Alexander Stirling Calder
Alexander Stirling Calder
1870 - 1945
Sculptor, son of (1) Alexander Milne Calder. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under THOMAS EAKINS and THOMAS ANSHUTZ and later in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Returning to Philadelphia in 1892, he won the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club and became an assistant instructor in modelling at the Pennsylvania Academy. His first commission, in 1893, was for a portrait statue in marble of the eminent surgeon Dr Samuel Gross to go in front of the Army Medical Museum, Washington, DC (now Washington, DC, Armed Forces Inst. Pathology, N. Mus. Health & Medic., on loan to Philadelphia, PA, Thomas Jefferson U., Medic. Coll.). In 1903 he began teaching at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. His first national recognition came after he won a silver medal for a statue of the explorer Philippe François Renault at the World’s Fair of 1904 in St Louis, MO. Moving to New York in 1910, he taught at the National Academy of Design and later the Art Students League. Calder was in charge of the sculptural decoration for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco after the death of Karl Bitter (1867–1915). Although he was largely trained in the French academic tradition, he transcended its limits in some of his better pieces, such as the marble figure of George Washington (1918) for the Washington Arch in New York and the Swann Memorial Fountain (bronze, 1924) in Logan Circle, Philadelphia. Among his other notable works are the sculptures for Viscaya in Miami, FL, and the bronze statue of the Norse explorer Leif Ericsson, presented to Iceland by the USA in 1932 and placed on Skolavoeroduholt, the highest hill above Reykjavík. [Abigail Schade Gary and Joan Marter. "Calder." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T013131pg2.]
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