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for Abastenia St. Leger Eberle
American, 1878 - 1942
Eberle descended from Irish and French Huguenot stock on her mother's side and of English and Pennsylvania Dutch on her father's. While her father was a physician, her paternal ancestors were workers in metal for many generations.
Eberle attended public and private schools in Kansas City, Canada, and Canton, Ohio. She began her art education in the last city in a modeling class at the YMCA under Frank Vogan. As a teenager she spent many hours in the Westlawn Cemetary in Canton copying the monuments. After graduating from high school in 1895 she moved to Puerto Rico with her parents where she began modeling the people around her. Beginning in 1899, she attended the Art Students League where she studied under C. Y. Harvey, Kenyon Cox and George Grey Barnard.
Eberle soon became taken with the immigrant children of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her first sculptured projects depicted them and their life in the city. She took a studio on Madison Street on the Lower East Side where the neighborhood children would come and pose for her. Her most important work from this period is Girl on Roller Skates which was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum. In 1910 she won the Helen Foster Barnet Prize at the NAD for her work The Windy Doorstep which depicts a woman sweeping.
Eberle exhibited regularly at MacBeth Gallery and showed at the 1913 Armory Show. She shared a studio in New York with Anna Hyatt Hungtington and the two sculptors collaborated on Men and Bull which received a bronze medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
Eberle was active in the women's suffrage movement. Later she purchased a farm in Westport, Connecticut "Hedgerow" where she worked in the summers.
Eberle attended public and private schools in Kansas City, Canada, and Canton, Ohio. She began her art education in the last city in a modeling class at the YMCA under Frank Vogan. As a teenager she spent many hours in the Westlawn Cemetary in Canton copying the monuments. After graduating from high school in 1895 she moved to Puerto Rico with her parents where she began modeling the people around her. Beginning in 1899, she attended the Art Students League where she studied under C. Y. Harvey, Kenyon Cox and George Grey Barnard.
Eberle soon became taken with the immigrant children of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her first sculptured projects depicted them and their life in the city. She took a studio on Madison Street on the Lower East Side where the neighborhood children would come and pose for her. Her most important work from this period is Girl on Roller Skates which was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum. In 1910 she won the Helen Foster Barnet Prize at the NAD for her work The Windy Doorstep which depicts a woman sweeping.
Eberle exhibited regularly at MacBeth Gallery and showed at the 1913 Armory Show. She shared a studio in New York with Anna Hyatt Hungtington and the two sculptors collaborated on Men and Bull which received a bronze medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
Eberle was active in the women's suffrage movement. Later she purchased a farm in Westport, Connecticut "Hedgerow" where she worked in the summers.
