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Reviews
Wildlife and Western Heroes: Alexander Phimister Proctor, Sculptor
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By Peter Hassrick
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Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, in association with Third Millenium Publishing, London, 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 252 pages. $60.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Roger Hull
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon
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| Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860–1950), a promising wildlife painter, turned to bronze sculpture in 1887, establishing himself as an animalier in the tradition of Antoine-Louis Barye. He trained in France, won the Prix de Rome in 1898 and a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, then assisted the great American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose example prompted him to work with human figures as well as animals. Proctor's sculpture embodies Beaux-Arts ideals that, especially in the United States, provided an elegant (and, in Proctor's hands, virile) alternative to modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century. |
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In this definitive monograph on Proctor, Peter Hassrick, formerly collections curator at the Amon Carter Museum, reminds us (through context rather than explicit argument) that until after World War II, Beaux-Arts conservatism was an honored current in American art. In Proctor's case, academic tradition was vitalized by subject matter particularly appealing to Americans, especially men: the wild animals and heroic humans of the American West. |
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From the age of ten, Proctor grew up in Denver, and his background as a "Westerner" became central to his persona even though he spent long periods in France, Italy, New York, New England, and eventually Los Angeles. His feat of killing an elk and a bear on the same day in 1876, when he was sixteen, figures prominently in commentaries on his life (and is listed in the helpful chronology at the end of the book). The critic Royal Cortissoz described him admiringly as "the naturalist-hunter and the sculptor", and Proctor himself believed that the skills of hunter and sculptor were related (p. 65). Hassrick explains that for Proctor, as for the Teddy Roosevelt era generally, it was important to establish art and artists as masculine in a world at risk of becoming overly feminine. That Proctor hunted and slayed animals while also preserving them in art and advocating for the protection of the West's natural resources indicates a mode of thought that Hassrick, without extensive commentary, attributes to attitudes of the Progressive era. |
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Proctor frequently returned to Colorado and also traveled to the Pacific Northwest and Canada to hunt, hike, and camp. He had family near Seattle and saw the Northwest as fertile ground for commissions. Portland was particularly fruitful: in 1911, his work was exhibited at the new Portland Art Museum, which purchased his Indian Warrior (1898; cast 1900–1902), the first original bronze sculpture to enter the collection. Thus began a long, cordial relationship between Proctor and Oregon. Understandably, he was taken with Portland: "Art appreciation here is keener and more discriminating than in any other Western city that I have ever visited" (p. 69). Proctor's Oregon commissions include the equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt (dedicated 1922; Park Blocks, Portland), Circuit Rider (dedicated 1924; Capitol grounds, Salem), and Oregon Pioneer Mother (dedicated 1932; University of Oregon, Eugene). He lived for a time near Pendleton, and his monument to Sheriff Til Taylor was dedicated there in 1929. Perhaps his most aesthetically pleasing work in Oregon is the relief of three stalking lions commissioned by Wilson B. Ayer in 1913, willed to the Portland Art Museum in 1935, and conserved and installed in the museum's sculpture court in 1998. |
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Proctor is also represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and numerous others, including the A. Phimister Proctor Museum in Poulsbo, Washington, established in 1997 by the artist's grandson. Monuments by Proctor are located in Denver, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and other cities. Hassrick suggests that his supreme accomplishments are the equestrian, multi-figured Pioneer Mother in Kansas City, Missouri, and the two-man, two-horse monument to Robert E. Lee in Dallas, Texas. |
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The monograph is spaciously designed and well organized and written. A seventy five-page introductory essay, divided into seven chapters, presents a chronological discussion of Proctor 's early life, development as an artist, happy marriage and family life, and successes and frustrations as he competed with his western art contemporaries Charles M. Russell and Frederick Remington as well as high style Beaux-Arts sculptors, especially followers of Daniel Chester French, rival of Proctor's mentor Saint-Gaudens. |
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The essay is followed by a chronological catalogue that illustrates and discusses each sculpture, providing information on patron-artist relations, significance of subject, date of modeling and casting, location, and other known versions. The catalogue is cited throughout the essay so that one can turn to detailed discussion of a particular work while reading the broader commentary in the essay. (In the discussion of Oregon Pioneer Mother on page 89, citation is omitted for the catalogue entry on page 225 — a minor but temporarily confusing discontinuity.) |
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The book, situating Proctor in regional, national, and international contexts, is a valuable addition to American art historical studies. It contributes to art scholarship about the American West, on the basis of which Proctor staked his fame, and Northwest, which Proctor wooed and, in Oregon to a surprising degree, won. |
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