Bessie Potter Vonnoh.(bronze sculptures)

Alarge retrospective exhibition of the works of the American sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh is now on view at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Von-noh's area of expertise--small bronzes and garden statuary associated with the domestic environment--has generally been overlooked in the field of. American sculpture, which has tended to focus more on large-scale public monuments (the small works by Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell depicting subjects from the American West are exceptions). With this exhibition and its thorough and beautifully illustrated catalogue, written by the exhibition's curator Julie Aronson of the Cincinnati Art Museum with an essay by Janis Conner, Vonnoh joins her contemporary Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, herself the subject of a major 2006 publication, in finally attracting the level of scholarship she deserves.

Vonnoh, like Mary Cassatt a generation before, achieved broad popularity and critical accolades during her lifetime for embracing subjects that were perceived as appropriate to women artists. For example, Vonnoh's commitment to rendering contemporary fashion in her small sculptures--she commented in an 1897 interview, "I find..lines and grace enough in the nineteenth century maiden and her gowns to satisfy my interpretation of art"--appears to have coincided with Cassatt's belief that modernity was embodied in the depiction of women in the dress of the day. And viewers understood Vonnoh's sculptures of women holding and nursing young children in relation to Cassatt's archetype of the modern madonna, the ideal modem mother.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Vonnoh's approach was indeed conventional and her style academic, leading her to become known as the foremost sculptor of American women. She was the second woman elected into the National Sculpture Society, one of the first women sculptors honored by the National Academy of Design, and she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1931. The earliest museums to purchase her works were the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the ...