Nathan Hale

Frederick MacMonnies

MacMonnies was a shooting star in the American art world of the 1890s. A student of Augustus Saint Gaudens, he rocketed to fame with this sculpture of Nathan Hale and with the Bacchante and Infant Faun that was banned from Boston's Public Library. (It’s now on display in the American Wing Courtyeard of the Metropolitan Museum, along with several of MacMonnies’ other early works.) For the Columbian Exposition in 1892-1893 (see the Columbus Monument), MacMonnies designed the enormous Barge of State, which sat on a pedestal 150 feet wide. In the same decade, MacMonnies created the bronze sculptures for the great arch commemorating the Civil War that stands at the northern end of Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Above: Soldiers group from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

With sales of small-scale reproductions of his works, MacMonnies’s income in the 1890s reached $300,000 - probably $3 million in present-day dollars.

But as the twentieth century opened, MacMonnies lost his fire: Beauty and Truth on the facade of the New York Public Library are lifeless and insipid, as is the much-maligned Civic Virtue, banished from City Hall to Kew Gardens and recently transferred to the Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Above: MacMonnies, Civic Virtue, now in the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

For more on MacMonnies’ career, see Dianne L. Durante’s Artist-Entrepreneurs: Saint Gaudens, MacMonnies, and Parrish, a lecture available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

“Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Cross References

• For more sculptures relating to the Revolutionary War, see Washington (at Wall St., Washington Square Park, and Union Square), Lafayette, Jefferson, Hamilton (in Central Park and near the Grange), and Nathan Hale. See also “Figures from American History Active Before 1800” (handlist for a walking tour).
• For more on MacMonnies’s Hale, see “MacMonnies’ Nathan Hale”
• For more on fires in New York, see the Firemen’s Memorial.
• Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan has more on the function of art and on Hale's capture by the British.
• For more on this sculpture on the Forgotten Delights site, see here.