Bryant Baker

American

BiographyBorn in London, England on July 8th, 1881, the son of John Baker, sculptor, Bryant Baker comes from a long line of builders and carvers. Both his grandfather and his father worked on the wood and stone carving in Westminster Abbey. As an apprentice to his father, Bryant continued the family tradition by carving statues in Gothic style for Beverly Minster. Following the example of his brother Robert, also a sculptor, Baker came to the United States in 1916, and continued the array of commemorative statues and portrait busts that had been so successful in England.

Examples of his work are in France including L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, a
marble sculpture that depicts a slender nymph seated on the ground. She leans backward laughing up at the faun who stands at the right. Both pull at a piece of drapery cast over their shoulders and held in their outstretched hands. The features are delicately accented and the hair gracefully stylized. The small bronze from which this was enlarged was modeled between 1927 and 1933. The sculptor himself cut the marble, assisted by Abram Belskie.

His most famous piece in United States is Pioneer Woman Statue.
Executed in 1929, the Pioneer Woman Statue is located at 14th and Highland, adjacent to the Pioneer Woman Museum in Ponca City, Oklahoma. According to its dedicatory plaque, Pioneer Woman was created "in appreciation of the heroic character of the women who braved the dangers and endured the hardships incident to the daily life of the pioneer and homesteader in this country." The twelve-thousand-pound, seventeen-foot-tall, cast-bronze statue stands atop a pyramidal, silver dale-stone base. The entire presentation rises to forty feet. Depicted are a woman, Bible under her arm, leading her young son bravely, confidently into the future.

In 1926-30 E. W. Marland, wealthy oil man and future governor of Oklahoma (1935-39), developed a project that led to the Pioneer Woman commission for Bryant. 1926-27 Marland, in cooperation with a New York gallery, held a competition for the statue's design. Twelve prominent sculptors, including A. Stirling Calder, James Earle Fraser, Maurice Sterne, and H. A. MacNeil, were invited to prepare models. Each received a brief, written description of the concept, two authentic sunbonnets, and a $10,000 fee. In 1927 the gallery unveiled the models and toured them to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Dallas, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, and Ponca City; at all venues the public voted. More than 750,000 votes were cast, and Bryant Baker's model won the commission and a $100,000 prize (MacNeil's entry scored second place).

On April 22, 1930, Pioneer Woman was dedicated at its permanent site in Ponca City, on the anniversary of the 1893 opening of the Cherokee Outlet. Forty thousand guests listened to humorist Will Rogers pay tribute to all pioneers, but especially those of Oklahoma. United States President Herbert Hoover and Oklahoma-born Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley spoke by broadcast from the nation's capital.

The twelve models, and a Baker-designed Pioneer Man model, are housed at Woolaroc Museum, near Bartlesville. The Pioneer Woman statue and associated site were deeded to the state of Oklahoma by Marland.

The contents of Bryant's New York studio were purchased by the City of Ponca City after the sculptor's death in March, 1971. The studio had been at the Cultural Center, Marland's first home, until the fall of 1999 when it was moved to the Marland Estate.

Baker considered the Pioneer Woman statue his greatest work. At the dedication ceremony, he said, "To have been commissioned to execute for you this memorial to the pioneer woman will always live as the greatest event of my life. There has never been a subject more sublime, more poetic, nor yet more real and genuine. It must fire every imagination and it must stir the depths of every heart."

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