Janet Scudder

JANET SCUDDER (Indiana, USA, 1869 - Massachusetts, USA, 1940).
"Seated Child," ca. 1921.
Marble sculpture.
Signed.
Measurements: 88 x 73 x 36 cm.

Sculptures by Janet Scudder like the one we now bid on were very popular as fountains and garden ornaments in the early twentieth century, achieving great success among the bourgeois society of the time. Like our marble specimen, many depict nude children or young people in playful attitudes, interacting with water or animals such as frogs, conveying dynamism, grace and joy, with balanced and expressive compositions that capture movement in an elegant way.

A bronze example of this same sculpture was part of an exhibition of 22 garden sculptures held in 1919 at New York's Touchwood Gardens on Fifth Avenue. Also, a photograph of the work taken by A. B. Bogart was included in Janet Scudder's Modeling My Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1925). This same image is preserved in the Photographic Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C. A copy of Mrs. Scudder's autobiography is enclosed.

In 1891, Janet Scudder left Indiana, her home state, to train in sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. There she worked as an assistant to Lorado Taft, who had a group of female sculptors known as the "White Rabbits". Inspired by contemporary French sculpture, she traveled to Paris to continue her training and, in 1894, after seeing Frederick W. MacMonnies' "The Barge of State" fountain at the Exposition Universelle, she decided to study with him, becoming at the age of twenty-five the first woman to work in his studio.

Scudder was one of the first American artists to specialize in ornamental bronze fountains. She made at least thirty commissions for the residences of wealthy families, including "Piping Pan" (1911) for John D. Rockefeller and "Shell Fountain" (1913) for Edith Rockefeller McCormick, as well as works for Henry Huntington. In 1912, the New York Times described her as "one of America's outstanding sculptors".

Committed to the suffragist movement, in 1915 she joined the New York State Suffragist Association and served on the NAWSA art committee. In 1920 she was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design. Her works were exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions between 1893 and 1937, and are now in collections such as those of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.