Herbert Adams

A leading sculptor of the Renaissance Revival movement, Herbert Adams was born in Concord, Vermont at a time when American sculptors were turning away from antiquities to modern subjects and methods.

American sculptor. Raised in Fitchburg, MA, he trained at the Institute of Technology in Worcester (subsequently Worcester Polytechnic Institute), the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design) and the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, following an artistic path that mirrored that of many of his contemporaries. Arriving in Paris around 1885, he found a mentor in Antonin Mercié (1845–1916), whose accomplished bronzes evoke Italian Renaissance prototypes. He briefly established his own studio in Paris in 1888, and from 1890 to 1895 he taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Adams won important commissions for public monuments in Boston (clergyman William Ellery Channing, 1904) and New York (William Cullen Bryant, 1911). The latter, located on the grounds of the New York Public Library, features a dignified seated portrait of the poet, editor and advocate of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum; architect Thomas Hastings (1860–1929) designed the elaborate canopy that dwarfs the sculpture.

While most contemporary sculptors achieved success with their Beaux-Arts monuments, Lorado Taft (1860–1936) dismissed Adams’s public works as commonplace. Instead, Adams excelled in the genre of the female bust, some of which are portraits (notably that of his future wife, author, and art critic Adeline Adams, 1889; New York, Hisp. Soc.), while others are idealizations (Primavera, 1890–93; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A., and La Jeunesse, c. 1899; New York, Met.). These works, which Taft pronounced both rare and exquisite, fuse highly naturalistic physiognomies with richly-modeled, Renaissance-inspired costumes and coiffures. Prized for their aesthetic refinement, several are polychromed terracottas or mixed media sculpture: La Jeunesse combines marble, applewood and paste jewels, emulating a contemporary French practice. Beginning in the mid-1890s, Adams summered in the art colony at Cornish, NH, with fellow artists Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851–1938) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907).