Herbert Adams
founder and three times president of the National Sculpture Society, was born in Vermont in 1858 and died in New York in 1945. Adams was educated in a "common school," attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Normal Art School and taught at the Art School of Pratt Institute.
Portrait busts of women were his first most praised achievements. Adams was widely recognized for his medallions and reliefs. Among the artist's public commissions on view in New York are the William Cullen Bryant statue in Bryant Park; two bronze doors for the Vanderbilt Memorial in St. Bartholomew's Church; the statue of Solon along the Madison Avenue side of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court building at 25th Street; the doors leading to the gallery at the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the figures of Plato, Phidias, Praxiteles and Demosthenes, right of the pediment on the frieze on the exterior of the Brooklyn Museum, the Hoyt Memorial in Judson Memorial Church; the Pratt Memorial Angel at the Baptist Emmanuel Church, Brooklyn; the bronze portrait relief of Joseph H. Choate in the Union League Club; four portrait busts of John Marshall, Joseph Story, William Cullen Bryant and William Ellen Channing at the Hall of Fame of Great Americans, Bronx Community College; and the bronze doors for the Collis P. Huntington mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery.
Adams was the recipient of honors including the gold medals of the Philadelphia Art Club, Charleston Exposition, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, of the National Academy of Design, National Institute of Arts and Letters, medal of honor Panama-Pacific Exposition. Adams was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letter in 1899 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1912.
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