Launt Thompson, New York sculptor.

The mature career of Launt Thompson (see Fig. 1) coincided with the exciting period of public sculpture after the Civil War, when the United States began to mine its history for subjects worthy of representation in marble or bronze. Gradually abandoning the European-derived neoclassicism of the first generation of American sculptors, Thompson and his contemporaries forged a more realistic style and created a sculptural pantheon of political, military, artistic, and literary heroes for the nation. In so doing, they banished the "dusty-white ghosts among strangers of another generation," as Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) described the ideal marble busts and statues adorning every well-appointed parlor of the mid-nineteenth century. (1)

Thompson was the most successful pupil of Erastus Dow Palmer (1817-1904) and was considered the equal of John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910), the so-called dean of nineteenth-century American sculptors. Thompson's patrons included wealthy New Yorkers, city and state governments, and the United States Congress. His closest friends were painters of the Hudson River school and leading New York writers such as William Cullen Bryant (see Fig. 2), Bayard Taylor (1815-1878), and Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867). He also befriended entrepreneurs, politicians, and Civil War officers. Many of these prominent Americans were portrayed by Thompson in portrait busts, medallions, or full-length statues. Well over one hundred of his works are documented, and about half of these have been located. The artist's style combines heroic realism with a restrained delicacy of expression that places him among the best of the century's monument makers.

Born in Abbeyleix, county Queen's (now Laois), Ireland, on February 8, 1833, Launt Thompson immigrated with his widowed mother to Albany, New York, in 1847 during the potato famine. (2) The fourteen-year-old was hired as an office boy by Dr. James H. Armsby (1809-1875), a surgeon at the Albany Hospital and professor at Albany Medical College. Thompson's constant practice of sketching prompted the doctor to introduce him to the landscape painter William Hart (1823-1894), who gave the boy drawings to copy. A local woman, Caroline Reed (1820-1914), provided him with books on art and literature. In 1849 Palmer saw Thompson's anatomical drawings and put him to work carving and finishing marble portrait reliefs, busts, and statues in his new sculpture studio at the corner of Columbia Place and Eagle Street in Albany.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Albany supported a vital arts community and was home to the painters Asa Weston Twitchell, William and James Hart, George Henry Boughton, and Homer Dodge Martin, among others. Moreover, many artists from New York City and New England used Albany as a base for their sketching trips in the Hudson River valley, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks. Palmer and his studio were at the center of much of this activity. For example, Palmer served as an agent for the Crayon, one of the first American art journals, published in New York City between 1855 and 186l. (3) Copies were delivered to Annesley's art store on Broadway in Albany, where artists and patrons gathered to discuss the latest developments in art. Palmer also organized local exhibitions, and it is likely that Thompson showed his earliest work in Albany. (4)

In the winter of 1858 Thompson moved to New York City. Palmer wrote to a friend, "May God bless his efforts. He has been with us more than nine years, and a more faithful boy it would be difficult to find." (5) Thompson shared an apartment on Twenty-second Street with James Pinchot (1831-1908) (6) and rented space in the new Tenth Street Studio Building. He was the only sculptor there among mostly landscape painters, many also from upstate New York. His friends George Henry Boughton (1833-1905) Charles Temple Dix (1840-1873), and Jervis McEntee (1828-1891) were tenants, and the list of other painters in residence that year reads like a Who's Who of American nineteenth-century painting. (7)

A year after moving to New York City, Thompson exhibited a group of cameos and a marble medallion at the National Academy of Design, and the Crayon published a notice of the show at Palmer's urging. (8) In 1862, he was elected an academician at the National Academy, based on his Trapper, a marble portrait of the American woodsman Grizzly Adams [James Capen Adams; 1812-1860]. This bust is now lost, but its plaster cast is recorded in a rare stereograph of the artist in his studio in the mid-1860s (Fig. 1). The photograph shows many of Thompson's early portrait busts, including one of the poet William Cullen Bryant (see Fig. 2) and another of his good friend the actor Edwin Booth (1833-1893), as Hamlet (two busts at far left). (9) The New-York Evening Post praised the bust of Booth as "the most successful and finely modeled head he has yet produced... a valuable addition to the art gems of this ...