Philip Martiny | |
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Born |
Alsace |
May 19, 1858
Died | June 26, 1927 New York City |
(aged 69)
Occupation | Sculptor |
Philip H. Martiny (Alsace, 19 May 1858 – 1927) was a Franco-American sculptor who worked in the Paris atelier of Eugene Dock, where he became foreman before emigrating to New York in 1878—to avoid conscription in the French army, he later claimed. In the United States he found work with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, with whom he remained five years; a fellow worker in Saint-Gaudens' shop was Frederick MacMonnies. A group photograph taken in Saint-Gaudens's studio about 1883, conserved in the Archives of American Art, shows Kenyon Cox, Richard Watson Gilder, Martiny, Francis Davis Millet, Saint-Gaudens, Julian Alden Weir and Stanford White.
He often worked in cooperation with architects in Beaux-Arts architecture. He lived in Bayside, Long Island, and had a sculpture studio in McDougal Alley, a fashionable former mews behind Washington Square Park. Much of his work is in New York City, though he provided bas-reliefs for the Art Institute of Chicago and for government buildings in Washington, DC. Martiny was one of the colony who gathered round Saint-Gaudens at Cornish, New Hampshire.
Martiny was one of the large team of decorative sculptors assembled to carry out details for the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, where he settled for a year to carry out the clay models for many somewhat facile decorative allegorical figures, cherubs, caryatids and the like. Karl Bitter diplomatically characterised Martiny's technique: