John Frazee was a pioneer sculptor. He designed the New York City Customs House (now Federal Hall) and designed a number of lot monuments in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Background
John Frazee was born on July 18, 1790, in poverty in the “upper village” of Rahway, New Jersey. His father, Reuben Frazee, was a carpenter, a descendant in the third generation from a godly Scottish family named Fraser or Frazer, who came to Amboy, New Jersey, among its earliest settlers.
Soon after John’s birth, his father abandoned his brood, and nothing was heard from him for nine years.
The mother, whose maiden name was Brookfield, took the boy when he was five to the Brookfield farm, where he was reared under the kindly influence of his grandmother, and where of necessity he was soon set to work about the farm and home.
Education
Frazee had little play, less schooling. Then the prodigal father returned, and sent young John to work for a brutal farmer named DeCamp, in surroundings “most deplorable. ”
At fourteen, however, the lad escaped unscathed to the Brookfield farm, where he labored cheerfully, with some brief snatches of longed-for schooling.
At seventeen, Frazee was apprenticed to William Lawrence, a bricklayer and mason, who later became a licensed tavern-keeper.
Career
Between trowel, tankard, and hoe, John was busy. By day, he laid brick; on winter nights, says his friend Dunlap, he served “the reveler and the drunkard. ”
Soon an unexpected opportunity came. Lawrence, having finished building a bridge over the Rahway River at Bridgeton, wished to have an inscription cut in the stone. Not one of the forty men working on the bridge would undertake it, but Frazee, with the inexperience of his eighteen years, rushed in and succeeded, his exploit being duly bruited abroad.
In 1810, Frazee was sent to work as a bricklayer for John Sanford, a contractor for the masonry on the New Brunswick bank, and there he met Ward Baldwin, a stone-cutter who had learned his trade while working on the famous City Hall in New York. Frazee was already spending eleven hours a day in bricklaying, but he was glad to spare four of the remaining hours in acquiring from Baldwin the art of hewing stone.
Later, when Lawrence was building a stone house for Peter De Windt Smith, near Haverstraw, Frazee boldly offered to do all the so-called ornamental carving, asking for the work “in language as respectful as my illiterate abilities could summon”. Again his attempt was successful beyond hope.
When the War of 1812 broke out, he turned to cutting tombstones to eke out a living.
At first, his work was only in curbstones, milestones, and headstones; his earliest attempt to represent the human form was in 1815 when he made a figure of Grief for the tombstone of his infant son. His skill of hand increased with practice, and for several years he worked from thirteen to fifteen hours a day, spending his evenings carving in wood for cabinetmakers, or cutting steel letters for branding.
In 1818, with his brother William, Frazee opened a marble-shop in New York City, where he soon found ample employment in making mantels, tombstones, and church memorials. Dunlap relates that from 1819 to 1823 “his principal study was lettering, which he carried to high perfection”.
A figure of his three-year-old son, modeled in 1820, won him an interview with John Trumbull, who curtly told him that nothing in sculpture would be wanted “in this country, for yet a hundred years”.
Frazee chilled but not daunted, continued his efforts.
His post-mortem memorial portrait of John Wells, dated 1824, and placed in St. Paul’s Church, New York, was the first marble bust carved in this country by a native American, giving it a historic significance above that of Trumbull’s mistaken prophecy. The memorial, for which the sculptor received $1, 000, includes an inscribed tablet over-adorned with monumental items, but the portrait itself is soundly conceived and executed.
Two years later, Frazee was one of the fifteen artists who, choosing fifteen others, founded the National Academy of Design. At its inception, he alone represented the art of sculpture.
But Frazee’s portraits represented only a part of his output; his activities in the marble-yard continued. This labor occupied him from 1834 to 1841.
John died at Compton Mills, Rhode Island, in the sixty-second year of his age.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
“I knew nothing about the arts of antiquity. .. The want of that knowledge may easily be detected . .. in most of my works, prior to the year 1820. ”
Connections
In 1813, Frazee married Jane Probasco of Spotswood, New Jersey.
His first wife having died “of the pestilence” in 1832, leaving five of the ten children born to them, he married Lydia Place, daughter of Thomas Place of New York City.