Commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the National Sculpture Society, this important history traces America's rich heritage of figurative sculpture from the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 to the present. It explores the full range of the subject, including massive works such as Mount Rushmore as well as Augustus Saint-Gaudens's exquisite twenty-dollar gold piece. Illustrated with more than 275 outstanding examples of American figurative sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Masters of American Sculpture begins with an analysis of the influence of Beaux-Arts tradition on the creation of the great public monuments of the United States. With this background, the book moves on to survey chronologically such important categories of sculpture as equestrian monuments, tributes to war heroes, and portraits. In his wide-ranging text, the author, Donald Martin Reynolds, provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. He includes a section on medallic art, a category usually neglected in sculpture surveys, and also devotes a chapter to American Indians, both as widely favored subjects for sculpture and as sculptors themselves. Not neglecting genre, the author deals extensively with the large group of sculptors who concentrate on works portraying everyday people doing everyday things. Finally he surveys the figurative tradition in the twentieth century and speculates on future trends in sculpture. The book is lavishly illustrated with 65 color and 225 black and white images and includes famous public monuments as well as lesser known works by such sculptors as Hiram Powers, John Quincy Adams Ward, Daniel Chester French, Karl Bitter, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, PaulManship, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Richard McDermott Miller, Walker Hancock, and Marcel Jovine. This is a splendid gift book for anyone interested in sculpture, architecture, and American history.
