Thomas Ball
Thomas Ball carte de visite
Born	)June 3, 1819 Charlestown, Massachusetts
Died	December 11, 1911) (aged 92) Montclair, New Jersey
Nationality	United States
Field	sculpture

Thomas Ball (June 3, 1819 – December 11, 1911) was an American artist and musician. His work has had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States, especially in New England.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 References 4 Sources

Life

He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Thomas Ball, a house and sign painter and Elizabeth Wyer Hall. His father died when he was twelve.^[1] After several odd jobs to help support his family he spent three years working at the Boston Museum, which he later described as a "place of amusement" rather than an art museum.^[2] There he entertained the visitors by drawing portraits, playing the violin, and singing, and repaired mechanical toys. He then became an apprentice for the museum wood-carver Abel Brown. He taught himself oil painting by copying prints and casts in the studio of the museum superintendent.^[3]

Ball was an accomplished musician and from his teenage years worked as a paid singer in Boston churches.^[4] He performed as an unpaid soloist with the Handel and Haydn Society beginning in 1846 and with that organization sang the title role in the first United States performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah^[5][6] and the baritone solos in Rossini's Moses in Egypt. On a visit to Boston years later he performed the baritone role in Boston's first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Germania Orchestra on April 2, 1853.^[7][8]

As commissions started to come in he moved from studio to studio until he settled in a studio in Tremont Row where he remained for twelve years. There he painted several religious pictures and a portrait of Cornelia Wells (Walter) Richards, editor of the Boston Evening Transcript. He then turned his attention to sculpture. His earliest work was a bust of Jenny Lind, whom he saw on her 1850 tour of the United States. Copies of his Lind work and his bust of Daniel Webster sold widely before being widely copied by others.^[5][9] His work includes many early cabinet busts of musicians.^[3] His first statue of a figure was a two-foot high statue of Daniel Webster, on which he worked from photographs and engravings until he managed to see him pass his studio shortly before his death.^[10]

At thirty-five he went to Florence for study. Except for an interval of work in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857–1865, he remained there until 1897 as a member of an artistic colony that included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Hiram Powers. The notables he met in Europe included Franz Liszt, whom he met at the Vatican in 1865 and of whom he produced a portrait bust.^[5][11]

He made it a practice never to attend the unveiling of any of his public works. Once in Boston he managed to avoid receiving the invitation to the ceremonial dedication of his statue of Gov. Andrew and instead went to see the work later, viewing it from different approaches. He later wrote: "It was a mean thing to do. I am ashamed of it now; but I could not bring myself to stand on that platform and face the multitude."^[12]

Dartmouth College award him an honorary degree of Master of Arts.^[13]

When he returned to America he lived in Montclair, New Jersey, while keeping a studio in New York City.^[3][6]

In 1880, Ball published an autobiographical volume, My Threescore Years, which he updated in 1890 as My Three Score Years and Ten.^[14]

Ball died at the home of his son-in-law, sculptor William Couper, wife of his daughter Eliza Chickering Ball, in Montclair.^[6][15]

Works

Ball's sculptures include:

• George Washington in Methuen, Massachusetts
• George Washington in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, California^[16]
• Daniel Webster in Central Park, New York City
• Henry Clay (1858) in the U.S. Senate collection^[17]
• George Washington (1864) in the Boston Public Garden, an equestrian statue
• Edwin Forrest as "Coriolanus" (1867), in the Actors' Home, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania^[13][18]
• Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy (1869) in front of Old City Hall, Boston
• Massachusetts Gov. John Albion Andrew (1870) in Doric Hall, the Massachusetts State House^[19][20]
• "The Angle of Death Lifting the Veil from the Eyes of Faith" (1872), a memorial to Jonas Chickering in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts^[5]
• The Emancipation Memorial (1875) in Washington, D.C.
• Charles Sumner (1878) in the Boston Public Garden
• P. T. Barnum (1887), circus showman, in Bridgeport, Connecticut^[21][22]

References

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ball, Thomas". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Sources

• Taft, History of American Sculpture (New York, 1903)
• Nash, Edwin G., "Ball, Thomas" in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 1 (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928)
• Thomas Ball, My Threescore Years And Ten: An Autobiography (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891)