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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, 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.

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/NA7-EjEi_F0.

Before we look at changes in style and important sculptors, we’re doing a quick survey of the subjects of outdoor sculptures. In the first post in this series, we saw sculptures of animals and politicians. In the second, we saw our first military and literary heroes. The third post included a list of memorials to the Civil War, and the fourth post, figures active before 1800, including Founding Fathers. The fifth was on businessmen.

In this post, we turn to memorials erected before the end of World War I to American figures in the arts: literature, architecture, and the theater.

The first sculpture outdoors in New York City to honor a figure in the arts was Schiller, erected in 1859. Schiller, which was also the first sculpture placed in Central Park, was donated by German immigrants to honor one of their national heroes. For Schiller and other sculptures commissioned and donated by immigrants, see this post. They include what is, in my opinion, the best sculpture of a European literary figure standing in New York City: John Quincy Adams Ward’s Shakespeare.

But in today’s post, we’ll focus on American authors.

1871 and 1885: Washington Irving

The leading authors in New York City in the 1820s were Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, William Cullen Bryant, James Kirke Paulding, and James Fenimore Cooper. New Yorkers erected sculptures to all of them except Paulding (1778-1860), a novelist and satirist.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was one of the first Americans to win acclaim for his fiction, notably The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip van Winkle, and Knickerbocker’s History of New York. The earliest memorial to him, from 1871, stands in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Fourteen years later, in 1885, a giant head of Irving by Friedrich Beer was placed in Manhattan. It eventually ended up outside the Washington Irving High School on (surprise!) Irving Place.

1876: Fitz-Greene Halleck

Halleck (1790-1867) was the earliest American poet to be honored with a sculpture in New York City. At the sculpture’s dedication in Central Park in 1877, a crowd of some ten thousand trampled grass and plucked flowers. Olmsted was infuriated.

1900: Richard Morris Hunt

Hunt (1827-1895) was the most celebrated American architect of his time. In New York City, his most notable work is the Fifth Avenue façade of the Metropolitan Museum. He designed many, many others, including some of the huge but ephemeral buildings at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, 1893.

1900: Hall of Fame of Great Americans

In 1900, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans was established on New York University’s Bronx campus as a pantheon for notable American men and women. A semi-circular colonnade was designed by Stanford White with room to display 102 busts. The requirements for eligibility to election to the Hall of Fame varied over the years, but usually, a person had to be a native born or naturalized citizen of the United States, had to have died at least 25 years ago, and had to have made a major contribution to the economic, political, or cultural life of the nation.

In 1973, NYU sold its Bronx campus, including the Hall of Fame, to Bronx Community College. Currently the Hall holds 97 busts. None has been added since 1976. For a list of all the honorees and the dates at which each was added, see Wikipedia.

I somehow missed including several early busts from the Hall of Fame in my Instagram posts listing outdoor sculptures in New York City in chronological order. (I hit the year 1900 in March 2020: something must have distracted me.) So in this post, I’ve included all the figures in the arts honored in the Hall of Fame by 1918.

1900: Audubon, Emerson, Hawthorne, Irving, Longfellow, Stuart

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his renown as one of America’s earliest literary figures, Washington Irving was one of the first Americans to be honored at the Hall of Fame. Also in the earliest cohort: artist and ornithologist John James Audubon, essayist and transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and painter Gilbert Stuart. Emerson and Hawthorne were sculpted by Daniel Chester French, a very prominent sculptor who had already done the Hunt Memorial (above), and later created the Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

1910: Poe, Bryant, Cooper, Stowe

Artists in the cohort of 1910 included mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe, poet (later newspaper editor) William Cullen Bryant (more on him in a moment), novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

1915: Cushman, Parkman

The 1915 cohort – the last before American involvement in World War I – saw the addition of Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), an American actress, and Francis Parkman (1823-1893), a historian. (An iffy genre to include here, but I’m not sure where else to fit him.)

1911: William Cullen Bryant, Bryant Park

Aside from the Hunt Memorial on Fifth Avenue (see above), the most elaborate memorial to a figure in the arts honors William Cullen Bryant. In fact, a whole park is named after him: Bryant Park, behind the research branch of New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Bryant (1794-1878) was one of the early stars of American literature. Later he edited the New York Post for half a century. On the Bryant Memorial, see here and here.

Next week: allegorical and mythological figures.

More

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