Background
Henry Merwin Shrady was born on October 24, 1871 in New York City, the son of Mary (Lewis) and George Frederick Shrady.
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Henry Merwin Shrady
Edit ProfileEducation
He received the degree of A. B. at Columbia in 1894.
Career
He was diverted from a legal career into business and for five years was with a match company, 1895-1900. After an illness and the failure of the company, he began to do sketching and modeling.
One of his sketches, sent to the National Academy of Design exhibition without his knowledge, was sold, and a jeweler offered to take all the small animal bronzes he would make. What little technical instruction he had, he got from Karl T. F. Bitter, who invited him to share a studio.
Lack of early instruction prolonged all his labors and accounts for the small number of his works, of which he himself was a severe critic. He enlarged figures of a moose and a buffalo for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 at Buffalo, and modeled a group of Indians in relief on a bronze panel for the pedestal of the Robert Fulton monument at Spuyten Duyvil.
In 1901 he won a competition with his equestrian Washington at Valley Forge, placed in Brooklyn near the Williamsburg Bridge. He was elected a member of the National Sculpture Society in 1902, became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1909, and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
His preëminent achievement in sculpture is the Grant memorial in Union Square, forming the Capitol end of the Mall in Washington.
In 1902, twenty-three sculptors and associated architects submitted designs. Those of Shrady and Edward Pearce Casey were chosen unanimously by a jury made up of two of Grant's officers, Generals John McAllister Schofield and Wesley Merritt; Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, Sculptors; Daniel Hudson Burnham and Charles Follen McKim, architects.
The memorial represents a sweeping cavalry charge. In the center of the marble platform, 252 feet in length, rises the colossal figure of Grant, garbed according to his custom in the uniform of a soldier, without side arms. The horse, two and a half times life-size, is alertly intent, while his rider calmly watches the battle. This monument, in which there are thirteen horses in the round, places Shrady among the most prolific equestrian sculptors of all time.
He spent twenty years laboring on details of action and equipment, which have passed the scrutiny of military men as well as artists, and suffered a financial loss as the result of such prolonged work. The panels on the memorial were executed by Sherry Fry from sketches made by Shrady.
As a relief from his exacting labors on the Grant memorial he accepted commissions for the equestrian statue of Gen. Alpheus Starkey Williams in Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Michigan, and the seated figure of Jay Cooke at Duluth, Minnessota.
He died two weeks before the elaborate ceremonies of dedication of the Grant Memorial on April 27, 1922.
Achievements
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He made the bust of Grant in the New York University Hall of Fame, and for the Holland Society of New York he modeled the equestrian statue of William the Silent on Riverside Drive, New York City. His last work was on the equestrian statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Charlottesville, Virginia, which was modified and executed by Leo Lentilli.
Connections
On November 18, 1896, he had married Harrie E. Moore, with whom he made his home at Elmsford, New York, in a house that had been built before the Revolution. He had a daughter and three sons, all of whom, with his widow, survived him.
