James S. Sherman (Modeled 1910, Carved 1911) by Bessie Onahotema Potter Vonnoh

Bessie Potter Vonnoh received a commission for the bust of James Sherman in 1910 and modeled him from life while the vice president was still in office. The result was a frontal bust, a conception that is both simple and straightforward. This pose emphasizes the full, pudgy face but also reveals Sherman’s open, genial appearance, suggesting his judicial fairness while presiding over the Senate.

Bessie Potter Vonnoh was a St. Louis native who studied in Chicago with Lorado Taft from age 15. She later assisted Taft in works he created for the World’s Columbian Exposition and received a separate commission for an eight-foot figure, Art, for the Illinois State Building at the fair. At the age of 22, she opened her own studio in Chicago. Greatly influenced by the small bronzes of the Russian sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy, which she first saw at the exposition, Vonnoh developed her own themes in similar statuettes, especially intimate mother-and-child groups, dancing girls, and elegantly lolling ladies. The sculptor herself called these groups “Potterines.” Also noted for her portraiture, Vonnoh created, in 1899, a commissioned bust of Major General S.W. Crawford for the Smith Memorial in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

Vonnoh won numerous medals and prizes at national and international exhibitions. She exhibited more than 30 sculptures at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1910 during the time the Sherman bust was under way. She and her husband, the notable painter Robert Vonnoh, lived in New York City from 1901 and showed their work together there and across the country in a series of joint traveling exhibitions. Vonnoh, the first woman sculptor to become a permanent member of the National Academy of Design, produced works that today are found in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.