Henry Kirke Brown
Henry Kirke Brown
1814 - 1866
American sculptor. Of the many sculptors to study in Italy, Brown was the first to eschew a career as an expatriate artist, choosing instead to establish his studio in the United States. To this end Brown depicted subjects of national relevance in a realist style that was accessible and appealing to his audience. His monuments to De Witt Clinton (1853) in the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, and George Washington (1856) in Union Square, Manhattan, cast at the Ames Manufacturing Company—a firearms factory in Chicopee, MA—were among the first bronze monuments successfully cast in the United States and paved the way for other American sculptors to cast their work in this county.
Born on a farm in Massachusetts, Brown studied painting in Boston in 1832 with noted portraitist CHESTER HARDING and in the mid-1830s learned anatomy at the Woodstock Medical College in Vermont. By 1836 he was painting in Cincinnati. It was here that Brown experimented with modeling clay, probably at the suggestion of his friend the sculptor Shobal Clevenger (1812–43).
In 1839 Brown married Lydia Louise Udall of Vermont and moved to Boston, though he made extended trips to Albany and Troy, NY, where he modeled as many as 40 portrait busts of local civic officials. The technical obstacles entailed in producing marble and bronze sculpture in the United States at this time led Brown to cast most of these busts in plaster. Hoping to execute them in marble, he moved to Florence, Italy, with his wife in 1842. The Browns became prominent in the Anglo-American expatriate community in Florence, remaining there until 1843 when they moved to Rome where they lived until 1846. Brown rounded-out his largely autodidactic training by sketching numerous drawings after antique sculptures he saw in Rome, Tivoli, Naples, Sorrento, and Pompeii (examples in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC). While abroad he received commissions from important American patrons, including Charles M. Leupp (d 1859) for whom he sculpted the marble composition Chi Vinci Mangia (1844–6; New York, NY Hist. Soc.), depicting a boy holding a dog on a leash.
In the fall of 1846 Brown arrived in New York and became a key figure in the city’s burgeoning cultural scene, serving as a founding member of the Century Club and sculpting busts of the prominent cultural figures Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and William Cullen Bryant. His solo exhibition, the first such show by an American sculptor in New York, opened in November 1846 at the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN, to which he earned associate membership the following year. In the summer of 1848 Brown established a studio and makeshift foundry in Brooklyn where he modeled and cast Choosing of the Arrow (1849; version New York, Met.) and Filatrice (1850; version New York, Met.), which were distributed nationally by lottery through the American Art-Union, and were among the first editions of statuettes issued in America. Shortly after this, Brown’s monuments to De Witt Clinton and George Washington earned him a national reputation.
In 1856 Brown moved his studio and home to Balmville, near Newburgh, NY. Around this time he made several attempts but failed to secure a coveted federal commission for the House pediment of the Capitol. As a consequence he became active with the Washington Art Association, a national organization then lobbying Congress to distribute commissions for the Capitol to American artists. Brown’s fellow artists chose him as their spokesperson, which led to his appointment to the National Art Commission by President James Buchanan in 1859. This commission advising Congress on decorations for the Capitol was terminated at the onset of the Civil War. Brown’s models (1860–61) for a 100-ft-long (30 m) pediment for the State House, Columbia, SC, were also destroyed during the war.
In the last two decades of his life Brown sculpted numerous public monuments, including two statues of Abraham Lincoln (1869, Prospect Park, Brooklyn; 1870, Union Square, Manhattan) and two federally commissioned equestrian statues General Winfield Scott (1874), Scott Circle, Washington, DC, and Nathanael Greene (1877), Stanton Park, Washington, DC. He received four commissions for statues for the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall (Nathanael Greene, 1870; George Clinton, 1873; Philip Kearney, 1888, Richard Stockton, 1888), the last two of which were completed by Henry Kirke Bush-Brown (1857–1935), his nephew and adopted son.
In 1876 Brown served as a judge for the CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter his realist style was superseded by that of American sculptors trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who would dominate portrait sculpture and public art of the last quarter of the 19th century. His apprentices JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD and Larkin Mead (1835–1910) both became notable American sculptors. [Karen Lemmey. "Brown, Henry Kirke." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2094084.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
