James Earle Fraser
James Earle Fraser
1876 - 1953
American sculptor. James Earle Fraser’s prolific sculptural output ranged from a statue of George Washington (h. 19.8 m) for the 1939 New York World’s Fair to designs for the Indian head and buffalo nickels minted by the United States Treasury from 1913 to 1938.
Born in Minnesota, Fraser spent much of his childhood in the Dakota Territory before attending school in Minneapolis. In 1891 he worked as an apprentice in the Chicago sculpture studio of Richard Bock (1865–1949), attending drawing and modeling classes in the evenings at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 20, Fraser traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi and was subsequently admitted to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where trained in the atelier of prominent French sculptor Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900). He enjoyed early success, exhibiting at the 1898 Paris Salon and winning the Wanamaker Prize from the American Art Association in Paris that same year. His talent caught the eye of one of the Wanamaker Prize jurors, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), the foremost American sculptor of the late 19th century. Consequently, Saint-Gaudens hired Fraser to work in his Paris studio. In 1900, Fraser followed the master sculptor to Cornish, NH, where he worked as Saint-Gaudens’s chief studio assistant.
In 1902 Fraser began working on his own commissions, having established a studio on Macdougal Alley in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a street that was home to a number of artists studios—including those of Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) and George de Forest Brush (1855–1941). Initially, Fraser’s work was dominated by portrait commissions, including several representations of children skillfully modeled in low-relief. He soon built a national reputation after receiving a commission to sculpt a medal honoring of Saint-Gaudens’s contributions to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901) and a portrait bust of Theodore Roosevelt (installed 1910) for the United States Senate Chamber, Washington, DC. A founding member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Fraser participated in the Association’s watershed Armory Show (1913) in New York and contributed monumental sculptures to the world’s fairs of his day, including the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), where he exhibited an equestrian monument Cherokee Indian and a seated portrait of Thomas Jefferson.
Fraser’s career advanced quickly after the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915) where he won the gold medal for his twice life-size plaster model of End of the Trail, a composition Fraser had first conceived of in the mid-1890s. Inspired by his childhood memories in the Dakota Territory, End of the Trail depicts a Native American warrior slumped in a saddle astride his trail-worn horse and came to symbolize the plight native peoples suffered under westward expansion. Monumental bronzes of End of the Trail were erected in Shaler Park, Waupun, WI (1929) and Mooney Grove Park, Visala, CA (1971). Fraser also issued bronze reductions of End of the Trail, his best-known work.
Fraser is noted for having more public sculpture in Washington, DC than any other artist and his work there includes an elaborate sculpture program for the National Archives Building (1935), consisting of granite and limestone sculptures for the south pediment, the allegorical statues Heritage and Vigilance, and several architectural decorative elements. In the same year he also made the allegorical marble figures the Authority of Law and the Contemplation of Justice at the west entrance to the Supreme Court Building. Other works in Washington include the bronze statues Alexander Hamilton (1923) and Albert Gallatin (dedicated 1947) for the Department of the Treasury Building; the John Ericsson Monument (1926) in West Potomac Park; a pair of gilded bronze equestrian statues, The Arts of Peace (designed 1925, erected 1950), located at the Lincoln Memorial entrance to Rock Creek Park; the gilded bronze Second Division Monument (1936); and four limestone pediments (1932) for the Department of Commerce Building.
His major works for other cities include an over life-size equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt (dedicated 1940) located at the main entrance to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and Benjamin Franklin (1938) for the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. In addition to being a sculptor of monuments, Fraser was a master of numismatic designs, including those for the United States World War I Victory Medal (1919) and the Navy Cross (1920).
His professional affiliations included National Academy of Design (elected academician in 1917), National Arts Commission (1920–25), and president of the National Sculpture Society (1924–7). Upon his death in 1953, Fraser’s widow Laura Gardin Fraser (1889–1966), his former student from the Art Students League, where he taught from 1906 to 1911, oversaw the completion of his unfinished works. An accomplished sculptor in her own right, she had assisted Fraser with many of his monumental commissions since their marriage in 1913. [Karen Lemmey. "Fraser, James Earle." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2086891.]
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