BACK TO AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

THOMAS BALL
(American 1819-1911)

Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Thomas Ball began his artistic career as a portrait and miniature painter. With no formal training as a sculptor, he began modeling figures—including one of the famous Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind—in 1851. He studied sculpture in Italy from 1854 to 1857, and again from 1865 to 1897. Between these European trips, Ball worked in his Boston studio, where he carved a plaster model for this statue of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay.

Never losing touch with American subject matter despite his Italian sojourns, Ball designed his sculpture of Clay as a companion to his earlier statue of Daniel Webster. Both men had been senators and each served as Secretary of State. The year that he sculpted Henry Clay, who was often called “the Great Compromiser,” Thomas Ball sold the original plaster model and its reproduction rights to the art dealer G. W. Nichols, who had it cast in bronze at the J. T. Ames Foundry in Chicopee, Massachusetts. The Ames company, one of the first bronze foundries in America, had previously reproduced Ball’s Daniel Webster, which was one of the first successfully mass-produced statues in the United States. In 1870, Ball was commissioned to create a larger-than-life-sized version of his figure of Webster for New York’s Central Park.