“Sun Vow” at Reading Public Museum
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A MacNeil "Sun Vow" sculpture housed in the Founder's gallery of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, PA
We were recently contacted by John Graydon Smith, CEO of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, that a copy of MacNeil’s “Sun Vow” is exhibited there in the museum.
Follow-up contact from Ashley J. Hamilton, Director of Collections, tells us that the piece can be seen in the Founder’s Gallery in the center of the second floor. A map to the RPM is provide below:
The Director also graciously sent photos and a bit of history. This “Sun Vow” came to the museum in 1929 as part of the American Art collection but is displayed more prominently in the Founder’s Gallery on the 2nd floor.
A hot link to the RPM’s American Gallery has been added to this web-site’s list of “Museums: with MacNeil Art” in the right-hand column. A photo of James Earle Fraser’s “End of the Trail” is displayed there. [ Reading Public Museum, Reading PA; “Sun Vow” ] MacNeil and Fraser both married accomplished sculptors — Carol Brooks MacNeil and Laura Gardin Fraser. The two men, along with their wives, were colleagues throughout their careers. Both men have massive bas relief friezes, 100 feet long, that are prominent on the Missouri State Capitol Building.
Second perspective on the "Sun Vow"
The “Sun Vow” is certainly Hermon MacNeil’s most renowned piece of work. It is as endearing now as it was a century ago. Lorado Taft, often called the Dean of American Sculpture, wrote in 1904:
No one grudges the young artist the honors which this work has brought him: a silver medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and a gold medal at the Pan-American [Buffalo 1901]. Even were his career to be cut short today, this group, like Stewardson’s “Bather” or Donoghue’s “Young Sophocles,” is good enough and important enough to insure its author a permanent place in the history of American Art. [SOURCE: Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture, p 444. ]
Thank you, for your courtesy John Smith and Ashley Hamilton. We have added your “Sun Vow” to our virtual gallery of Hermon A. MacNeil’s works.
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