Frederick William Macmonnies

Frederick William Macmonnies (Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn September 28, 1863 - New York March 22, 1937) was the best known expatriate American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts school, as successful and lauded in France as he was in the United States. He was also a highly accomplished painter and portraitist.

Dancing Bacchante with an Infant Faun

Dancing Bacchanteis Macmonnies' second best-known sculpture. The life-size nude was offered as a gift to the Boston Public Library by the building's architect Charles Follen McKim in 1896, to be placed in the garden court of the library. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union caused such a public outcry citing its "drunken indecency" that the gift had to be refused by the library. McKim gave the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York instead. The spectacle that was made regarding this gift, a salvo in the American Culture Wars, gave MacMonnies and this sculpture a great deal of notoriety in the United States: there is an example of the Bacchante in the permanent collections of most of the large museums in the United States and France. A copy (illustration, above right) has now taken its place in its intended original location in the Boston Public Library.

Related Topics:
Boston Public Library - Charles Follen McKim - Woman's Christian Temperance Union - Culture Wars

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