Evans was raised in Warren County, Virginia, and retained lifelong ties with that state, as well as with his native city, Washington, D.C., where a number of his major works are located.
Showing artistic talent early in life, Evans apprenticed in the studio of the Washington sculptor Ulric S. J. Dunbar. By age seventeen, he had produced two portrait busts of relatives that were shown at the fifth annual exhibition of the Society of Washington Artists in 1895. This exposure lead to a commission from J. Sterling Morton, U.S. secretary of agriculture during President Grover Cleveland's second administration, for a bust of himself (c. 1895, U.S. Capitol). Morton introduced the young man to a circle of prominent and influential people.
In 1897 Evans went to Paris to pursue training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He studied there the next year under Alexandre Falguière. He furthered his awareness of the more progressive sculptural aesthetics of the period by studying at the Académie Julian, where his teacher was Denis Puech, and by visiting the studios of Frederick MacMonnies, Auguste Rodin, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
In 1900, at his parents' urging, Evans returned to Washington, where he shared a studio with the architect George O. Totten. The next year he temporarily took over Edith H. Ogden's sculpture class at the Corcoran Gallery of Art school; Saint-Gaudens visited the class to see his friend Evans and to critique his students' work. Later in 1901, Evans moved to New York to seek a wider range of sculptural commissions. Although he traveled a great deal, he was based in New York for many years, residing first on East Tenth Street and later on Washington Place. During his early years in the city, Evans addressed a self-proclaimed deficiency in drawing by entering H. Siddons Mowbray's life class at the Art Students League in 1902.
By now Evans was well established as a specialist in portrait sculpture, and so it was not surprising when, in 1902, the famous actress Maude Adams approached him to render her image (see below). At the same time, J. Sterling Morton again catalyzed a change in Evans's life, commissioning him to execute his first public sculpture, The Morton Monument. He returned to Paris in 1903 to create this work. A decade later, the sculptor gained international attention with The Golden Hour (1912), an ideal female nude rendered in classical style. The figure was originally created as a fountain piece for the Scarborough, New York, estate of Frank A. Vanderlip. It won a bronze medal in the Paris Salon of 1914, and the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, later purchased a replica of it. His success with ideal nude figures was consolidated with the commission for the similar Maiden with Swans (1912) for the John D. Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York.
In the succeeding decades Evans produced a steady stream of portraits and images of famous contemporaries and distinguished historical figures, including busts of William Jennings Bryan (U.S. Capitol) and Simon Bolivar (Pan-American Union, Washington, D.C.); several busts for New York University's Hall of Fame; and a full-length Robert E. Lee (Virginia State Capitol, Richmond). Certainly his best-known achievement is the monumental figure of Thomas Jefferson, commissioned in 1941 for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. It was dedicated in situ in the plaster version in 1943 and replaced by the bronze four years later.
Evans was first represented in an Academy exhibition in 1915. His Boy and Panther (Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina), one of several works commissioned by Vanderlip, won the Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal in the 1919 winter exhibition. He also was a member of the National Sculpture Society and of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Shortly before his death, Evans presented the Academy with a record of his work in three large portfolios of professionally made photographs.
