John Flanagan was the son of a marble cutter. He began his artistic studies in New York, attending the Cooper Union as well as classes at the Art Students League under George de Forest Brush. He also studied sculpting with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who taught him the techniques of portraiture in relief, a genre for which Flanagan became well known. He went to Paris in 1890, was in Léon Bonnat's atelier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts by 1893 and entered the atelier of Alexandre Falguière, where he remained until 1894. He then spent a year studying drawing at the Académie Colarossi. While in Paris, Flanagan worked with Frederick MacMonnies on the decorative sculpture of the Columbian Fountain for the Chicago world's fair of 1893. He returned to New York in 1902.
Flanagan's talent for working in relief led him into the field of medallic sculpture. Among notable examples of his work in this form are the design for the George Washington twenty-five-cent piece, authorized by Congress in 1931 to honor the bicentennial of Washington's birth, and the Verdun Medal, presented by the United States to the people of Verdun, France, in 1921. For this latter piece, Flanagan was named a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.
His most famous monumental work is the huge clock with the figures Reader and Writer, executed in Paris for the main reading room of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Flanagan's full-length statue of the inventor and physicist Joseph Henry is in Albany, New York, and his bust of Saint-Gaudens is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among his relief portraits are those of his fellow artists Paul Wayland Bartlett, Daniel Chester French, Frederick MacMonnies, and Julian Alden Weir, examples of which are in the collection of the Century Association, New York. In 1937 he designed a new seal for the National Academy.
Flanagan began exhibiting at the Academy in 1908, typically showing a "Frame of Medals"; such a group was awarded the Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal in the winter exhibition of 1932. He also won silver medals in the Exposition Universelle, Paris (1900), the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo (1901), and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis (1904). In addition, he won the 1921 Saltus Medal for medallic art awarded by the American Numismatic Society. He belonged to the National Sculpture Society, the American Numismatic Society, the Century Association, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Flanagan taught sculpture at the Academy school for four seasons beginning in 1944, and, after an absence of a year, returned to the faculty for 1948-49.
"That the public knows so little about him is largely the fault of the artist himself, for John Flanagan is a most modest man," the critic Frank Owen Payne wrote in 1922. "He believes that an artist's sincere efforts are alone sufficient to establish his standing either as worthy or unworthy of praise."
Considering his work in the design of coinage, it was a sad irony that, according to his obituaries, Flanagan died penniless at New York City Hospital on Welfare Island.
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