Born into Philadelphia's most famous family of sculptors, A. Stirling Calder began his artistic training in 1886 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Eakins. In 1890 he went to Paris, studying first at the Académie Julian under Henri Michel Chapu and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Falguière. After two years he returned to Philadelphia and began teaching modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy. In 1894 he won his first major commission, a bust of Eakins's famous subject Dr. Samuel Gross.
Calder and the painter Nanette Lederer married in 1895. The couple then went to Paris for a stay of two years. On their return to Philadelphia, Calder again taught at the Pennsylvania Academy and briefly served as curator of the city's art museum, then called the Pennsylvania Museum. In 1904 he participated in an advisory capacity concerning the sculptural decorations for the buildings of that year's Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. Out of these years came several monuments for Philadelphia, including a large sundial for Fairmount Park, which quickly established Calder's reputation for decorative, monumental, and architectural sculpture.
Ill health prompted a move in 1905 to Arizona, and thus began a rather peripatetic period of Calder's life. He and his family moved on to Pasadena, California, in 1906, and in 1910 to New York, where Calder taught at the Art Students League and at the National Academy for the 1911-12 season. They returned to California in 1913, this time to San Francisco, where Calder was acting director of sculpture for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. He won the exposition's Designer's Medal for his Fountain of Energy.
The Calders made a final move in 1916, returning to New York. A number of major commissions followed: the elaborate Depew Memorial Fountain, executed in 1917 for University Square, Indianapolis, Indiana, and the figure of George Washington the statesman done in 1918 for a pier of the Washington Square Arch in New York. Calder spent the 1920s and 1930s executing other monumental works, such as the Swann Fountain for Philadelphia and a memorial to Leif Eriksson commissioned by the U.S. government for presentation in 1931 to the people of Iceland. He also developed a talent for depicting the nude and for realistic portraiture, such as the busts of his friends and fellow artists George Bellows, Robert Henri, and John Singer Sargent. His son, Alexander Stirling Calder, Jr. (1898-1976), was also a sculptor, famous as the originator of the mobile and the stabile.
