"A Newcomer who possesses all the qualities of a great master."

Those words of high praise form a respected French art critic must have been welcome, indeed, to 31-year-old George Grey Barnard. After a decade of study and hard work in Paris, he suddenly found himself the darling of that art capital's hard-to-impress critics. The six sculptures he entered in the 1894 Salon sponsored by the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts were universally praised in such words as "full of ideas and imagination," "grand compositions," "powerfully modeled," and "the works of a young genius." He was elected as an associate of the Societe, a rare honor for a young and unknown foreigner.

Barnard's early achievements as a sculptor were especially remarkable because he had little exposure to art as a child. "I never saw a true statue in marble until at 20, I arrived in Paris," he wrote in a letter to the schoolchildren of Kankakee in 1937. Late in life, Barnard gave a group of his studio plasters to the school he attended as a child, so that the students would "have statues to study and build your future upon."

Following his triumph in Paris, Barnard decided (against the advice of his friends and of established sculptors like Auguste Rodin) to return to America. In 1895, he married Edna Monroe of Boston and settled on the northern tip of the island of Manhattan.
His powerful work, Struggle of Two Natures in Man, had been the sensation of the Paris Salon. When Alfred Corning Clare, who had financed Barnard's early career, died in 1896, the Clark family presented Two Natures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his memory. One of the first Barnard works completed after his return to America, a giant reclining bronze of the god Pan, was also purchased by the Clark estate. It was presented to the City of New York, and is currently on he grounds of Columbia University.

Another work completed in Barnard's early years in Manhattan was the primitive Hewer. It was purchased by the Rockefeller family for its upstate New York estate, as were several other pieces including the elegant Rising Woman.

The largest commission obtained by Barnard (supposedly the most costly art commission in American history up to that time) came in 1902. He was awarded a $700,000 contract to produce two monumental groups of figures for the new Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg. The sculptor returned to France, where he hired workmen and spent the next eight years completing the huge work. They were unveiled in Paris, to critical acclaim, in 1910 and installed in Harrisburg the following year.

Because payment from Pennsylvania authorities was often uncertain during the time the work was being done, Barnard turned to a new activity to provide a more steady income for his family and his workers. He searched out and bought neglected pieces of medieval sculpture and other art in he French countryside, then sold it to collectors for a tidy profit. He also began building the personal collection of medieval art that he would eventually install in New York and open to the public as "The Cloisters" (now owned and maintained by the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

After completing the Harrisburg commission, Barnard embarked upon a new venture that he called "my journey into the heart of Lincoln." He was commissioned by the Taft family of Ohio to execute a full-length statue of the 16th President. The sculptor spent many months studying Lincoln's face and character to present a true portrait of "this man-made like the oak trees and granite rocks."

When the realistic portrait of Lincoln was unveiled in 1917 in Cincinnati, it aroused strong passions among critics and ordinary Americans alike. Some called the rugged and seamed visage of Barnard's Lincoln ugly and in poor taste; other praised the statues the most true-to-life representation ever made of the 16th President.

A copy of the Cincinnati statue was later erected in Manchester, England, as a token of American-British friendship. Barnard was fascinated by Lincoln and did a number of versions through the years.

After World War One, the sculptor began work on a project that would dominate the remaining twenty years of his life: a projected Peace Arch, 120 feet in height, to honor those who died in the war. Inside a high-ceilinged abandoned powerhouse in New York, Barnard worked daily on a large-scale model of the Arch.

At the base of the model as he worked was a piece of weathered gray barn siding deeply incised with the initials GB. That piece of lumber was an artifact form a time and place that lived in George Grey Barnard's heart his entire adult life: the Kankakee of the 1870s. He had carved his initials in 1877 on the side of a barn owned by the family his his friend Roger Sherman. The plank was preserved when the barn was torn down, and presented to the sculptor on a visit to Kankakee in the 1920s.

Barnard had earned high honors in the art world, tasted fame, and earned a modest fortune. In letters to the friends of his Kankakee childhood years, however, Barnard constantly referred to the sights and sounds of that time. He expressed an envy he felt for those who had remained in Kankakee. "You will never know what a miracle it seems to me," he wrote to Harry Troup, "of you being able to life your long life always in the same town...among the friends of school days."

Those "friends of school days," Harry Troup, Frank McGrew, Kit Halsey, Roger Sherman; their favorite teacher, Mrs. Fred Whitmore, and the school itself (Central School at Merchant Street and Indiana Avenue, demolished in 1964) were often in Barnard's thoughts in the closing years of his life. Only six days before his death in 1938, the sculptor wrote to Kit Halsey a rambling letter full of childhood reminiscences, ending with the explanation, "am quite sane, Kit, but homesick tonight."

That letter, and more than a score of others in the Museum's collection, forms - along with his studio plaster statues and studies - George Grey Barnard's legacy to the hometown of his heart.

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