A. Phimister Proctor Museum

IN 1891, the great Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski paid a visit to Alexander Phimister Proctor’s studio on the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Proctor was working on life-sized wild animal sculptures. The pianist admired Proctor’s Stalking Panther and Fawn bronzes and commented that he couldn’t understand how the same man could model so fierce a beast as a panther and such a delicate, timid fawn.

Always the charmer, Proctor countered by wondering how Paderewski could play a crashing thunderstorm and then a dainty sonata to a water lily. Paderewski replied, “I interpret; you create.”

Proctor felt Paderewski’s praise was “far too generous.” His own, albeit self-effacing, modus operandi is summed up best at the end of his autobiography, Sculptor in Buckskin: “I am eternally obsessed with two deep desires—one, to spend as much time as possible in the wilderness, and the other, to accomplish something worthwhile in art.”

He did both to an enviable extent. Proctor was a rare individual who viewed life as work and work as play. To him hunting and sculpting were indelibly intertwined. Hunting was his breath of life and the inspiration and education for the sketches and models that would become revered sculptures that now stand in parks, museums and monuments from coast to coast.

BORN IN CANADA AND RAISED IN COLORADO, Proctor was a genuine Westerner whose love of the American wilderness—its social and natural history—never left him. Although he dubbed himself the “sculptor in buckskin,” Proctor’s academic training made him as comfortable in international artistic circles as he was hunting grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains. He studied at the Art Students’ League and the National Academy of Design in New York City, and later at the Académies Julien and Colarossi in Paris, where he learned to translate his keen observations into works of art that memorialized the West without sentimentality.

Unlike his contemporaries—Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and James Earle Fraser—Proctor dedicated his life to creating monumental statues throughout the United States and gave much effort to making available his smaller bronzes to the general public. His works of art celebrate both famous heroes and anonymous, iconic figures. General William T. Sherman rides a Proctor horse in Central Park and General Robert E. Lee and Young Soldier travel stoically through time against the Dallas skyline. The Pioneer Mother on the campus of the University of Oregon, and equestrian group of the same name in Kansas City, honor the dauntless character of the West's early pioneers. In Denver, the Bronco Buster and On the War Trail embody untamed frontier spirit. And Proctor’s tribute to Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Rider, was the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first educational film on the work of a sculptor.

Proctor’s genius in depicting animals can be seen in the Tigers in front of Princeton University’s Nassau Hall. The Animal House in New York’s Zoological Gardens carries his monkeys, elephants, rhinoceros and frogs on its frieze. Lions flank Pittsburgh’s Frick Building, and four Buffalo guard the Q Street Bridge in Washington, D.C. His last monumental commission, Mustangs, which resides on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is a sublime symbol of freedom and self-reliance—a fitting finale to a spectacular career.

NOW YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY to own a part of Proctor’s collection and a piece of American history. The posthumous Limited Edition Bronzes available for sale in the Museum Store demonstrate the blend of curiosity, talent, patience and perfectionism that made Proctor one of the foremost wild animal and equestrian sculptors and chroniclers of the American West.