After I published last week’s column, a friend pointed out an egregious error that I had made in writing it: I had entirely failed to mention the name of the sculptor of the piece. This was particularly painful in that he had truly put his life into the work. So, today I will rectify my mistake.
In November, 1902, the New York Tribune’s Illustrated Supplement published two pictures in which were shown the two finalists in the competition for the design of the Grant Memorial. The first, by Charles Henry Niehaus, showed a triumphant Grant riding into Washington after winning a battle. He is flanked by two battle-worn but proud Union soldiers carrying a flag and laurel branch. According to the Tribune, it is “not a triumphal entry in the sense of a personal triumph.”
Niehaus no doubt believed that he had a leg up on the competition. After all, he had been a famous sculptor for some 20 years at this point, and could point to three of his statues in just the National Statuary Collection, not to mention two works in the Library of Congress as well as the Samuel Hahnemann memorial next to Scott Circle.
The other sculptor, one Henry Merwin Shrady, was, in contrast, a rank beginner, with exactly one major commission to his name: A statue of George Washington at Valley Forge which he had made for the Continental Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Shrady was also significantly younger than Niehaus – and had, in contrast to him, tried numerous other fields of endeavor before becoming a sculptor. His proposal was much simpler, showing just Grant on his horse; all extraneous figures were relegated to the two flanking castings showing the chaos of battle.
Shrady did have a few points in his favor: He was working closely with the architect Edwin Pierce Casey, who was in charge overall of the Grant memorial. Furthermore, his father had attended Ulysses S. Grant during a bout of throat cancer.
Shrady in his studio with his horse (Library of Congress)
It was thus not a complete surprise when Shrady won the commission, and he threw himself into his work with a passion. His first step was to find a studio to work in. This was complicated by the fact that he needed a space that he could easily get a horse in and out of, for his design showed Grant on a horse. To further ensure that it would be anatomically correct, he “made investigations in biology at the Museum of Natural History” and dissected “horses and mounted their skeletons,” according to his obituary in the New York Times. It would be 20 years before his statue was completed.
Sadly, all this effort took their toll. On April 12, 1922, Shrady died in St. Luke’s Hospital in New York. His life’s work was due to be unveiled just over two weeks later. Even before his death, it was being hailed as “the most ambitious piece of architectural sculpture ever attempted in this country,” praise that has been repeated up to the present day.