Henry Augustus Lukeman was born on January 28, 1871 in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Augustus and Minnie Tucker (Curtis) Lukeman. His father was from Leamington, Warwickshire, England, and met his future wife, a Virginian, when she was abroad. The younger Lukeman's boyhood and the greater part of his life were spent in New York City.
Lukeman attended night classes in drawing at the National Academy of Design and the Cooper Union. Thereafter he went abroad and studied for six months in the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Falguière and later under Daniel Chester French. He was given an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Dickinson College.
Lukeman's interest in sculpture was early revealed by the fact that he joined a modeling class in a boys' club at the age of ten. A few years later he went to work in the studio of Launt Thompson, sculptor of the statue of Napoleon in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Preparations for the World's Columbian Exposition, held in 1893, gave him, and other young sculptors of that day, opportunity for employment and adventure, both of which he found awaiting him in Chicago. There he made the acquaintance of Daniel Chester French, who secured his assistance in enlarging French's heroic statue of "The Republic, " designed to stand in the Court of Honor, and a lifelong friendship between the two was formed.
After the exposition work was over, Lukeman supported himself for a time by executing ornamental and architectural designs for buildings in New York. Later he became an assistant of Chester French, an association which continued for years, although meanwhile Lukeman set up his own studio and executed numerous independent commissions. The list of his works is long and their standard of merit, which was well above the average, uncommonly uniform. Among the most notable are: the statue of Manu, the lawgiver of India, Appellate Court House, New York City; statues of President McKinley, Adams, Massachussets, and Dayton, Ohio; statues (four each) for the Royal Bank Building, Montreal, and the Brooklyn Museum, and a statue of Columbus for the Custom House, New York; statues of Joseph Henry, Princeton, New Jersey, of Franklin Pierce, Concord, New Hampshire, of William Shepard, Westfield, Massachusetts, and of Jefferson Davis and James George, Statuary Hall, United States Capitol; equestrian statues of Kit Carson, Trinidad, Colorado, of Daniel McMurtrie Gregg, Reading, Pennsylvania, and of Francis Asbury, Washington, D. C. ; memorials to Ulysses S. Grant, San Diego, California, and the Women of the Confederacy, Raleigh, North Carolina; the War Memorial, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; also a gigantic relief of General Robert E. Lee on his famous horse "Traveller, " Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia. The last was a courageous undertaking but fraught with unhappiness. The idea and design of the carving originated with Gutzon Borglum, who, after eight years' work, abandoned the project as a result of a quarrel with its sponsors. Lukeman, urged by these sponsors and misadvised by his friends, took over the commission, a procedure regarded by some as unethical and bitterly protested by Borglum. This criticism and quarrel were distressing to him, and not very long after the Lee group was completed he, too, abandoned the work.
He was an impressionable person and could hardly fail to be greatly influenced by his teachers, for whose work he entertained the highest admiration. From Thompson he acquired technique and a sense of repose in sculptural expression; from French, grace and beauty. The very perfection of his work seems at times to have smothered emotion; it is almost universally pleasing but rarely personal or vivid. However, his statue of Manu will always hold high place for statuesque dignity; his equestrian statue of Asbury, for sympathetic interpretation. Besides his studio in New York, Lukeman had a studio and summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He died of heart disease at his home in New York and was buried in Stockbridge.
In 1898 Augustus Lukeman was elected to membership in the National Sculpture Society and the Architectural League of New York. In 1909 the National Academy of Design made him an associate.
Lukeman was of a temperamental and extremely sensitive nature.
In December 1933 Lukeman married Mrs. Helen Bidwell Blodgett, of Stockbridge.
