Christmas Eve 1895.
Chicago, Illinois
There was a Wedding in …
Hermon MacNeil’s Studio
~ 1733 Marquette Building ~
Married in a private ceremony on Christmas Day Hermon and Carol MacNeil had a reception in the Marquette Building
Carol Louise Brooks as a young girl. An Etching by William Harry Warren Bicknell. (about 1891)
~
Every Christmas we remember this
Special Christmas Day Wedding of two sculptors.
They met in Chicago, Carol’s hometown as they sculpted the “White City” of The Worlds Columbian Exposition (aka. Chicago Worlds Fair). That event opened in May 1893.
Hermon made figures on the Electricity Building. Carol (Carrie) was a student of Lorado Taft and became a “White Rabbit”, that group of select females permitted to sculpt as the deadline for opening day loomed closer.
Two years later Hermon, age 29, proposed to Carol (Carrie) just 24. She accepted. They got a Marriage License on Christmas Eve and used it the next day. Several weeks later they sailed to Rome where Hermon had accepted the Reinhart Fellowship and they both continued to learn sculpture for 3 years. And then spent a a fourth year in Paris.
~ Christmas Day 1895 ~
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Hermon MacNeil often made Christmas Cards that featured his own drawings and studio images.
MacNeil Christmas card from 1922.
Here’s a Card from 1922 ==>>
This pencil sketch proclaiming “Merry Christmas 1922” appears reminiscent of MacNeil’s 
“Sun Vow” 
In that composition, a Native Chief, possibly Sioux, coaches a young warrior through a rite of passage — shooting an arrow into the of the sun.
In MacNeil’s 1922 Christmas drawing, a similar pair of figures wave a banner of seasons greetings. Their presence seems a reprise of the Sun Vow sculpture.
While that was over a century ago, here’s what we can know today:
- We know being an artist, MacNeil often carried and kept sketchbooks.
- We know he would sit in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with his sketchbook.
- We know he sketched D. L Moody at an interdenominational Sunday Worship in Wild Bill’s Arena (since no Sunday shows were allowed and Moody rented the venue).
- We know he traveled, sketched and sculpted on his trip to the Southwest territories in 1895 (New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado).
- We know he formed clay and plaster images there; and he shipped many back to Chicago.
- We know that his memory of Native images dominated his sculptures for the next ten years.
I suspect that the idea for this card sprang up from the artist’s visual memory, perhaps, revived from an old sketchbook. A dusty record of images that he first saw three decades earlier at the Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Here’s More from this website:
“Native American Themes: His first introduction to native subjects came through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. During the 1893 Worlds Fair, Buffalo Bill’s troupe performed in a carnival setting outside the main entrance. Fascinated, MacNeil’s artist-eye and imagination took every opportunity to see the show and sketch the ceremonies and rituals of Indian life — MacNeil often carried a sketch book. He latter befriended Black Pipe, a Sioux warrior from the show, who he found down-and-out on the Chicago streets after the carnival midways of the Fair had closed. MacNeil invited Black Pipe to model for him and assist in studio labors, which he did for over a year. Inspired by these native subjects and encouraged by Edward Everett Ayers, MacNeil found a respect for this vanishing Native culture and made subsequent trips to the southwest. When the Marquette Building was constructed, MacNeil was awarded a commission to complete Four Bas Relief Panels of over the main entrance. His work depicts four scenes from Marquette’s trip through the Great Lakes region.”
“In the summer of 1895, along with Hamlin Garland (a writer) and C. F. Browne (a painter), he traveled to the four-corners territories (now, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah) seeing American Indians (Navajo, and Moqui — now Hopi) in their changing cultural element on various reservations. While there, he was asked to sculpt, out of available materials, a likeness of Chief Manuelito. The Navajo warrior had died in despair after being imprisoned for four years as a renegade by the U. S. Government (Col. Kit Carson) twenty-five years earlier. Manuelito’s likeness (click here), made of available materials, brought tears to his widow’s eyes, and remains an object of cultural pride in Gallup, New Mexico to this day.” SOURCE: Click HERE
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A BRIEF NOTE from the Webmaster:
“We did not discover this bust by Hermon A. MacNeil until 2020, 100 YEARS after this sculpture was installed in its niche at New York Public Library.
Here’s the story we found!”
IN 1920 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Bulletin reported the following story and photos:
“The John Stewart Kennedy Memorial was completed and the bust of Mr. Kennedy by H. A. MacNeil, the sculptor, was installed in the niche prepared for it in the Fifth Avenue entrance lobby. Mr. Kennedy was 
formerly the President of the Lenox Library, and upon the consolidation became a Trustee and Second Vice-President of The New York Public Library, in which capacities he continued to serve until his death in 1909. He took an active part in the negotiations, which resulted in the consolidation, and the deep interest, which he displayed in the development of the Library and his liberal benefactions to it will be ever remembered.” [SOURCE: Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Volume 24: January to December 1920, New York, 1920]
1920 New York Public Library. The John Stewart Kennedy Memorial was completed and the bust of Mr. Kennedy by H. A. MacNeil, the sculptor, was installed in the niche prepared for it in the Fifth Avenue entrance lobby.
Kennedy was a Scottish-born American businessman, financier and philanthropist. At the time of his death his will gave away $30,000,000 to various , universities, libraries, museums, Presbyterian missions, around the city and globe, including $2,500,000 to the New York Public Library. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Kennedy]
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