Becky's photoblog

Our visit to the Brooklyn Museum reminded me that I keep running in to copies of Frederick MacMonnies’ ‘Bacchante and Infant Faun‘, one of my favorite sculptures.

Just for fun, here’s a list of all of the versions of Frederick MacMonnies’ Bacchante and Infant Faun that I know of

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City  – the Met apparently has MacMonnies’ original bronze sculpture, 1893–94, cast in 1894. The Met’s page on the Bacchante
• The Boston Public Library – a bronze version of the Bacchante is the centerpiece of the fountain in the courtyard. my photoblog entry
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – a bronze version of the Bacchante (cast in 1901) used to be in the MFA’s main lobby, and in 2010, it was moved to the MFA’s new wing. The MFA’s page on the Bacchante
• The Brooklyn Museum – marble, 1894
  – the Brooklyn Museum’s page on the Bacchante
  – my photoblog entry
• The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA
• The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, CT – bronze, 1894
• The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens, Pasadena, CA
• The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA – bronze, 1895
• The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL – bronze, 1894

The description of Bacchante and Infant Faun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website (emphasis mine)

“Modeled by Frederick W. MacMonnies in Paris in 1893–94, “Bacchante and Infant Faun” epitomizes the dramatic quality of the French Beaux-Arts style that dominated American sculpture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The sculpture captures a nude young woman in exuberant motion, her right toes on the ground and her right arm holding a bunch of grapes high over her head. Her left knee pushes upward in a dancing motion, and with her left hand she secures a nude infant sitting in the crook of her elbow. MacMonnies first presented the bronze statue to the American architect Charles Follen McKim in appreciation for a fifty-dollar loan that had facilitated MacMonnies’s trip abroad in 1884. McKim intended it for the courtyard of the neo-Renaissance Boston Public Library that his firm, McKim, Mead and White, had designed for Copley Square. After a great storm of public protest stirred by temperance unions, clergy, and other angry Bostonians against the statue’s “drunken indecency,” McKim withdrew the gift and then offered “Bacchante” to the Metropolitan in May 1897. The Board of Trustees enthusiastically accepted it, and the bronze was displayed for many years in the Museum’s Great Hall with other examples of modern sculpture. Because of the statue’s enormous popularity, numerous reductions of it were cast in two sizes. There are also four smaller bronze versions (68 in. H.), two large marble replicas, and three other located over-life-size bronzes.”

Tags: comparisons

Posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 in the ART, museums category.
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