Name/Title
The Reader's Digest-1951Description
Article about James Earle Fraser - "Most Famous Unknown Sculptor" in the Reader's Digest from 1951, pages 117-119; condensed from The New York Times Magazine.
Reader's Digest, September 1951: Article of Lasting Interest - Most Famous Unknown Sculptor.
Most Famous Unknown Sculptor - Condensed from The New York Times Magazine, Aline B. Louchheim.
The sculptor who created America's most popular statue, "The End of the Trail" - an Indian slumping on his tired horse - also designed the buffalo nickel. He has made more enormous figures of important people than any other sculptor in America. Last May he received one of the highest honors in the arts: the gold medal of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters. Yet few people could name him.
James Earle Fraser, a prodigiously successful man of 75, still has enough commissions to keep him busy for 15 more years. He can be found any day in the large studio opposite his colonial house outside Westport, Conn. His face is contradictory: the sharp nose, set chin; straight mouth express the determination of his pioneer ancestry, but the warm brown eyes and fine gray hair, one lock falling over his high forehead, give him the look of a poet.
As you enter the studio you see an oddly assorted group of giants: larger than life size in gleaming white plaster, the seated figure of Thomas Edison gazes out with a friendly look. Clad in surgeon's gowns, the giant figures of the Mayo brothers stride wide-eyed toward an operating table; a gigantic General Patton, his two guns in their fancy holsters, is raising binoculars to his eyes. Nearby, a pioneer woman listens to the sounds of Indians on the warpath as she clutches a child to her breast. Behind a large screen, a mammoth plaster Pegasus is about to take flight - the work of Fraser's sculptor-wife, Laura Gardin Fraser, who for 38 years has shared his enthusiasm for designing heroic figures and small medals.
Fraser recalls his father's objections to his chosen career. "He wanted me to be an electrical engineer. He was afraid I'd starve."
Such contracts as $136,000 for work on the Commerce Department building, $50,000 for an Albert Gallatin figure for the Treasury Department and $53,000 for two groups behind the Lincoln Memorial prove how groundless were these fears.
Fraser's father was a mechanical engineer for the Chicago, Milwaukee Railroad. In 188o, when James was four, the railroad reached Mitchell, S. D., and the Fraser family moved there and lived in a boxcar, where the children slept on the floor wrapped in Indian buffalo skins. They knew the rigors of prairie weather and the hazards of pioneer life.
Fraser remembers this dramatic childhood in intimate detail - the whitened buffalo bones, the tales of trappers - tales of Indians being pushed back to the Pacific (which later inspired "The End of the Trail"). He recalls tales of buffalo herds crowding each other to the edge of the great Missouri River, the "big fellers" sliding down the steep sand cliffs safely, but thousands of calves trampled and lost in the swirling waters (which inspired a "Buffalo Herd" group for the Bank of Missouri).
He tells of Sioux Indian children who showed him how to make arrows, of long rides on his pony and his father's story of a surveying trip to Yellowstone when they brought back General Custer's body. He can still feel the frantic alarm of Indian scares, when the women would grab the children and rush for shelter. ("The Pioneer Woman" is drawn from an aunt, who died at 27 from consumption.)
The father made mechanical drawings; the son drew "pretty darned near everything." When he was eight he saw a man in Mitchell carving a stone cube. "He'd made four corner posts and a ball inside that could move. I was excited and asked him where he got the stone. 'At the big chalkstone quarry out by the Jim River,' he said. 'where they get the big white blocks to make the fronts of the saloons and stores in town.' I went out to the quarry and began carving every darn thing."
At 15 Fraser was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. At 17 he had completed the statue of "The End of the Trail" and he took it with him when he went to Paris in 1895. His success there was immediate. "The End of the Trail" won him the $1000 award of the American Art Association of Paris. It also attracted the attention of Augustus St. Gaudens. From then on, Fraser spent part of the day at the Beaux-Arts and part assisting the illustrious artist. Fraser returned to America to help St. Gaudens with the gilt equestrian General Sherman, which strides above the tulips in the Plaza at 59th Street in New York.
The buffalo nickel was first coined in 1913. "The nickel plays such a large part in everyday existence, it is worth while to make it beautiful in design."
Fraser's idea was to make a coin uniquely American: the Indian and the buffalo. "Just at that time," he recalls, "some young feller invented a guard against the use of slugs in slot machines. I wanted a rich-looking coin, bigger and thicker than the old nickel. That stirred up commotion in Washington. But I found the law does not specify the size of any coin - and got an O.K. They had to change every slot machine."
Fraser has had many commissions from Government agencies. The most ambitious scheme is the statuary for the bridge behind the Lincoln Memorial. The commissions were awarded in 1933. By the time the models were ready World War II had begun. When Count Carlo Sforza came here to sign the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance he offered to have the statues cast in Italy at the expense of the Italian Government as a goodwill gesture.
Each of the 18-foot-high groups, representing a winged horse flanked by two symbolic figures, was shipped to Italy in 25 pieces; they have been cast in bronze and have gold burned onto the surface. The groups (each now weighing 14 tons, the largest bronze castings ever made) were brought to America this summer in Army transports.
His public anonymity amuses him. "I've been too busy to have exhibitions." Dozens of letters still arrive each month, forwarded from museums, asking who did "The End of the Trail." Hundreds of thousands of photographs of this sculpture have been sold since it won a prize in the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.
Fraser's mark is forever on America. And his mark is American - the attitudes and adventures of his pioneer background are reflected in his sculpture.Acquisition
Accession
2015.0001Source or Donor
Dahl ResidenceAcquisition Method
Donation
