This book examines the unprecedented florescence of sculpture during the reign of Queen Victoria

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Sculpture Society, this important history traces America's rich heritage of figurative sculpture from the Columbian exposition of 1893 to the present. Illustrated with outstanding examples of American figurative sculpture of the last century, this volume begins with an analysis of the influence of the Beaux-Arts tradition on the creation of the great public monuments of the young republic. With this background, the book moves on to survey important categories of sculpture chronologically. Equestrian monuments and countless tributes to war heroes are surveyed in one category. In another important grouping, author David Martin Reynolds surveys portrait sculpture. He also includes a section on medallic art, a category usually neglected in sculpture surveys. In another innovation, Dr. Reynolds devotes a chapter to American Indians, both as widely favored subjects for sculpture and as sculptors themselves. Not neglecting genre, the author deals extensively with the large group of sculptors who concentrated on animals. Finally he surveys the figurative tradition in the twentieth century and speculates on future trends in sculpture. Donald Martin Reynolds teaches at the School of Architecture, Columbia University, in New York City and is the author of many articles and books on sculpture, including Monuments and Masterpieces, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Reviews. 210 illustrations

Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developmen

Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Yale University, 2007) under the title: The plague of jocularity: contesting humor in American art and culture, 1863-1893.

Beyond Grief explores high-style funerary sculptures and their functions during the turn of the twentieth century. Many scholars have overlooked these monuments, viewing them as mere oddities, a part of an individual artist's oeuvre, a detail of a patron's biography, or local civic cemetery history. This volume considers them in terms of their wider context and shifting use as objects of consolation, power, and multisensory mystery and wonder. Art historian Cynthia Mills traces the stories of four families who memorialized their losses through sculpture. Henry Brooks Adams commissioned perhaps the most famous American cemetery monument of all, the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. The bronze figure was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who became the nation’s foremost sculptor. Another innovative bronze monument featured the Milmore brothers, who had worked together as sculptors in the Boston area. Artist Frank Duveneck composed a recumbent portrait of his wife following her early death in Paris; in Rome, the aging William Wetmore Story made an angel of grief his last work as a symbol of his sheer desolation after his wife’s death. Through these incredible monuments Mills explores questions like: Why did new forms--many of them now produced in bronze rather than stone and placed in architectural settings--arise just at this time, and how did they mesh or clash with the sensibilities of their era? Why was there a gap between the intention of these elite patrons and artists, whose lives were often intertwined in a closed circle, and the way some public audiences received them through the filter of the mass media? Beyond Grief traces the monuments' creation, influence, and reception in the hope that they will help us to understand the larger story: how survivors used cemetery memorials as a vehicle to mourn and remember, and how their meaning changed over time.