Chapter 24　American Sculpture

I've told you about sculpture from Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Rome, Italy and France, but not a thing about sculpture made in the United States. I did tell you that Houdon made his bust of George Washington at Mount Vernon, but Houdon himself was not an American.

The reason I haven't told you about American sculpture yet is because it was late in starting. Probably the last thing the early settlers would have thought of bringing across the ocean to America would have been a statue.Statues aren't easy to carry around and the ships were small and crowded.Then, when the settlers got here, they were too busy even to try to make statues.They had to chop down trees, build homes, plant crops, fight the Native Americans, and explore the country.Two hundred years after the first colonial settlement, America could boast of no real sculptors or sculpture of their own.

At that time, ships were built along the seacoast to bring back goods from other countries and to hunt whales. These were splendid, square-rigged sailing vessels.The owners were proud of their ships and decorated the ships'bows-the front part-with wooden figures called figureheads.These figureheads were generally the figures of mermaids or sea nymphs and seemed to sprout out of the bows of the ships.Some figureheads were full-length figures, some were carved from the waist up, and some were simply busts.Figureheads were almost always brightly painted.