Chauncey Bradley was born on December 14, 1810 in Hamden, near New Haven, Connecticut, United States. One of the seven children of a farmer, he early felt repugnance for farm work.
He was in fact physically unfitted for its rigors, having a tendency toward tuberculosis, from which four of his brothers and sisters died.
Having shown skill in woodcarving, Chauncey was apprenticed at sixteen to R. E. Northrop, a carver of New Haven.
It is said that Ives worked under Hezekiah Augur, pioneer carver-sculptor. Certainly he acquired the wood-carver's point of view, for his early attempts in sculpture were made in the "direct-action" method natural to a worker in wood and pursued by Augur in his marble-carving.
Ambitious to become a sculptor, young Ives went to Boston, locked himself in his room to show what he could do unassisted, and produced directly from marble, without recourse to a clay or plaster model, a bust which was regarded as creditable. Other attempts followed. One of these, a head of a boy, William Hoppin, was shown in a jeweler's window in Boston and brought him orders. In 1841, while he was taking plaster casts at Meriden, Connecticut, a doctor warned him of "decline. " He scoffed at the caution but three years later found himself ordered south for his health.
He thereupon borrowed from a friend the means to go to Italy. He remained in Florence seven years, meanwhile, since he had already some reputation for his portrait busts, earning enough to support himself and pay his debt. To this period belong his busts of Prof. Benjamin Silliman (New York Historical Society) and of Ithiel Towne (Yale Art Gallery).
In 1851 he removed to Rome, his headquarters until his death in that city. Ives returned frequently but only briefly to America. In 1855, bringing with him his eight new statues, among them "Pandora", "Cupid with his Net", "Shepherd Boy", "Rebecca", "Bacchante" and "Sans Souci, " he came to New York, and there opened a studio, intending to remain two years. In two months, however, he had disposed of his output.
In 1872 his marble figures of Jonathan Trumbull and of Roger Sherman, sent by Connecticut, were placed in the Statuary Hall of the Capitol, Washington, District of Columbia. On the façade of the Capitol at Hartford, Connecticut, is his marble figure of Trumbull, and in the grounds of Trinity College, in the same city, his bronze of Bishop Thomas C. Brownell. His portrait busts of General Scott and of William H. Seward were shown at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876.
His last public work, a bronze historical group, "White Captive and Indian, " completed in Rome in 1886, was unveiled in Lincoln Park, Newark, New Jersey, the year after his death.
Chauncey Bradley Ives was known as the creator of many portraits of the well known and not so well known persons of his time. Some of these portrait statues and busts include ones of: Noah Webster, (1840) William H. Seward, (1857). He also generated a large number of works drawn from Greek and other mythologies (Pandora, Ariadne). His statue of Undine Rising from the Waters (1884) remains one of the icons of the American neo-classical movement, being selected to grace the front covers of at least three books about sculpture, American Sculpture at Yale University, Marble Queens and Captives and A Marble Quarry.
In 1860 Ives married to Maria Louisa Davis, daughter of Benjamin Wilson Davis, of Brooklyn, New York. Their family life was spent in Rome, where six of their seven children were born.
