1879 - 1947
McCartan received encouragement in his artistic interests from his mother and from the principal of the elementary school he attended in his native Albany. He moved to New York, probably during the late 1890s, where he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and with Herbert Adams. He was employed as a studio assistant to Karl Bitter and, in 1901, matriculated at the Art Students League in New York where he studied sculpture with George Grey Barnard and Hermon MacNeil and drawing with Bryson Burroughs and Kenyon Cox. He supported himself by working as an assistant on various projects for Isidore Konti and John Massey Rhind, among others.
Beginning in 1907, McCartan spent three years working with Jean Antoine Injalbert at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, while in Paris, made frequent visits to the Louvre, taking special notice of antique and Renaissance works. He was also interested in the work of Auguste Rodin, especially in the Frenchman's methods of patination. There is some disagreement on whether or not Rodin influenced McCartan's style, however, with the critic Royal Cortissoz being an early opponent of any such theory.
After returning to America in 1910, McCartan again worked in Bitter's studio, assisting with figures for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He finally opened his own studio in New York around 1913. During the 1910s, he turned his attention to sculpting fountain and garden figures including The Spirit of the Woods, a bacchante figure done for the Harold Pratt estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, and Girl Drinking from a Shell (Reading [Pennsylvania] Public Museum). His Diana originally modeled in 1920, was awarded a medal by the Concord Art Association in 1925 and a cast of it was purchased for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Another is at Brookgreen Gardens, Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina). Cortissoz likened Diana to the work of Houdon and called McCartan "a beguiling figure in American Art. . . . He is American, yes, but . . . there functions again in him not only eighteenth-century France but other places in other times."
Among McCartan's monumental works are the Eugene Field Memorial in Chicago (finished 1922); the figures of Progress (or Transportation) and Industry (1928) which flank the large clock on the New York Central Building (now the Helmsley Building) in New York; and an allegorical figure, Interstate Transportation (1934-35), designed for the Department of Labor and Interstate Commerce Building, Washington, D. C.
McCartan began exhibiting at the National Academy in 1910 and won the Helen Foster Barnett Prize here in 1912 for a fountain design (cat. no. 153) which was probably his earliest independent effort in that genre. In 1940, he was elected the first vice-president of the Academy. He was also a member of the American Sculpture Society and of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. When poor health forced him to cut back on his sculptural production after the 1930s, he concentrated on teaching. He was an instructor for many years, beginning in 1914, at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York; and, in 1943, he became director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute.
Beginning in 1907, McCartan spent three years working with Jean Antoine Injalbert at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, while in Paris, made frequent visits to the Louvre, taking special notice of antique and Renaissance works. He was also interested in the work of Auguste Rodin, especially in the Frenchman's methods of patination. There is some disagreement on whether or not Rodin influenced McCartan's style, however, with the critic Royal Cortissoz being an early opponent of any such theory.
After returning to America in 1910, McCartan again worked in Bitter's studio, assisting with figures for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He finally opened his own studio in New York around 1913. During the 1910s, he turned his attention to sculpting fountain and garden figures including The Spirit of the Woods, a bacchante figure done for the Harold Pratt estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, and Girl Drinking from a Shell (Reading [Pennsylvania] Public Museum). His Diana originally modeled in 1920, was awarded a medal by the Concord Art Association in 1925 and a cast of it was purchased for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Another is at Brookgreen Gardens, Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina). Cortissoz likened Diana to the work of Houdon and called McCartan "a beguiling figure in American Art. . . . He is American, yes, but . . . there functions again in him not only eighteenth-century France but other places in other times."
Among McCartan's monumental works are the Eugene Field Memorial in Chicago (finished 1922); the figures of Progress (or Transportation) and Industry (1928) which flank the large clock on the New York Central Building (now the Helmsley Building) in New York; and an allegorical figure, Interstate Transportation (1934-35), designed for the Department of Labor and Interstate Commerce Building, Washington, D. C.
McCartan began exhibiting at the National Academy in 1910 and won the Helen Foster Barnett Prize here in 1912 for a fountain design (cat. no. 153) which was probably his earliest independent effort in that genre. In 1940, he was elected the first vice-president of the Academy. He was also a member of the American Sculpture Society and of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. When poor health forced him to cut back on his sculptural production after the 1930s, he concentrated on teaching. He was an instructor for many years, beginning in 1914, at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York; and, in 1943, he became director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute.
