Descending+Night

Date: modeled ca. 1915
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1953/1953.10.6_1a.jpg&max=460 width="287" height="370" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=27320"]] || Title: **Descending Night**

Artist: **Adolph A. Weinman** Born: Karlsruhe, Germany 1870 Died: Forest Hills, New York 1952

Medium: bronze Dimensions: 56 1/2 x 46 1/4 x 24 1/4 in. (143.5 x 117.5 x 61.6 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Mrs. Adolph A. Weinman

Accession: 1953.10.6 ||
 * About the Artwork: **

Adolph A. Weinman designed these figures (//Descending Night// and //Rising Sun//) on a monumental scale as the crowning elements of a pair of fountains for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, held in San Francisco in 1915 to celebrate the Panama Canal's completion. Both sculptures were displayed atop thirty-foot tall fluted columns in outdoor fountains surrounded by vegetation. The materials used complemented the surrounding buff- colored travertine buildings. The exposition's official publication described //Descending Night// as "a gorgeous woman's figure just alighting, the brooding face and folding wings more than suggestive of dusk and starlight," and the companion //Rising Sun// as "a joyous youth a-tiptoe, ready to commence his morning flight."

The reviewer, Anna L. Booth, commented in 1913 that the sculpture displays exhibited vigor, realism, and artistic quality. Booth notes that Weinman and other sculptors made figures representing explorers, glorified workmen, and abstract concepts like achievement, struggle, and natural elements. Weinman readily found a market for smaller versions of the frankly sensuous figures, like this bronze pair now in the Smithsonian American Art Collection.

Sources: “Paper Trail: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915” Archives of American Art Journal, 43, No. ¾ (2003), 38-47; Booth, Anna L. “ Sculpture at the Panama-Pacific Exposition” Fine Arts Journal, 29, No. 2 (Aug. 1913), 486-490; Cunningham, John J., Adolph A. Weinman (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1950), 16-19.

About the Artist SAAM Collections Page
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