The History of American Sculpture (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The History of American Sculpture
No more c...)
Excerpt from The History of American Sculpture
No more composite nation than the United States has existed in modern times. The influx of foreign elements has been enormous; yet, despite the varied antecedents and the wide affinities of the American people, our language remains English and our traditions (such as exist) are and always have been English. In matters of religion and law, the inheritance was adequate, and familiar princi ples were readily harmonized with a new environment. In our literature, likewise, the ancestral traditions have been positive and potent; but in regard to the other fine arts they have been negative, though not less significant, since they explain, in large measure, the unpromising conditions amid which our national art was cradled.
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Edward Kemeys was an American sculptor. He served as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Background
Edward Kemeys was born on January 31, 1843 in Savannah, Georgia, United States, the son of William Kemeys, a native of Scarborough, New York, and Abby Greene, of Providence, Rhode Island. His paternal ancestry was Welsh, and to that inheritance he attributed his intuitive qualities. When he was very young his parents returned to the N. At thirteen he spent a vacation in Illinois and there he saw for the first time the fauna of the frontier. His boyish love for wild animals was quickened to an absorbing interest.
Education
Kemeys went to public school at first in Scarborough and later in New York City. He did not receive any formal art training.
Career
On March 31, 1862, Kemeys enlisted in the 65th Regiment, New York, and except for a brief discharge he served throughout the Civil War. He then tried farming in Dwight, Illinois, but he was a dreamer and hunter more than a farmer. Drifting to New York City, he found employment as an axeman in an engineer corps working in Central Park, where his chief joy was to visit the zoo. One day, seeing a modeler making a head of a wolf, he felt the urge to become a sculptor of wild animals. He bought wax and began to model. Within a year he had produced his heroic group, "Wolves, " which in 1872 was bought for Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.
With money thus earned, he went West to study animals. With a gun and banjo he covered the plains and the mountains. When he found himself penniless in the buffalo country, his banjo won him entrée to a hunting-party out for big game. All the finest specimens of wild animals were his to dissect and to model--antelope, buffalo, wolf, elk, and bear. He also came to know the Indians and their lore. Later his interest found permanent expression in his bronze statue, "Prayer for Rain" (Champaign, Illinois), an Indian flanked by animals.
In 1877 Kemeys went abroad to exhibit in London and Paris. His second large group, "Deer and Panther, " was sold in London, while his third, "Bison and Wolves, " was well received at the Paris Salon of 1878. He studied the methods of the consummate French sculptor Barye, perhaps without fully comprehending Barye's greatness. He was intolerably homesick in Paris. To one who had hunted the bison "under the wolf-skin, " Indian fashion, the caged creatures of the Jardin des Plantes meant little.
His first notable work after his return to New York was the heroic bronze crouching cougar, called "Still Hunt" (1883), placed high on a rock-like pedestal in Central Park. Sometimes, as in his "Jaguar Lovers" and in "Bear Eating Grapes, " he portrayed the whimsical, even genial, aspects of formidable beasts. In all of his work he showed an almost uncanny insight into animal psychology. In 1887 he finished his colossal "Bison Head" for the Union Pacific bridge at Omaha; in 1893 he had completed his groups for the Columbian Exposition, and in 1895, his "Lions" for the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute building.
For several years he kept a Chicago studio, from which he made frequent trips into the wilds. Many of his small works of intimate appeal were studied from nature in an Arizona shack. Collections of these pieces are in Chicago, Philadelphia, and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. During his final years, undaunted by failing health, he worked in Washington.
Achievements
Edward Kemeys has been listed as a noteworthy sculptor by Marquis Who's Who.
