Horse Scratching
Bronze
7 3/4 x 10 3/8 x 4 3/8 in
Biography
Charles Cary Rumsey was born in Buffalo in 1879 to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His interest in sculpture emerged and was encouraged at an early age. In 1893, his family took a trip to Paris, and instead of returning with them, Charles remained there for two years. There he served as an apprentice to a prominent American sculptor, Paul Weyland Bartlett.
He returned to the United States in 1895, and after completing college prep studies entered Harvard in 1898, during the summers he attended the school at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where he studied under Bela Lyon Pratt.
After graduating from Harvard, Rumsey returned to Paris and took a studio in the Latin Quarter and enrolled at the Julian and Colarossi Academies. Emmanuel Fremiet, a specialist in equestrian statuary, was an influential professor there to Rumsey.
In 1906, Rumsey returned to America where he settled in a studio on 59th Street in New York, and began his serious sculptural production. Rumsey's specialty was equestrian sculptures. He worked principally in bronze and stone, often employing mythological and historical themes articulated in private commissions and public monuments. His 40-foot bas-relief panels of Indians, horses and buffaloes for the Manhattan Bridge and the heroic subject matter of Rice Stadium commission are examples.
Rumsey was one of the more notable sculptors working in the Beaux-Arts tradition, a monumental and grandiose style that was the chief mode of public sculpture in Rumsey's day. In his brief career, he died in an automobile accident in 1922, he touched on realistic and quasi-impressionist styles and at some points tentatively introduced some modern elements into his work. He had, in fact, enough contact with modernism to be included in the famous New York Armory Show in 1913, the exhibition that is credited with the first major introduction of modern art to America.
