Background
He was born on November 14, 1873 in Troy, New York, United States. He was the son of Louis and Mary Elizabeth (McClellan) Potter.
He was born on November 14, 1873 in Troy, New York, United States. He was the son of Louis and Mary Elizabeth (McClellan) Potter.
He received his early education in art from Charles Noel Flagg. After leaving Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, he went in 1896 to Paris, where he studied painting under Luc-Olivier Merson and sculpture under Jean Dampt.
A friend of the Boutet de Monvel family, he carved a bust of Bernard Boutet de Monvel and exhibited it in the Champs de Mars. Having spent three years in Paris, he went to Tunis to model North-African types.
The Bey of Tunis commissioned him as the sole artist to represent Tunisian types at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and conferred upon him the decoration of Officier du Nichan Iftikhar (Order of Renown). Potter's work at this period was vividly realistic; good examples are his "Bedouin Mother and Child", "A Tunisian Jewess" and "The Snake Charmer. "
Returning to the United States, he exhibited "The Snake Charmer" in the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York (1901), where it attracted favorable comment, while busts later shown, especially the "Tunisian Jewess" and "The Young Bedouin, " were said to be worthy of high praise.
After some years spent in civilized surroundings, he felt a desire to portray primitive American man and to that end traveled among the Indians. In Southern Alaska he made numerous studies of the Tlingit Indians at their various tasks and rites. Their squat bodies doubtless induced the heavy archaic quality found in such pieces as "The Hunter with his Dogs, " "The Shaman, " and "The Spirit of the Night"; the interest is ethnological rather than artistic.
In the spring of 1909 Potter held an exhibition at the Modern Athenian Club in New York City. He showed bronzes, marbles, studies, finished pieces, groups, portrait busts, statuettes. To this period belong his Horace Wells Memorial at Hartford and his bust of Mark Twain, made without the subject for a model, but commended for realism. His final works included two symbolic figures, one male, the other female, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1912 under the titles "The Earth Man" and "The Earth's Unfoldment, " the former typifying struggle upward, the latter spiritual awakening.
He died suddenly at Seattle, Washington, from a treatment administered by a Chinese herb doctor.
He was greatly interested in the universal brotherhood of man and in his later development of his beliefs, often stressed the ethnological side of a subject. Potter's ideals led him to researches in occultism, but these he later abandoned as useless in reaching a deeper spiritual insight.
There is no information about his marital status.