Figural
EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN (1874–1954)
Victory, 1908
Bronze, medium brown patina, 27 in. high (excluding black base)
Signed, dated, and inscribed (on the ball): EVELYN B. LONGMAN / 1908; (on the ball): No. 13; (founder’s mark, along bottom rim): ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N.Y.
Model executed in 1904
RECORDED: cf. Albert TenEyck Gardner, American Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1965), pp. 116–17 illus. // cf. Beatrice Gilman Proske, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture (revised ed., 1968), pp. 134–35 illus., 136
EXHIBITED: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1989, Uncommon Spirit: Sculpture in America 1800–1940, p. 55 no. 34 illus. in color
Longman's first significant effort as a sculptor in her own right was the colossal figure of Victory (plaster, now destroyed), which she created for the dome of Festival Hall at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis, Missouri. Victory proved so successful that a decade later, when she received an important commission for a sculpture to surmount the American Telegraph and Telephone Building, New York, she adapted its composition to create the gilded male figure of Electricity (formerly housed in the lobby of the AT&T Building, New York).
Reductions of Victory were made in 1908 from the working model for the monumental version. According to Alfred Ten Eyck Gardner, approximately 35 bronzes in this scale were cast. Other examples may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no. 1); The National Academy of Design, New York; Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina; Newfields (The Indianapolis Museum of Art), Indiana; The Toledo Art Museum, Ohio; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. In addition, two larger bronzes of the subject are known. One, measuring 50 in. high, was cast from the working model plaster (destroyed) and is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. The other of 1905, 58 3/4 in. high, was a special commission by several members of the Union League Club, Chicago, in whose collection it remains today.