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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 4, Shelf A (Sculpture)
	88.162	Jo Davidson Portrait Bust of Israel Chatinover, 1931 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf B (Sculpture)
	28.424	Malvina Hoffman Portrait of Giovanni Boldini, View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf D (Sculpture)
	39.560	Alexander Sterling Calder Head, ca. 1921 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf E (Sculpture)
	09.876	Solon H. Borglum Charles A. Schieren, 1909 View object details...
	30.924	William Ordway Partridge Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1899 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf F (Sculpture)
	21.398	Victor David Brenner Bust of Samuel P. Avery, Jr. 1847-1920, View object details...
	58.183	Oscar Miestchaninoff Head of a Young Bulgarian, 1920 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf G (Sculpture)
	73.58	Chester Beach Helen, ca. 1909-1910 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf H (Sculpture)
	23.256	Augustus Saint-Gaudens Head from the Adams Memorial, modeled 1891, copyrighted 1908 View object details...
	27.740	Waldemar Rannus Le Negre, before 1927 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf I (Sculpture)
	30.1110	Emile Robert Zettler Ted Wagner, ca. 1925 View object details...
	45.67.1	Harry Levine Negro Head, n.d. View object details...
	1992.106	Max Bachmann Portrait of an Indian, 1900-1905 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf J (Sculpture)
	47.152	Concetta Scaravaglione Abraham Walkowitz, ca. 1943 View object details...
	66.27.4	John Mackie Falconer Plaque of John Mackie Falconer (Self-Portrait), ca. 1870 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf K (Sculpture)
	23.254	Olin Levi Warner Bust of J. Alden Weir, 1880 View object details...
	23.288.3	Augustus Saint-Gaudens Jules Bastien-Lepage, Modelled 1880 View object details...
	74.209	Laura Ziegler David Levine, 1974 View object details...
	81.38	Jacques Lipchitz Bust of Marsden Hartley, 1942 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf L (Sculpture)
	22.1958.1	John Flanagan Portrait Medal of Paul Wayland Bartlett, 1917 View object details...
	22.1958.2	John Flanagan Portrait Plaque of Daniel Chester French, 1919 View object details...
	22.1958.3	John Flanagan Portrait Medal of Walter Griffin, 1919 View object details...
	22.1958.4	John Flanagan Portrait Plaque of Julian Alden Weir, 1918 View object details...
	22.1958.5	John Flanagan Portrait Plaque of Childe Hassam, 1909 View object details...
	22.1958.6	John Flanagan Portrait Medal of Joseph Pennell, 1919 View object details...
	24.429	William R. O' Donovan Bust of Winslow Homer, 1876, cast ca. 1911 View object details...
	24.557	Olin Levi Warner "Friend Fenton", 1878 View object details...
	32.2092.4	Emil Fuchs Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, 1898 View object details...
	2002.2	William Rush Self Portrait (The Pine Knot Portrait), 1822; cast 1971 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf M (Sculpture)
	18.189	Olin Levi Warner Joseph Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekht, Chief of the Nez Percé Indians, 1889 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf N (Sculpture)
	50.37	Alfeo Faggi Christ in the Garden, 1949 View object details...
Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf P (Sculpture)
	00.158	William Ordway Partridge A Madonna, ca. 1890 View object details...
	24.552	Carl E. Akeley The Old Man of Mikeno, 1923 View object details...
	32.2092.21	Emil Fuchs Japanese Gentleman, 1913 View object details...