![]() ![]() His Roosevelt group for the American Museum of Natural History was dedicated in 1940. Sculptor James Earle Fraser studied in Paris, before returning to the United States in 1902, where he set up a studio in New York that he made his headquarters for the next 50 years.Īmong others, Fraser sculpted statues of Alexander Hamilton (D.C.), Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson City, Mo.), Albert Gallatin (D.C.), John Hay (Cleveland), Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia), Abraham Lincoln (Jersey City, N.J.), Thomas Edison (Dearborn, Mich.), Harvey Firestone (Akron, Ohio), and General George Patton (West Point). ![]() He studied in Paris, before returning to the United States in 1902, where he set up a studio in New York that he made his headquarters for the next 50 years. He was inspired by the architecture and sculpture he observed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. ![]() Young Fraser discovered his artistic vocation while carving scattered chunks of limestone near his home. His father was a railroad engineer who spent the summer of Fraser’s birth in Montana gathering up the remains of George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry members who perished at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 26, 1876, to return them to their homes in the East. ![]() James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) was born in Winona, Minn., but he grew up near Mitchell, S.D. Although the Roosevelt debate has largely focused on the statue group’s depiction of him as a cowboy or Rough Rider on horseback, leading a Native American on one side and an African gun bearer on the other to a more “civilized” future, it might be useful to give some attention to the distinguished American sculptor who fashioned the sculpture. The American Museum of Natural History’s recent decision to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its Central Park entrance gives us all the opportunity to revisit and rethink a wide range of things we have taken for granted in American history and American memory. ![]()
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