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Frederick William MacMonnies

Frederick MacMonnies, one of the most prominent sculptors of the Gilded Age, was also an accomplished portrait painter, producing numerous likenesses from late in the 1890s, including the Grand Manner portrait of John Hayward Roudebush.

Born in Brooklyn, the young MacMonnies showed precocious talent for sculpting that developed through his work as a studio assistant for the eminent American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, exposure that helped to shape MacMonnies' artistic ideals. He studied at Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design, in the evenings. In 1884, he departed for Paris where he continued his education with Jean-Alexandre Falguiere, who was also an instructor of Saint-Gaudens at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

In 1887, MacMonnies met Mary Fairchild, a painter, and they married the following year. They became fixtures in the French art colony of Giverny, first visiting in 1890 and settling there in 1895, where they acquired an estate that became an alluring showplace. MacMonnies had a sculpture studio on the property, and in 1903 he set up another studio devoted to painting. A demanding technician, he prepared his own canvases, ground and mixed his own pigments by hand.1 Like his sculpture, his paintings were largely devoted to figurative subjects and he did formal commissions as well as likenesses of models and former students, as in this portrait of Roudebush.

The subject of the portrait was a lawyer and resident of Easthampton, on Long Island, and was a student of MacMonnies as well as an explorer, hunter, and surveyor. Roudebush is shown in hunting attire with a shotgun and a recently shot pheasant with a little terrier. MacMonnies adept and naturalistic style shows a commanding and expressive brush style in which he ably captures details that enliven the scene, such as the rendering of the hunting costume, particularly the knee britches, worn leather shoes, and gun, as well as the lush verdant landscape in the background.

The Roudebush likeness was shown at a solo exhibition mostly comprised of portraits in Durand-Ruel's New York gallery in January of 1903. The show garnered mixed reviews and may have been a motivating force in MacMonnies's eventual return to sculpture, the medium for which he achieved enduring recognition. The painting was also presented at the 1907 Paris Salon and was included among the contents of MacMonnies's Giverny studio at the time of his death. VAL

1. For more on Frederick MacMonnies, see Mary Smart, A Flight with Fame; The Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937)(Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1996); and William H. Gerdts, Monet's Giverny: An Impressionist Colony (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993). pp. 137-42.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston

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