American Sculpture 1830–1950

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In the 1830s and 1840s ambitious American sculptors went to Italy for its marble and skilled carvers. Hiram Powers's The Greek Slave (1844) toured the United States to large crowds, and Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis later built careers in Rome; Lewis's The Death of Cleopatra (1876) was shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

After the Civil War, Paris and bronze took over. Augustus Saint-Gaudens combined naturalism and allegory in the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (1884–97) in Boston, and Daniel Chester French designed the seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922. Public monuments, medals and architectural sculpture multiplied. Between the wars Paul Manship brought sleek, stylised figures to Art Deco commissions, while Gaston Lachaise and Elie Nadelman simplified the human body in very different ways. By the 1930s and 1940s Alexander Calder's mobiles and David Smith's welded steel had moved American sculpture decisively towards abstraction.