Paul Howard Manship

Evelyn St George, and by descent;

Sotheby's London, 2 June 2009, lot 85;

Private collection

This charming bust of a child portrays the granddaughter of Florence Evelyn Baker, who was the daughter of the wealthy New York banker George F. Baker. In 1891, Evelyn travelled to Ireland to marry Howard Bligh St George, a cousin of the painter William Orpen (1878-1931). She met Orpen in 1908 and started a love affair, becoming his companion and muse. Evelyn moved to London in 1912, where she met many of the prolific artists of the day, including Manship, when he was staying in London with the famed painter John Singer Sargent. In 1924, Manship made a bronze portrait of Evelyn's daughter, Vivian St George, now in the Brooklyn Museum (inv. no. 2008.68). More than a decade later, Evelyn St George commissioned the present portrait of her four-year-old granddaughter. Manship frequently visited Europe during this time, as he had a studio in Paris, where he probably carved the present marble.

Manship was considered a prodigy in the American sculpture landscape. His admiration is illustrated by Royal Cortissoz, in the New York Herald Tribune:

An eclectic still, as he probably always will be, ineffably refined, sophisticated, a master of his craft through whom the influences of all the historic schools have seemed to flow, he yet preserves as his central merit a rich and altogether personal feeling for beauty … (op. cit., p.567)

As a young sculptor, he trained in the studio of Solon Borglum (1868-1922) and Isodore Konti (1862-1938) and later worked with Charles Grafly (1862-1929) at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While the early stages of his career reflect a more classical academic style, he soon joined the avant-garde movement and developed a highly personal style oscillating between realism and abstract art. He felt broadly inspired by sculpture from classical antiquity, in particular archaic Greek sculpture, reflected in the hair which is engraved with linear lines and the overall stylised shape of the figure. Manship moved to Italy in 1909, when he won the prestigious American Prix de Rome, where he was able to study classical sculpture first hand. He returned to the States in 1912, where his success grew rapidly and attracted important projects, including the J.P. Morgan Memorial commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1918 or the monumental gilded bronze of Prometheus on the Rockefeller Plaza, New York.

RELATED LITERATURE

W. Craven, Sculpture in America, New York, 1968, pp. 565-568