Thomas Ball

Thomas Ball (June 3, 1819-1911) was an American sculptor and singer. He was born at Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of a house-and-sign-painter, and after starting, self-taught, as a portrait painter he turned his attention in 1851 to sculpture, his earliest work being a bust of Jenny Lind. At thirty-five he went to Florence for study; there, with an interval of work in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857—1865, he remained for more than thirty years, being one of the artistic colony which included the Brownings and Hiram Powers. He returned to America in 1897, and lived in Montclair, New Jersey, with a studio in New York City. His work includes many early cabinet busts of musicians (he was an accomplished musician himself, and was the first in America to sing "Elijah"), and later the equestrian statue of George Washington in the Boston public gardens, probably his best work; Josiah Quincy in City Hall Square, Boston; Charles Sumner in the public gardens of Boston; Daniel Webster in Central Park, New York City; the Lincoln Emancipation group at Washington; Edwin Forrest as "Coniolanus," in the Actors’ Home, Philadelphia, and the Washington monument in Methuen, Massachusetts. His work has had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States and especially in New England. In 1890 he published an autobiographical volume, My Three Score Years and Ten, which was updated in 1900.

Bibliography

Thomas Ball; My Fourscore Years; 1900, (1994 Reprint is ISBN 0962063525)