Background
Olin Levi Warner, son of Levi and Sarah B. (Warner) Warner, was born in Suffield, Connecticut, of New England colonial stock. Levi Warner, an itinerant Methodist minister, moved to Amsterdam, N. Y. , in 1846.
Olin Levi Warner, son of Levi and Sarah B. (Warner) Warner, was born in Suffield, Connecticut, of New England colonial stock. Levi Warner, an itinerant Methodist minister, moved to Amsterdam, N. Y. , in 1846.
He attended district school until his fifteenth year, meanwhile showing talent in drawing faces and carving little figures from chalk. At the outbreak of the Civil War he wished to enlist as a drummer boy, a desire which faded in the bustle of the family's removal to Brandon, Vt. There he went to school until the age of nineteen. He had never seen statues, but he longed to make them, and, knowing no better, he bought plaster, set it, and from the resulting block whittled a bust of his father. This was at least a likeness, and in a spirit of consecration he resolved to become a sculptor. To earn money for his art education he mastered telegraphy, at which he worked six years, in Albion and Rochester, N. Y. , and in Augusta, Ga. With money saved from his earnings, he went abroad at twenty-five years of age. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts, studying under Jouffroy, and becoming acquainted with Alexandre Falguière, Antonin Mercié, and Jean Baptiste Carpeaux.
His talent, industry, and courage won the regard of Carpeaux, who took him as workman into his private studio and invited him to remain as assistant. Warner declined this opportunity. Times were troublous. The Empire fell, the Republic was declared. In sympathy with the Republic, he joined the Foreign Legion, mounted guard at the fortifications, and did not resume his studies until after the Commune. In 1872 he returned to the United States, where he suffered tragic disillusionment. He struggled four years in his New York studio and at his father's farm in Westminster, Massachussets; he worked for silver manufacturers and designed bronze gas fixtures. At the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 he exhibited a striking medallion of Edwin Forrest. About this time his portrait bust of Daniel Cottier, the art dealer, was hailed by artists and critics as a delightful work, truly classic in feeling, yet far as possible from pseudo-classic taste. Other busts followed, penetrating yet poetic interpretations of character, without recourse to the "painter-like quality" then becoming popular in sculpture. Among the best of these are portraits of J. Alden Weir, the painter (1880), Maud Morgan, the harpist (1881), William C. Brownell, the critic, and John Insley Blair. The last, a masterpiece of rich modeling, is owned by the Metropolitan Museum. Warner, born a Connecticut Yankee, has been called a pilgrim strayed from Hellas. Hellenic serenity pervades his standing figure of "Twilight" (1879), his "Dancing Nymph" (1881), his relief of "Cupid and Psyche" (1882), the noble bronze caryatids of his Skidmore fountain at Portland, Ore. (1888), and his reclining "Diana, " about to rise at the approach of Actaeon, a figure which expresses the beautiful moment of transition between repose and action. In 1889-91 he was in the Northwest, where he made valuable portrait studies of such notable Indian chiefs as Joseph of the Nez Percés, Vincent and Seltice of the Coeur d'Alenes, Young Chief and Poor Crane of the Cayuses, Lot of the Spokanes, and Moses of the Okinokanes. The Long Island Historical Society owns a number of his Indian heads in terra cotta. His granite drinking fountain (in the manner of the Renaissance and therefore somewhat uncharacteristic of the sculptor) was completed in 1890 and placed in Union Square, New York, but it was later moved to Central Park. Of the two notably fine seated statues by Warner, that of Governor Buckingham, war governor of Connecticut, is in the State Capitol at Hartford, that of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachussets In front of the Boston State House is a stately standing figure of Gen. Charles Devens, completed in 1894 and erected in 1898. For the Columbian Exposition of 1893, Warner executed the souvenir half-dollar, colossal heads of famous artists, a statue of Hendrik Hudson, and busts of Governors Clinton and Roswell P. Flower for the New York State building. He was soon to engage in the more congenial work of designing and modeling two great bronze doors for the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. , the themes being "Oral Tradition" and "Writing. " The Tradition door, with its beautiful panels of classically draped figures and its impressive tympanum, had been fully completed before Warner's sudden death as the result of a bicycle accident. For the second door, little that would have satisfied his sensitive spirit had actually been accomplished, and the commission was therefore turned over to Herbert Adams. Warner is well represented in the Metropolitan Museum. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, the National Sculpture Society, and the Architectural League of New York. Because of his high consecration to his art, and his unswerving choice of the monumental rather than the pictorial in sculptural expression at a time when a picturesqueness of sculptural rendering was popularly applauded, his sudden death at the height of his powers was a severe loss to American sculpture.
In 1886 he married Sylvia Martinach, daughter of Dr. Eugene Martinach, a New York physician. They had two daughters.
