Skip Navigation
Contents of Case 4: 33 objects

Sculpture, Busts

The American Sculpture Collection
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection offers a lively survey of sculptural practice in North America and the Spanish American colonies over three centuries, in a variety of materials (predominantly marble and bronze) and a medley of styles. Most of the Museum’s American sculpture is now in the Visible Storage Study Center and the adjacent American Identities galleries.

From the Neoclassical marble females of Hiram Powers and Richard Greenough to Gaston Lachaise’s modernist bronze goddess, the full-length human figure has been a central preoccupation of many sculptors represented in the collection. For Spanish colonial carvers, it took the form of the devotional figure in wood, often embellished with painted surfaces and sometimes with more precious materials like ivory and silver. In contrast, twentieth-century modernist carvers, like Chaim Gross, preferred to leave the wooden surface of the figure in a natural state.

Portrait busts in stone, bronze, and even wood are among the most common sculptural forms here, with origins in antiquity. Whether conceived as private commemoration or as public icon, the portrait bust, like the painted portrait, served as the mainstay of many artists’ careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executed in a spectrum of styles from realism to modernism. Most are about life-size, adding to their expressive power to commit a mortal human face to the permanence of bronze or stone.

Reliefs, another ancient form of sculpture in which figures project from a background, bring the two-dimensional illusionism of painting to the enduring medium of bronze or marble. Among the many sculptors represented in the collection, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Olin Levi Warner, and Helen Farnsworth Mears excelled at exploiting this pictorial quality, using delicate drawing and subtle modeling in their bronze portrait plaques. Some reliefs here are in the form of round or oval medallions, which recalled the coins and cameos of antiquity.

Brooklyn’s collection is rich in the work of American “animaliers,” later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sculptors who specialized in bronze animal sculptures, usually executed on a small scale. These works portray highly naturalistic, usually wild, animals, often in vigorous action or combat. Once a model was created, usually in clay, multiple bronze casts could be made for a mass market eager to decorate domestic interiors. Some of these bronzes, like the small version of Alexander Phimister Proctor’s great pumas flanking the Ninth Street gate to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, are reduced-scale models of large outdoor sculptures.

Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf A (Sculpture)
88.162 Jo Davidson
Portrait Bust of Israel Chatinover 1931

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf B (Sculpture)
28.424 Malvina Hoffman
Portrait of Giovanni Boldini

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf C (Sculpture)
47.152 Concetta Scaravaglione
Abraham Walkowitz ca. 1943

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf E (Sculpture)
09.876 Solon H. Borglum
Charles A. Schieren 1909

View object details...
30.924 William Ordway Partridge
Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson 1899

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf F (Sculpture)
21.398 Victor David Brenner
Bust of Samuel P. Avery, Jr. 1847-1920

View object details...
58.183 Oscar Miestchaninoff
Head of a Young Bulgarian 1920

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf G (Sculpture)
73.58 Chester Beach
Helen ca. 1909-1910

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf H (Sculpture)
27.740 Waldemar Rannus
Le Negre before 1927

View object details...
45.67.1 Harry Levine
Negro Head n.d.

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf I (Sculpture)
30.1110 Emile Robert Zettler
Ted Wagner ca. 1925

View object details...
1992.106 Max Bachmann
Portrait of an Indian 1900-1905

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf J (Sculpture)
66.27.4 John Mackie Falconer
Plaque of John Mackie Falconer (Self-Portrait) ca. 1870

View object details...
2010.4 Frederick William MacMonnies
Bozzetto of Pioneer Mother for Pioneer Monument ca. 1906-1910

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf K (Sculpture)
23.288.3 Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Jules Bastien-Lepage Modelled 1880

View object details...
24.429 William R. O' Donovan
Bust of Winslow Homer 1876, cast ca. 1911

View object details...
74.209 Laura Ziegler
David Levine 1974

View object details...
81.38 Jacques Lipchitz
Bust of Marsden Hartley 1942

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf L (Sculpture)
22.1958.1 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Paul Wayland Bartlett 1917

View object details...
22.1958.2 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Daniel Chester French 1919

View object details...
22.1958.3 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Walter Griffin 1919

View object details...
22.1958.4 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Julian Alden Weir 1918

View object details...
22.1958.5 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Childe Hassam 1909

View object details...
22.1958.6 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Joseph Pennell 1919

View object details...
24.557 Olin Levi Warner
"Friend Fenton" 1878

View object details...
2002.2 William Rush
Self Portrait (The Pine Knot Portrait) 1822; cast 1971

View object details...
32.2092.4 Emil Fuchs
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson 1898

View object details...
2023.46.3 Richmond Barthé
Harald Kreutzberg first cast c. 1933

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf M (Sculpture)
18.189 Olin Levi Warner
Joseph Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekht, Chief of the Nez Percé Indians 1889

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf O (Sculpture)
00.158 William Ordway Partridge
A Madonna ca. 1890

View object details...
50.37 Alfeo Faggi
Christ in the Garden 1949

View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf P (Sculpture)
13.1055 Vitorio Salvatore
Bust of a Child n.d.

View object details...
24.552 Carl E. Akeley
The Old Man of Mikeno 1923

View object details...