Celebrating New York City Image 10

The Richard Morris Hunt Memorial was dedicated in 1891. It is on Fifth Avenue on the edge of Central Park across from the Frick Museum. It is an exedra consisting of a semicircular terrace lined with columns and benches, in the center of which is a bust of Richard Morris Hunt on a pedestal. On the left side of the exedra is an allegorical female figure representing Painting and Sculpture. She holds a palette and a mallet. On the right side is an allegorical female figure representing Architecture. She holds a model of the Administration Building designed by Richard Morris Hunt for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Hunt (1828-1895) was the first American architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He went on to design such New York buildings as the Tribune Building and the Lenox Library, both now gone, the Metropolitan Museum, and the granite pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, as well as homes for the Vanderbilts and Astors. Hunt was the founding president of the Municipal Art Society in 1892. 

It took two tries on two trips to New York City to get photos of the memorial that I liked enough to work from. This pen-and-ink drawing of the "Hunt Memorial." is a very vertical composition which I decided to use because I wanted to focus on the statue holding the model of the building on the right side of the memorial. The shadows were fantastic and I loved the trees in Central Park as a back drop.