https://frenchcurious.tumblr.com/page/377
I wonder who the artist was, he has a fun style
Good grannys grapples, it's in the Library of Congress!
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011647576/
Bryant Baker, 1910
Possibly Percy Bryant Baker, but he was one amazing sculptor as well, astounding, really. Lifelike busts of famous people in bronze or marble.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bryant-baker-207
Bryant Baker was born in London into a family of sculptors and craftsmen. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and created decorative carvings for Westminster Abbey and the Victoria and Albert Museum. While at the academy, he was chosen by King George V and Queen Alexandra to model a statue and bust of King Edward VII. The royal family were so pleased with his work that they requested fourteen replicas of the bust in marble.
In 1916 he came to the United States and volunteered in the Medical Corps, making artificial limbs and face masks for injured soldiers.
He created sculptures of many presidents, including a seventeen-foot statue of George Washington and busts of William H. Taft, John F. Kennedy, and Calvin Coolidge, Edison, etc.
Amazing art. Once you see them, you'll wonder why the hell he was doing magazine covers
Crazy coincidence, his reported greatest masterpiece, was of William Wood Jr, who died when trying to prevent a car collision between his Rolls Royce which was currently racing a Stutz on highway 28 (Reading - Andover Boulevard), and an oncoming car in the middle of the road. Wood turned out to the side to prevent the collision, and lost control of his Rolls when attempting to get back on the road.
Considering how poorly roads were engineered in 1923, near what is now the intersection of the 93 and the 95, it's not hard to imagine how fast the car was smashed, killing the driver, William Wood Jr.
The Rolls hit a telephone pole, ramming the steering column and steering wheel into Wood, the passenger, General Alexander Gardner was smashed into the car by the telephone pole, the back seat passenger (Paul Rice) was thrown clear, out through the torn away roof.
So, Bryant was commissioned by the grieving father, a wealthy textile mill owner in Lawrence, Massachusetts who made his fortune turning around failing mills, and built a village for the company execs... as by 1924, the company owned sixty mills and employed over 40,000 people, to make a bronze bust of the incredible young man that was the apple of his fathers eye, the heir apparent to the family industry and fortune.
Old man William Wood Sr was the son of a fisherman, who died at sea when Wood Sr was 12, who then had to provide for his mom and siblings. That set the tone of work as the lifelong passion for him for the rest of his life.
Fortunately for Wood, a wealthy textile manufacturer offered him a job working in his cotton mill. Pierce was impressed with Wood's work and promoted him to the manufacturing department, where he learned cost structures and figures.
In 1876, at the age of eighteen, Wood was sent by Pierce to a good job with a Philadelphia brokerage firm, where he learned about stocks and bonds. After tiring of Philadelphia, Wood returned and worked at a bank. When a textile company went bankrupt, its new manager hired William as paymaster.
In 1885, the mill in Lawrence, MA went bankrupt and was purchased by Frederick Ayer and his brother who were were successful patent medicine producers but knew nothing about the textile industry. Ayer's new manager convinced Wood to leave his job and be his assistant in charge of manufacturing. A short time later, 27 year old Wood was promoted to treasurer, and four years later he was made manager. Wood was then making around $25,000 a year, a very substantial amount of money for 1890.
Within three years of his promotion, William Wood married Ayer's daughter who was well educated; she had studied at a finishing school in France and then attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, MA. Wood's first son, William M. Wood Jr., was born in Andover in 1892.
Wood brought together over fifty under-performing mills to reduce competition and increase prices for his products.
WW1 had made wool mills an incredibly profitable business, and the father, a mean old bastard, brother-in-law to future General George S. Patton, who had his managers plant dynamite during a strike at a mill... to implicate the workers on strike - who were innocent.
Why were they on strike?
Under a new Massachusetts law Wood was required to shorten the work week for all his employees. Wood did cut the work week from fifty-six hours to fifty-four hours, but he also increased the speed at which the looms ran in order to keep from losing profits. The workers were angry that they were working just as hard and producing just as much as they would in a fifty-six hour week, but only getting paid for fifty-four hours.
Anyway, back to the driver of the Rolls for a moment. How loved was he? 10 to 15000 people turned out for his funeral. Serious. He worked in the wool mill from the lowest job, to the highest, learning everything about the business, and all the employees.
Though he was only 26 years old at the time the United States entered World War One, Wood was placed in charge of all the company's contracts with the government and in 1917 received the largest order ever placed for textiles with one company.
After negotiating a contract with the War Department to provide woolen goods to the American Armed Forces during World War I, Wood resigned from the company and volunteered for the US Navy, and was soon chosen as a candidate for training in the Harvard Cadet School for officers.
The old man, who'd recently lost a daughter to influenza, lost his only son, whom he'd hoped would take over and continue to grow the family wool mill factory industry, soon had 2 strokes, was forced to resign from running his business empire, never recovered from the depression.
He had his chauffeur drive him out on a deserted road, he got out of the car, out of his driver's sight, pulled out his .38 revolver and ended his own life.
And that is the crazy real story of an artist that among other things, made a bust of a Rolls Royce driver, who's dad was chauffeured to a middle of nowhere road to suicide, but the bust disappeared immediately after the family recieved it, and it was not even known about by the Smithsonian (as the artist, Bryant Baker was a national treasure) and it tuned up in 2015. Nearly 90 years after it disappeared
https://researchandideas.com/index.php?title=Sculptor_Bryant_Baker%27s_Lost_Masterpiece
