Martin Milmore was born on September 14, 1844, in Sligo, County Sligo, Ireland, of excellent Irish stock. After the death of his father, a schoolmaster, in 1851, the widowed mother with her four young sons came to the United States and settled in Boston.
Martin and his brother Joseph were educated at the Brimmer School and the Latin School, while in addition Martin had art lessons at the Lowell Institute for seven years.
Joseph, the eldest son, was early obliged to go to work. At first a cabinet-maker's assistant, he later became a proficient stone-cutter, with a recognized talent for sculpture. From this brother Martin, while still in school, received lessons in wood-carving, which determined him to become a sculptor. His earliest effort was a bust of himself, made by the aid of a mirror. Wishing to study modeling in clay, he presented himself at the newly built studio of Thomas Ball, during the first hour after that sculptor had taken possession. Ball did not give lessons, but, touched by the lad's disappointment, gave him a work room and materials, in return for which the boy agreed to keep the studio clean and attend to the fires. The close association thus begun lasted from 1860 to 1864, when Milmore set up his own studio. In the early sixties, Ball was building up, bowlful by bowlful, the plaster model of his famous equestrian statue of Washington, and Milmore as observer and helper was initiated into many branches of the sculptor's craft. While still with Ball he produced a little figure called "Devotion, " ordered for the Sanitary Fair of 1863, and a high relief, "Phosphor, " of which he sold the original and two replicas. In 1864, through the purchaser of one of the replicas, he received a commission for three granite figures for the Boston Horticultural Hall: "Ceres, " over twelve feet high, "Flora" and "Pomona, " each eight feet high. The "Ceres" he modeled in plaster, after the manner of Ball in the Washington equestrian. He spent two years on these figures, his brother Joseph assisting him in the cutting. In 1865, came his much praised bust of Charles Sumner, presented by the Massachusetts legislature to George William Curtis and now in the Senate wing of the Capitol, Washington, D. C.
In Milmore's design an extensive granite base, with bronze panels on its sides and symbolic bronze figures at four piers, supports at its center a high shaft crowned by a bronze figure of "Liberty. " Now outmoded, the monument remains a sincere and dignified effort. To model the sculpture, he went to Rome, where he spent studious years from 1870 to 1875. During his stay he made portrait busts of Pope Pius IX, Wendell Phillips, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other busts by Milmore are Lincoln, Grant, Daniel Webster, Cardinal McCloskey, and George Ticknor, the last-mentioned now owned by the Boston Public Library. At West Point, New York, is his bronze statue of Gen. Sylvanus Thayer. At Erie, Pennsylvania, Keene, North Hampshire, Charlestown, Massachussets, and Fitchburg, Massachussets, are typical Civil War monuments from his hand. His brother Joseph, a sculptor of scarcely less talent than himself, was his constant collaborator; the great granite Sphinx commemorating the Union dead, at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachussets, is their joint work. Milmore died at Boston Highlands, aged thirty-eight. His grave in Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, is marked by one of the most famous pieces of sculpture in the United States "Death and the Young Sculptor, " by Daniel Chester French.
(no date c. 1882 as Milmore appears to be in his late thir...)
Quotes from others about the person
"Milmore was a picturesque figure, " wrote one of his contemporaries, "somewhat of the Edwin Booth type, with long dark hair and large dark eyes. He affected the artistic, wearing a broad-brimmed soft black hat, and a cloak. His appearance was striking, and he knew it. "
T. H. Bartlett, an informed if acrimonious critic, writing in the eighties, found them better in intention than in execution, while Lorado Taft writes: "Milmore stands for good workmanship rather than for poetic expression. Few, if any, of his productions seem inspired. There is nothing epic in his grasp of war subjects, nothing lyric in his treatment of gentler themes. But we find throughout good honest construction, adequate modelling, and, rarest of all, a sense of the monumental in line and mass. "
Milmore was never married.
