It is a permanent reminder of the characteristic placement of Dallin's larger works during his lifetime: at the entrances to buildings housing art exhibitions.ĭuring the last three decades of his life, Dallin was fortunate enough to have Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge as a major patron. The last of his large equestrian Indian figures, The Appeal of the Great Spirit, conceived in the first decade of the century, was bought by the City of Boston in 1912 and installed in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, making it today his most familiar work. He took a position at the Massachusetts State Normal Art School in Boston, where he taught until 1942. In 1900 his Medicine Man (Fairmount Park, Philadelphia) received a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris the following year it was placed in front of the Art Building at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.ĭallin returned to America in 1899 and settled permanently in Arlington Heights, near Boston. He produced several important groups and equestrian sculptures during these years and exhibited in the Salons of 1897, 1898, and 1899. Yet Dallin was not satisfied with his artistic training, and in 1896 he returned to Paris and entered the atelier of the sculptor Jean Dampt. He spent part of the 1890s in the latter city and then taught for a time at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. As the author and critic William Howe Downes pointed out in 1899, it "marked the ripening of the sculptor's talent and the opening of a distinct period of original productiveness." The 1890s brought several major commissions to Dallin, including a full-length Isaac Newton for the Library of Congress and the gilded angel atop the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The work was shown in Chicago in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition and made Dallin's fame. At the Salon in 1890 he exhibited The Signal of Peace (Lincoln Park, Chicago), an equestrian Indian composition inspired by the European tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The model, cast in bronze, was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889.ĭallin continued his interest in Native American, and therefore non-academic, subject matter. Instead, he busied himself with a commission given by an American for an equestrian statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, conceived as a gift to France from the American people. He passed the concours for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but chose not to matriculate. The following year, he went to Paris, entered the Académie Julian, and studied with Henri Michel Chapu. In 1888 he sent one of these, The Indian Hunter, to the American Art Association exhibition in New York, where it was awarded a Gold Medal. In the mid-1880s, Dallin began experimenting with figures of the American Indian, a genre with which he was to be identified for the rest of his life. Politics and procrastination postponed the unveiling of the finished bronze to 1940, causing the work to be a lifelong burden but a happy fulfillment of Dallin's old age. After some delay and several revisions, he was awarded the contract for the figure in 1885. His model for the sculpture was completed and shown at the Boston Art Club early the following year. Consequently, he was well placed to compete, in 1883, for the commission of an equestrian statue of Paul Revere financed by patriotic Bostonians. In 1882 Dallin established his own studio in Boston and began producing portrait busts and statuettes. He also met his future wife and lifelong supporter, the author Vittoria Colonna Murray. Morse, and he worked in a local terra-cotta factory. There he studied at Truman Bartlett's school and with the sculptor Sidney A. Blanchard and Jacob Lawrence, who financed Dallin's move to Boston in 1880. An early propensity for modeling in clay attracted the attention of two local mining investors, C. Dallin was descended from pioneer settlers of Utah, where he received his primary education.
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