page_title: Alexander Stirling Calder
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Stirling Calder / Career
caption_attribution_description: Early life in Iceland It is believed that Leif was born about 970 AD in Iceland[2], the son of Erik the Red (Old Norse: Eiríkr inn rauði), a Norwegian explorer and outlaw and himself the son of another Norwegian outlaw, Þorvaldr Ásvaldsson. Leif's mother was Thjodhild (Þjóðhildr).[3] Erik the Red had founded two Norse colonies in Greenland, the Western Settlement and the Eastern Settlement, as he had named them. Apparently, Leif Ericsson had two brothers, Þorvaldr and Þorsteinn, and one sister, Freydís. Leif married a woman named Thorgunna, and they had one son, Þorkell Leifsson.
context_page_description: Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
context_section_description: In 1892 he returned to Philadelphia and began his career as a sculptor in earnest. His first major commission, won in a national competition, was for a larger-than-life-size statue of Dr. Samuel Gross (1895–97) for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Calder replicated the pose of Dr. Gross from Eakins's 1875 painting The Gross Clinic. Another early commission was for a set of twelve larger-than-life-size statues of Presbyterian clergymen for the facade of the Witherspoon Building (1898–99) in Philadelphia.
  In 1906, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1913.
  In Pasadena, he modeled architectural sculpture for the Throop Polytechnic Institute (now the California Institute of Technology). He returned to the east coast in 1910.
  In 1912, he was named acting-chief (under Karl Bitter) of the sculpture program for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, a World's Fair to open in San Francisco, California, in February 1915. He obtained a studio in NYC and there employed the services of model Audrey Munson who posed for him – Star Maiden (1913–1915) – and a host of other artists. For the Exposition, Calder completed three massive sculpture groups, The Nations of the East and The Nations of the West, which crowned triumphal arches, and a fountain group, The Fountain of Energy. Following Bitter's sudden death in April 1915, Calder completed the Depew Memorial Fountain (1915–1919) in Indianapolis, Indiana.
  Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Calder were commissioned to create larger-than-life-size sculptures for the Washington Square Arch in New York City. George Washington as Commander-in-Chief, Accompanied by Fame and Valor (1914–1916) was sculpted by MacNeil; and George Washington as President, Accompanied by Wisdom and Justice (1917–18) by Calder. These are sometimes referred to as Washington at War and Washington at Peace.
  He sculpted a number of ornamental works for "Vizcaya", the James Deering estate outside Miami, Florida. These included the famous Italian Barge (1917–1919), a stone folly in the shape of a boat, projecting into Biscayne Bay.
  Two of his major commissions of the 1920s were the Swann Memorial Fountain (1920–1924), and the architectural sculpture program for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (completed 1931), both in Philadelphia.
  He was one of a dozen sculptors invited to compete in Oklahoma's Pioneer Woman statue competition in 1926-27, which was won by Bryant Baker. In 1927, he was also commissioned by the Berkshire Museum to sculpt the woodwork and fountain of the Museum's Ellen Crane Memorial Room in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
  In 1929, he won the national competition for a monumental statue of Leif Eriksson, to be the gift of the United States to Iceland in commemoration of the 1000th anniversary of the Icelandic Parliament. Standing before the Hallgrímskirkja, the Lutheran cathedral in Reykjavík, and facing west toward the Atlantic Ocean and Greenland, the Leif Eriksson Memorial (1929–1932) has become as iconic for Icelanders as the Statue of Liberty is for Americans.
caption: Leif Eriksson Memorial (1929–1932), Reykjavík, Iceland
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