TitleThe Gardener
Artist
Sylvia Shaw Judson
(1897-1978)
Date1929 (cast 1968)
MediumCast hydrocal
DimensionsOverall: 51 × 13 × 15 in.
Overall (without base): 48 × 13 × 15 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 7, 1968
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number183-S
Label TextThe original conception of this piece was first modeled by Judson in 1929 and cast in lead to ornament the garden of the home of Alfred Granger in Lake Forest, Illinois. It depicts the full-length life-size figure of a small, barefoot boy who wears a rain hat and holds a flower pot in one hand and a trowel in the other. Judson exhibited the work in 1929 at the 42nd Annual Exhibition of the Art Insitute of Chicago (no. 239) where it was awarded the Logan Prize. A plaster version, probably the original plaster, was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago's A Century of Progress Exhibition in 1933 (no. 1148). Other versions were exhbited in Judson's one-artist show at the Art Instititue in 1938 and at the Arden Gallery in New York in 1940 (no. 9). The Gardener quickly became the sculptor's most popular work. She sold a number of lead casts of the piece between 1935 and 1962 through several New York galleries. President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson chose one of these to present as a gift to President and Mrs. Marcos of the Phillipines in the early 1960s, and it remains in the presidential palace there. Another cast is in the Jacqueline Kennedy Rose Garden, the White House, Washington, D.C.The Academy's piece was cast specifically for presentation to the Academy as Judson's diploma work.
