As a rule, I don't think of American sculpture as anything particularly special. And then I happened across five (5) nineteenth-century works in marble at the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and all that changed --
Genius of mirth, 1842, by Thomas Crawford California, ca. 1855, by Hiram Powers Cleopatra, ca. 1860, by William Wetmore Story Venezia, ca. 1866, by Latkin Goldsmith Mead Hiawatha, ca. 1872, by Augustus St Gaudens
Two more surprises were these moving works in bronze, by John Q. A. Ward --
The Indian Hunter, ca. 1860 The Freedman, ca. 1865
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