BESSIE POTTER VONNOH
by Joan K. Yanni
The lovely Bronze Fountain Figure that appeared in the Sculpture Pavilion during the summer was presented to the Gallery by Edward, James, and Julian Atwater in honor of their parents and grandparents. The life-sized maiden, curls upswept and garment outlining her figure, holds a water bowl (or bird bath) in her raised hands as a bird hovers near her shoulder. She is the work of sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh.
The sculpture has a local history. A figure identical to ours is part of a 1930s fountain group in the conservatory Garden at the north end of Central Park, dedicated to the memory of Frances Hodgkin Burnett, author of The Secret Garden. Funds were raised for the Central Park garden by selling sculptures. One of these was commissioned by the Atwaters’s grandmother, and placed in a park in Batavia as a memorial to her father.
When the Batavia Park fell into disrepair, the sculpture was returned to the family. After the death of their mother, the Atwater sons decided it should be put on view where others could enjoy it—at the Gallery, of course. MAG was delighted to receive it, since it is the work of an accomplished American sculptor—and since the artist had exhibited at the Gallery in 1916! While the tubing leading to the bird bath is still intact, there are no plans at present to reactivate the fountain,
Bessie Potter Vonnoh was born in St. Louis in 1872. She was a fragile child and a tiny woman—only 4 feet eight inches tall. But neither of these factors prevented her from succeeding in the difficult, sometimes strenuous, field of sculpture.
In 1876, two years after her father died, Bessie and her mother moved to Chicago. Here she became a student of the sculptor Lorado Taft, who had returned to Chicago after training at the École de Beaux Arts. She was one of Taft’s women students who helped prepare his work for exhibition at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and who were named the “White Rabbits,” because of the way they scurried about in their white smocks. Vonnoh had some of her own pieces exhibited at the Exposition: an eight-foot figure of Art for the Illinois State Building and two plaster portraits.
Probably the most significant event at the fair for Potter was her exposure to the small, bronze, loosely modeled figures of the sculptor Paul Troubetzkey. These inspired her to experiment with her own bronze figurines (which she called “Potterines”), which in time became enormously popular. Today most American museums have at least one of her small bronzes: The Young Woman (1896), Girl Dancing (1897), Motherhood (1903) or The Fan (1910).
In 1894 she opened her own studio and specialized in portrait statuettes of young girls, mothers and children, dressed in the full skirts and puffed sleeves of the time. In 1895 she visited Rodin in Paris, and in 1896 she produced what was to become her most popular work, The Young Mother—a seated woman with flowing skirt looking tenderly at a baby which she holds in her arms. This work was so popular that many replicas were made of it, in both plaster and bronze, and it was the source for several other statuettes that were variations on the same theme. The work received a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Potter looked for inspiration in the everyday world and was intent on proving that “as much beauty could be produced in statuettes twelve inches in height, and in busts six inches, as could be had in the life-size and colossal productions suitable for so few houses.”
Her skill grew along with the demand for her work. She had five works accepted in the 64th annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1894. At the 17th annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York held in the spring of 1895 she showed four pieces. She was not afraid to experiment with new materials; she occasionally used terra-cotta for her work, and, in some instances, colored her plasters. Nor did she limit her work to statuettes. In 1898 she was commissioned to do two colossal projects : a portrait bust of major General S. W. Crawford as part of a Civil War memorial in Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, and a life-size statue of the actress Maude Adams for the Colorado State Exhibition at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These were followed in 1911 by a commission to sculpt a marble bust of Vice President James S. Sherman in 1911 for the US Senate Building in Washington, D.C.
In 1899 Potter married the Impressionist painter Robert Vonnoh, whom she had met in Taft’s studio. They made their home in New York City and in the artists’ colony in Lyme, Connecticut. Bessie now increasingly turned to life-size statues and to nudes or figures in classical garb. In 1913 the Brooklyn Museum gave her an exhibition, and she had works accepted in the 1913 Armory Show. In 1906 she had become an associate member of the National Academy of Design. and in 1921 she received its gold medal.
Vonnoh and her husband had several two-person exhibitions in New York galleries in the 1920s and ‘30s, and were living in Nice, France when he died in 1933. She returned to New York and tapered off in her work. She died in New York City in 1955 at the age of 82.
From her earliest pieces, Vonnoh’s modeling had fluidity and spontaneity. She was adept at modeling both the nude and the clothed figure. In her depictions of young mothers, infants and children at play, she, like Mary Cassatt, was able to express the joy of motherhood and the excitement of youth absorbed in some wonder of nature. Her work has enduring appeal.
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