Image Not Available

Chester Beach

American

BiographyChester Beach, born in 1881 in San Francisco, was an academic sculptor of the figure in both bronze and marble, and he also designed coins. Characteristic works include The Glint of the Sea, a bronze of a nude young woman with arms raised; and the bronzes The Fountain of Waters, Sun Drawing the Waters, and Earth Receiving the Waters, in an outdoor setting at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Beach worked on Earth and Sun in Rome, Italy in 1929.

Beach exhibited his twenty-six inch high, The Unveiling of Dawn, at the historic 1913 Armory Show on Lexington Avenue in New York City. A Rodinesque sculpture of a male nude embracing the amorphous form of dawn hazily emerging from the marble, it is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Beach studied in California at the California School of Mechanical Arts and the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Academy Julian. He was a teacher of sculpture at the Richmond Hill Settlement House from 1910 to 1922, and in 1934, a drawing teacher at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design.

A pamphlet on the artist's work, "Sculpture by Chester Beach," featuring a biography and twelve images of his sculpture, was published in 1937 by Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

Chester Beach was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate in 1908 and an Academician in 1924. He died in 1956.

Person TypeIndividual