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The American Sculpture Collection
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection offers a lively survey of sculptural practice in North America and the Spanish American colonies over three centuries, in a variety of materials (predominantly marble and bronze) and a medley of styles. Most of the Museum’s American sculpture is now in the Visible Storage Study Center and the adjacent American Identities galleries.

From the Neoclassical marble females of Hiram Powers and Richard Greenough to Gaston Lachaise’s modernist bronze goddess, the full-length human figure has been a central preoccupation of many sculptors represented in the collection. For Spanish colonial carvers, it took the form of the devotional figure in wood, often embellished with painted surfaces and sometimes with more precious materials like ivory and silver. In contrast, twentieth-century modernist carvers, like Chaim Gross, preferred to leave the wooden surface of the figure in a natural state.

Portrait busts in stone, bronze, and even wood are among the most common sculptural forms here, with origins in antiquity. Whether conceived as private commemoration or as public icon, the portrait bust, like the painted portrait, served as the mainstay of many artists’ careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executed in a spectrum of styles from realism to modernism. Most are about life-size, adding to their expressive power to commit a mortal human face to the permanence of bronze or stone.

Reliefs, another ancient form of sculpture in which figures project from a background, bring the two-dimensional illusionism of painting to the enduring medium of bronze or marble. Among the many sculptors represented in the collection, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Olin Levi Warner, and Helen Farnsworth Mears excelled at exploiting this pictorial quality, using delicate drawing and subtle modeling in their bronze portrait plaques. Some reliefs here are in the form of round or oval medallions, which recalled the coins and cameos of antiquity.

Brooklyn’s collection is rich in the work of American “animaliers,” later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sculptors who specialized in bronze animal sculptures, usually executed on a small scale. These works portray highly naturalistic, usually wild, animals, often in vigorous action or combat. Once a model was created, usually in clay, multiple bronze casts could be made for a mass market eager to decorate domestic interiors. Some of these bronzes, like the small version of Alexander Phimister Proctor’s great pumas flanking the Ninth Street gate to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, are reduced-scale models of large outdoor sculptures.

Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf A (Sculpture)
	32.2092.9	Emil Fuchs Lazy, View object details...
	32.2092.12	Emil Fuchs Siesta, View object details...
	32.2092.15	Emil Fuchs Age of Innocence, 1913 View object details...
	32.2092.25	Emil Fuchs The Butterfly, View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf B (Sculpture)
	32.2092.5	Emil Fuchs The Call from Beyond, n.d. View object details...
	32.2092.8	Emil Fuchs Joy of Life, View object details...
	32.2092.26	Emil Fuchs Dawn, View object details...
	32.2092.27	Emil Fuchs The Dancer, ca. 1912 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf C (Sculpture)
	31.815	Fritz Hammargren Torso, View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf D (Sculpture)
	X1058	John Rogers Is It So Nominated in the Bond?, 1880 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf E (Sculpture)
	20.990.1	Helen Farnsworth Mears The Awakening, Designed 1914; Cast August 3, 1916 View object details...
	20.990.2	Helen Farnsworth Mears Armless Angel, Modeled 1911; Cast 1916 View object details...
	20.990.3	Helen Farnsworth Mears Death Uncovering Its Face and Showing It To Be Life, 1916 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf G (Sculpture)
	28.422	Mahonri M. Young Right to the Jaw, ca. 1926-1927 View object details...
	75.132	Kenyon Cox Study for Greek Science, View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf H (Sculpture)
	12.898	Alexander Phimister Proctor Indian Warrior, 1898 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf I (Sculpture)
	32.2092.22	Emil Fuchs Lady Randolph Churchill as Empress Theodora, 1900 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf J (Sculpture)
	13.1062	Bessie Potter Vonnoh Modern Madonna, 1904 View object details...
	22.1968	Olin Levi Warner Florence Wyckoff, 1889 View object details...
	26.153	Georg J. Lober Statuette "Madonna", 1925 View object details...
	71.53	William Zorach Cast of Original Model for "Wisdom of Solomon", ca. 1960; Cast in bronze 1963-1964 View object details...
	1993.211.1	John B. Flannagan Mother and Child, 1910-1942 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf K (Sculpture)
	32.2092.23	Emil Fuchs Girl with Fan, 1900 View object details...
	1993.54	Frederick William MacMonnies Infant Faun, 1890-1895 View object details...
	2001.120	Mahonri M. Young Piper at the Gates of Dawn, ca. 1916 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf L (Sculpture)
	28.61	Daniel Chester French Rip Van Winkle, 1925 View object details...
	1995.98.1	Daniel Chester French Joe's Farewell, Designed 1872-1873 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 32, Shelf P (Sculpture)
	23.288.4	Augustus Saint-Gaudens Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens, Modelled 1882 View object details...
	32.2092.18	Emil Fuchs The First Lesson, 1913 View object details...
	32.2092.20	Emil Fuchs Girl and Dog, 1913 View object details...
	32.2092.29	Emil Fuchs Arabesque, 1922 View object details...
	68.87.60	Karl L. H. Mueller "Protecting the Dumb", late 19th century View object details...
	1991.203	Karl L. H. Mueller Early Rising, ca. 1877 View object details...