The Great God Pan (sculpture)

The Great God Pan (cast 1898–1899) is a bronze sculpture by American sculptor George Grey Barnard. Since 1907, it has been a fixture of the Columbia University campus in Manhattan, New York City.
The sculpture depicts the Greek god Pan, a half-man, half-goat deity associated with pastoral living, rustic music, and carnality. Barnard's Pan is mature and strongly muscled, with a long tangled beard, the ears and cloven hooves of a goat, but no horns or tail. He reclines lazily on his side atop a rock, playing his reed pipe and dangling one hoof over the edge of the rock.
The bronze sculpture is approximately 49 inches (120 cm) tall, 97.5 inches (248 cm) long, and 43 inches (110 cm) wide. It weighs 4,300 pounds (2,000 kg). Its green granite base is 27.5 inches (70 cm) high, 111.5 inches (283 cm) long, and 45 inches (110 cm) wide.
The inscription on the back reads: "George Grey Barnard – Sculptor". The inscription on the right front corner reads: "Geo. Gray Barnard / Sc. 1899. Cast in one piece by / Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company / Founders New York 1899," and is accompanied by the founder's mark.
Barnard conceived the sculpture in 1894. Originally it was intended to be a fountain sculpture for the courtyard of The Dakota, a luxury apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Alfred Corning Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, was Barnard's most important early patron. Clark's father had built The Dakota, and bequeathed the building to Clark's teenage son Edward in 1882. Clark visited Paris in 1895 and commissioned Barnard to proceed with the larger-than-life-size sculpture, but it was never installed at The Dakota.
Alfred Corning Clark died unexpectedly at age 51 in April 1896. His family privately offered Pan to the city in November 1896, to be the centerpiece of a fountain in Central Park:
The city's Art Commission approved acceptance of the gift, but the city's Parks Commission spent six months debating the suitability of the work and considering various Central Park locations before declining the Clark family's offer. The New York Evening Telegram published a June 10, 1897, cartoon entitled "The Two Orphans", which lampooned Barnard's Pan and Frederick William MacMonnies's Bacchante and Infant Faun, the latter having been rejected for the Boston Public Library the year before.
Edward Severin Clark, continuing his late father's support for Barnard's work, funded the casting of Pan in bronze and loaned the bronze cast to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and international expositions.
Barnard wanted his plaster sculpture cast in bronze in a single piece—as opposed to assembled from separately-cast pieces—but could not find a French foundry willing to attempt it. French-born Eugene F. Aucaigne, manager of the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company of Mount Vernon, New York, took on the challenge. Following months of preparation and construction of an extremely complex and heavy mold, Aucaigne oversaw the successful casting of Pan in bronze in August 1898. It was the largest bronze sculpture cast in a single piece in the United States at that time.
Barnard's plaster model for the sculpture's base featured a rock surrounded by reeds and cattails, with a standing crane to visually balance Pan's head. He also modeled Laughing Faun, a small mask to cover the water spouts around the sculpture's base. The idea of Pan as a fountain sculpture was abandoned following the Parks Commission's rejection; Barnard's base was never cast in bronze, and the faun masks were not used.
Barnard tried to manipulate the Parks Commission into reconsidering its rejection of Pan, presenting the sculpture's placement in Central Park as a fait accompli in a national magazine. When the commission balked at this, a boulder fronting on Central Park Lake was proposed as an alternative site. The commission dithered for four more years, before again rejecting Pan for Central Park.
Barnard included the plaster cast of Pan in his first one-man exhibition, held in November 1898 under the glass roof of the Logerot Hotel winter garden, at Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in New York City.
The bronze Pan was loaned for a year to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning in spring 1899.
Barnard exhibited Pan and Struggle of the Two Natures in Man at the Exposition Universelle in Paris from April to November 1900. The bronze Pan was installed outdoors along the Champs-Élysées, and the marble Two Natures inside the Petit Palais des Beaux-Arts. He was awarded a Gold Medal for the two sculptures.
Barnard exhibited Pan and Two Natures at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, from May to November 1901. The bronze Pan was installed in front of the art gallery and the marble Two Natures within the gallery. He was awarded a Gold Medal for the two sculptures.
In November 1902, the bronze Pan was among the four works shown by Barnard at the National Sculpture Society exhibition at Madison Square Garden, New York City.
The bronze Pan was exhibited at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, as part of an industrial display inside the Palace of Manufactures. The Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company was awarded a Gold Medal for its accomplishment in casting the sculpture, but Barnard was not recognized for Pan's artistic merit.
The plaster cast of Pan was included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's one-man exhibition of Barnard's work, November–December 1908.
Following the second rejection of Pan for Central Park, Edward Clark and his mother donated the bronze sculpture to Columbia College (now Columbia University). The sculpture was placed upon a green-granite Neoclassical base with three bronze lion-head water spouts for use as a fountain. Charles Follen McKim, of McKim, Meade & White, designed the architectural setting for Pan: a D-shaped granite fountain basin, circular pool, stepped platform, and exedra (curved stone bench). The Pan Fountain was installed in 1907 on The Green at Amsterdam Avenue and 120th Street, then the northeast corner of the campus.
The sculpture inspired a poem by Ralph Perry, editor of the 1916 yearbook, The Columbian:
In 1959, to make way for construction of the Seeley W. Mudd Engineering Building, Columbia relocated the Pan statue and its granite base—but not its architectural setting and fountain—to Amsterdam Avenue and 119th Street. It was relocated again in 1963, to a courtyard between Fayerweather and Avery Halls. To make way for a 1975 expansion of Avery Hall, Pan was relocated to its current site: north of West 116th Street, between Lewisohn Hall and the Low Memorial Library.
In 1903, Lorado Taft wrote:
In 1908, J. Nilsen Laurvik wrote: