John Quincy Adams Ward

John Quincy Adams Ward was an American sculptor, whose most familiar work is his larger than life-size standing statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City.

Nineteenth-century American commissions for sculpture were largely confined to portrait busts and monuments, where Ward was preeminent in his generation. Sculptors also made a living selling bronze reductions of their public works; Ward made use of new galvanoplastic duplicating techniques; many of Ward's reductions and galvanoplastic and die-stamped relief panels survive.

His bronze statue of The Pilgrim, a 9 feet (2.7 m) tall stylized representation of one of the Pilgrims, British immigrants to the New World led by William Bradford who left from Plymouth, England, in the cargo ship Mayflower in September 1620, sits on Pilgrim Hill in Central Park in New York City. The statue faces westward on the crest of a little knoll at the top of the hill, on a rusticated Quincy granite pedestal that was created by architect Richard Morris Hunt, overlooking the East Drive at East 72nd Street. The statue was donated to New York City in 1885 by the New England Society of New York.

In 1902, with the collaboration of Paul Wayland Bartlett, he made the models for the marble pediment sculptures for the New York Stock Exchange. The pediment was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers.

Ward participated in numerous organizations and associations during his long career. He was a founder and president of the National Sculpture Society (1893-1905), president of the National Academy of Design (1874), and a member of the Fine Arts Federation, the Architectural League, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Institute of Architects, the National Arts Club, and the Century Association. He sat on the Advisory Committee of Fine Arts of the City of New York at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and on the Advisory Committee of Sculptors at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. He was one of the original members of the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and served on its Executive Committee until 1901, as well as one of the first trustees in 1897 for the American Academy in Rome.

He died at his home in New York City in 1910. A copy of his Indian Hunter stands at his gravesite in Urbana, and his Urbana home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. His sketchbooks are conserved at the Albany Institute of History & Art. His work was part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023