Signed, on bronze mount: Work of Herbert Adams MDCCCXCIIII
Portrait of a Young Lady, 1894
- Herbert Adams, American, 1858-1945
Polychromed marble with bronze mounts
- Including base: 28 1/4 × 16 1/2 × 9 3/4 inches (71.8 × 41.9 × 24.8 cm) Overall (object): 18 1/4 × 16 1/2 × 9 3/4 inches (46.4 × 41.9 × 24.8 cm) Overall (pedestal): 54 3/4 × 29 × 18 1/4 inches (139.1 × 73.7 × 46.4 cm)
Founders Society Purchase, Beatrice W. Rogers Fund
1987.77
Details
While a student in Paris in the late 1880s, Adams began a series of portrait busts of American women that would soon earn him wide critical acclaim. In a marked departure from the bland neoclassical style, his delicate modeling and sensitive use of ornament and costume gave an effect of softness and spontaneity and created a new ideal of feminine charm and beauty. In these busts, Adams experienced with polychromy, tinting plaster in soft tones, and using wood, marble, ivory, and metals in simple combinations.
1988-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts from the Beatrice W. Rogers Fund in 1987 (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
Seventy-First Annual Exhibition. Exh. cat., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Philadelphia, 1901, p. 72, no. 100 (ill.). Caffin, Charles. American Masters of Sculpture. Garden City, New York, 1913, p. 105 (ill.). Taft, Loredo. The History of American Sculpture. New York, 1924, p. 391. Bulletin of the DIA 64, no. 2/3 (1988): p. 6 (fig. 4). Tolles, Thayer. “’In a Class by Themselves’: Polychrome Portraits by Herbert Adams.” Perspectives on American Sculpture Before 1925. New York, 2001, pp. 64-81 (fig. 50).
Herbert Adams, Portrait of a Young Lady, 1894, polychromed marble with bronze mounts. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Beatrice W. Rogers Fund, 1987.77.
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