Henry Kirke Brown

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Henry Kirke Brown (b. February 24, 1814, Leyden, Massachusetts - d. July 10, 1886, Newburgh, New York) was an American sculptor.

He began to paint portraits while still a boy, studied painting in Boston under Chester Harding, learned a little about modelling, and in 1836-1839 spent his summers working as a railroad engineer to earn enough to enable him to study further.

He spent four years (1842-1846) in Italy; but returning to New York he remained distinctively American, and was never dominated, as were so many of the early American sculptors, by Italian influence.

His equestrian statues are excellent, notably that of General Winfield Scott (1874) in Washington, D.C., and one of George Washington (1856) in Union Square, New York City, which was the second equestrian statue made in the United States, following by three years that of Andrew Jackson in Washington by Clark Mills (1815-1883). Brown was one of the first in America to cast his own bronzes.

Among his other works are: Abraham Lincoln (Union Square, New York City); Nathanael Greene, George Clinton, Philip Kearny, and Richard Stockton (all in the National Statuary Hall, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.); De Witt Clinton (illustration, left) and The Angel of the Resurrection, both in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York; and an Aboriginal Hunter. The New York Times remarked that the DeWitt Clinton was s the first American full-length sculpture cast in a single piece, when it was exhiobited temporarily in City Hall Park, 1855.

Henry Brown's children include Harold Bush-Brown, a long time director of the Georgia Tech's architecture school, and James Bush-Brown, landscape architect and co-author of America's Garden Book.

[edit] External links

• Bush-Brown Family Papers

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.