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James Earle Fraser
Theodore Roosevelt, 1902
[I photographed this sign because it was clearly wrong. In the upper right-hand corner, the piece says "19 @ 20" but the sign says it was done in 1902. I wrote to the museum and they agreed that the sign was incorrect and they'd fix it.]
Best known for his monuments to Native Americans, the Minnesota-born, South Dakota-raised Fraser began his artistic career producing architectural sculptures for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Soon after, he sought academic training in France, where he came to the attention of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, America's leading sculptor who was working in Paris at the time. Saint-Gaudens hired Fraser to assist on his gilded equestrian monument to William Tecumseh Sherman, which was destined for New York. The experience had a profound impact on Fraser's future career.
This image of America's twenty-sixth president, paired with one of his well-known sayings, dates from the year that Fraser established his own New York studio. It strongly evokes his teacher's celebrated approach to bas-relief portraiture. Fraser likely met Roosevelt through Saint-Gaudens, who, at the president's request, was then designing the famed $20 "double eagle" gold coin, issued in 1907 by the US Mint. Six years later, Frazer himself developed a reputation as a numismatist, producing the so-called Indian head, or buffalo, nickel. |