Background

James Wilson Alexander MacDonald was born on August 25, 1824, in Steubenville, Ohio. He was the son of Isaac MacDonald. In childhood, he showed an aptitude for art by drawing caricatures, but he was without advantages for art study.

At sixteen, he saw for the first time a plaster bust of Washington and resolved to become a sculptor. His father wished him to be a blacksmith. The outcome was that he ran away to St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked by day in a publishing house and at night studied art, encouraged and instructed by the painter Alfred Waugh.

Within eleven years, he became the senior partner in the publishing firm. Meanwhile he was pursuing art as well as business. At twenty-one he modeled his first bust in clay, a likeness of a business associate.

Education

MacDonald studied anatomy in St. Louis and is said to have had a year's study in New York in 1849.

Career

Five years after his graduation, having given up business, MacDonald became well known as a sculptor through his bust of Thomas H. Benton, senator from Missouri. This work was studied from life and was said to have been the first portrait-bust cut from marble west of the Mississippi. His early attempts in ideal figures were his "Italia" and "Joan of Arc. "

Later came "La Somnambula, " a life-size marble figure. After the Civil War, MacDonald settled permanently in New York City. Besides sculpturing, he painted a few portraits and landscapes, wrote art criticism, and lectured on anatomy. Several accounts state that he possessed the original model of the Houdon bust of Washington and that he received many orders for bronze copies.

Expert criticism has rejected the attribution to Houdon of MacDonald's model, and the matter remains controversial.

MacDonald died at Yonkers, New York.

Achievements

• Among his portrait-busts are those of the jurist Charles O'Conor, ordered by the New York bar and presented to the supreme court of the state; of Thurlow Weed, of the poet Bryant, "Prince" John van Buren, and James T. Brady, the last a posthumous work. His heroic bronze bust of Brig. -Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, given to the city in 1891, is in Hancock Square. In New York's Central Park, near the head of the Mall, is his heroic seated bronze statue of the American poet and wit, Fitz-Greene Halleck, placed in 1877. It does not suffer greatly in comparison with the adjacent contemporary but more monumental effigies of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, by Sir John Steell, but it is distinctly inferior to two neighboring works by J. Q. A. Ward, the "Indian Hunter" and the "William Shakespeare. " It is fair to consider these five works together since all were made in practically the same decade. Other important productions by MacDonald are bronze statues the "Edward Bates, " Forest Park, St. Louis, the "General Custer, " West Point, New York, and the "General Nathaniel Lyon. " Committees on monumental projects have valued his sculpture for its realistic correctness.

Connections

MacDonald was married to Sarah Ada Westbrook MacDonald. They had two children.

Father:

Isaac MacDonald

1795 - 14 December 1872

Mother:

Annie Wilson MacDonald

1805 - 1838

Wife:

Sarah Ada Westbrook MacDonald

1832 - 14 February 1883

Daughter:

Corrine Knickerbocker MacDonald Johnson

Died on 30 March 1940.

Daughter:

Edith R Macdonald

1882 - 10 June 1886

References

• Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works. A Handbook Containing two Thousand and Fifty Biographical Sketches