Edward McCartan Sold at Auction Prices

Sculptor, Painter, b. 1879 - d. 1947

(born 8 August 1879 Albany, New York; died 1947 New Rochelle, New York) American sculptor, painter. Edward Francis McCartan studied at the Pratt Institute, Art Students League, and with sculptor Herbert Adams in New York City. He traveled to Paris and studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1907-10. It was in Paris that he was struck by the decorative style of 18th Century French art and by the work of sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. While in Paris he started making small terracotta and plaster sculptures. Discovering there was a market for garden sculpture in the United States, in the early 1910s he started creating them; exhibiting his first work in 1912 and winning an award from the National Academy of Design that same year. As a result demand for McCartan’s garden sculpture sprang up; with mythological figures such as Diana and Pan being the most well known of his subjects. In the 1920s McCartan came to be known as one of America’s prominent sculptors, and such major museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. have acquired his work.