Denver Art Museum: Hermon Atkins Macneil
The Denver Art Museum has acquired Hermon Atkins Macneil’s bronze The Sun Vow, a work first modeled in 1899 and later cast in 1902. The Sun Vow is the first piece of Macneil’s to enter into the museum‘s permanent collection.
The Massachusetts-born sculptor has done a number of important works, including the design of the Standing Liberty Quarter, which was in use from 1916 to 1930, and Justice, the Guardian of Liberty, a monument that is on permanent display on the east pediment of the United States Supreme Court building. Macneil also designed the medals for the Pan American Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. One of the hallmarks of his works was Native Americans and other figures showing both beauty and strength.
“Sun Vow presents a distillation of many of Hermon Atkins Macneil’s personal and aesthetic interests: indigeneity as a hallmark of American art; an aesthetic ideal achieved through the classicized human form; and attention to universal themes – here, that of generational passage—as a primary method for transcending differences in culture and time,” the museum writes about the piece. “Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, American artists and critics were deeply concerned with developing a ‘national’ school of art. While often trained in Europe, many turned their attention to the Far West in search of ‘uniquely American’ subjects. Macneil’s Sun Vow builds a visual bridge of this artistic tradition into the 20th century.”
For more information about the museum’s collection visit www.denverartmuseum.org.
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