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This occasional series of blog posts will highlight the most important of the outdoor sculptures in New York City and provide some historical and art-historical context. To read other blog posts in this series and on outdoor sculpture in New York City, click on the New York City Sculpture tag. For photos of all outdoor sculptures in New York City in chronological order, see my Instagram page (in progress since August 2019).

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/yKgOpe2U-d8.

1856

By the 1850s, New York City was a transportation hub due to the Erie Canal, steamships, and the burgeoning railroad system. It was also a manufacturing center, a financial center, and a transfer point for thousands – later millions – of immigrants. The city’s half a million residents included a growing middle class and a small percentage of extremely wealthy people. By the mid-nineteenth century, New Yorkers finally had money and leisure for art on a large scale.

The first sign of that is this sculpture commemorating General George Washington’s ride down Broadway to reclaim New York when the British evacuated the city in 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War. Washington was the first large-scale sculpture to be erected in the city after the equestrian sculpture of King George III at Bowling Green was hauled down and melted into musket balls in 1776. The only equestrian sculpture to be erected earlier in the United States was one of Andrew Jackson, near the White House.

Washington is the first large-scale sculpture in a long series of monuments erected in New York City to honor military heroes.

Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) spent the early 1840s studying sculpture in Italy: one of the earliest American sculptors to do so. When he returned to the United States, he created the sculpture of De Witt Clinton that we saw last week and many others, of which Washington in Union Square is the most famous. 

I’ve discussed the style and subject of this work in detail in Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, and the historical context of the holiday known as “Evacuation Day” in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.

1857

Probably because American sculptors were still scarce, the monument at Madison Square raised to General William Jenkins Worth – a hero of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) – was mostly architectural. The 50-foot granite obelisk is credited to James Goodwin Batterson. Batterson was owner of the New England Granite Works, which supplied (among many other projects) the granite for the fountain basin at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace.

Four millennia ago in ancient Egypt, the obelisk was used to honor the gods. Later it became a common memorial form, as in the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., and Alexander Hamilton’s grave at Trinity Church, Manhattan.

This obelisk includes a small relief of General Worth on a rearing horse, a relief of a collection of military implements known as a “trophy“, and the names of places where Worth made significant contributions, including Mexico and West Point. For more on Worth and this monument, see this post.

1859

Another indication of New York’s increasing wealth was Central Park, a massively expensive project. Construction began in 1858 to a design by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. In a city that was already densely populated below Forty-Second Street, the Park was intended to provide a space for fresh air and exercise, as well as pastoral views unobstructed by block upon block of row houses and mansions.

Almost as soon as construction began, people began making donations to the Park: live, stuffed, and fossilized animals, and sculpture. Although Olmsted and Vaux had designed the park as a pastoral retreat, they did not have final say in what happened to such donations. That was the job of the Commissioners of the Central Park. One of the earliest donations the Commissioners accepted was this bust of Germany’s greatest playwright, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, given in 1859. The bust was sculpted by C.L. Richter, who doesn’t appear to have created any other works in the United States. Given the subject, he was probably a German sculptor trained and working in Germany.

Olmsted, who was supervising the Park’s construction, relegated Schiller to an out-of-the-way nook in the Ramble. But in 1863 the next donation, Eagles and Prey was placed along one of the main carriage roads in the Park (see last week’s post). Within twenty years, a dozen monumental sculptures were scattered through the Park. Today there are about sixty.

Schiller began a new trend in subjects of outdoor sculpture in New York City: works donated by immigrants to honor the heroes of their home countries. In the nineteenth century, when America’s doors were open to immigrants, many such sculptures were erected in the Park: Alexander von Humboldt (1869), Sir Walter Scott (1871), William Shakespeare (1872), Giuseppe Mazzini (1876), Thomas Moore (1879), Robert Burns (ca. 1880), Ludwig von Beethoven (1884), the Pilgrim (1885), Christopher Columbus (1892 and 1894), and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1892). Sculptures outside Central Park honoring heroes of immigrants include Goethe (1876), Thomas Moore (1879, in Brooklyn), Garibaldi (1888), Heinrich Heine (1888/1899), Beethoven (1894, Prospect Park), Mozart (1897), the Verdi Monument (1906), Verrazzano (1909), von Weber (1909), and Grieg (1914). In case you’re wondering, this is how I’ll keep this History of Outdoor Sculpture in New York City from going on forever: most of the sculptures listed above won’t be mentioned again.

Next week: Civil War memorials.

More

• My Instagram account shows every outdoor sculpture in New York City, since in chronological order, with a short blurb on the subject and/or artist of each.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my free Sunday Recommendations list and my Patreon page (free or by subscription): details here.