies died impoverished and obscure at the age of seventy-three. Renewed appreciation of American Beaux-Arts sculpture and design has returned MacMonnies to a prominent place in its history.
MacMonnies returned to Paris in 1886 and completed his training at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, studying under French sculptor Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900). His works first appeared in the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris in 1889. Thereafter MacMonnies's career flourised. His bronze statue of American Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale for a New York City park won a medal at the Salon in 1891, and he was awarded a commission for the most important sculptural work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the monumental, multifigural Triumph of Columbia. The controversy over his exuberant nude sculpture Bacchante and Infant Faun, commissioned for the courtyard of the new Boston Public Library building but rejected as decadent, only brought the artist more work. He received numerous private and public commissions over the next three decades.
In 1888 MacMonnies married a fellow American art student in Paris, painter Mary Fairchild, with whom he shared a studio. In 1890 the couple began spending time in the rural Normandy village of Giverny, a burgeoning artist's colony, and in 1898 they moved there, purchasing an old priory with a walled garden that soon became the social heart of the community. Briefly, around the turn of the century, MacMonnies temporarily abandoned sculpture for painting, but poor reviews sent him back to his primary medium. As both a painter and a sculptor, the charismatic MacMonnies was a highly successful and popular teacher, especially among young American women who traveled to Paris and to Giverny for study. His successive romantic involvements with several of them, combined with long absences from his family while he traveled for commissions or worked in his Paris studio, contributed to the MacMonnieses' divorce in 1909.
MacMonnies remained based in France until the outbreak of World War I, when he established a studio in New York. Feted on his return to his native country, he soon found himself sidelined as his traditional style and approach became outmoded. Financially ruined by the stock market crash of 1929, MacMonnies died impoverished and obscure at the age of seventy-three. Renewed appreciation of American Beaux-Arts sculpture and design has returned MacMonnies to a prominent place in its history.