George Grey Barnard

George Grey Barnard ( born May 24, 1863 in Bellefonte in Pennsylvania, † April 24, 1938 in New York City ) was an American sculptor and art collector.

Life and work

Barnard grew up in Kankakee on in the U.S. state of Illinois. He began his training at the Art Institute of Chicago and then went to Paris, where he worked from 1883 to 1887 in the studio of Pierre -Jules Cavelier and attended the École des Beaux -Arts. He remained twelve years in Paris and introduced the first successful of his works at the Paris Salon of 1894, before he returned to the United States in 1896.

In his early work, the influence of Auguste Rodin is clearly noticeable. This is testified: The Boy (1885), Cain (1886, later destroyed), Brotherly Love or Two Friends (1887 ), the allegory Two Natures (1894, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), The Hewer (1912, in Cairo (Illinois ) ), Great God Pan on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, Rose Maiden and Maiden Hood.

In 1912 he made ​​some figures for the new Parliament building ( State Capitol ) in Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. A colossal statue of Abraham Lincoln led in 1917 to heated controversy, as Barnard represented the former U.S. President with very broad strokes and drooping shoulders. The first cast of this statue found in 1917 in Cincinnati its lineup. There were other casts in 1919 in Manchester and 1922 in Louisville, Kentucky.

The sculpture Great God Pan, one of the first works Barnard after his return to America, was originally intended for the Dakota building in New York's Central Park. Alfred Corning Clark, the son of the original owner of the building, Barnard had supported financially at the beginning of his career. When Clark died in 1896, his family donated his honor the Metropolitan Museum of Art Barnard's sculpture Two Natures. The large bronze figure of Pan gave Clark's son Edward Severin Clark in 1907 from Columbia University.

During his stay in France Barnard wore a large collection of medieval art and architecture fragments together. He opened a private museum at Fort Washington Avenue, which he initially called Gothic Collection, before he renamed it in The Cloisters. This collection was in 1925 in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after John D. Rockefeller II provided $ 600,000 for this purpose are available. Today, these treasures can be seen in a specified branch of The Cloisters Museum in Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan.

Gallery

State Capitol in Harrisburg (detail)