Raised in Minnesota and in Dakota Territory, James Earle Fraser displayed skill in drawing and carving at an early age. When his family moved to Chicago in 18??, he obtained a position in the studio of the sculptor Richard Bach, an opportunity Fraser saw as important in his artistic development. In addition, he began formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His precocity was made immediately apparent when, at age seventeen, he executed his first portrait bust and, more surprising, created the model for what was to be his most famous work, End of the Trail, a sympathetic rendering of an Indian on horseback.
From 1895 to 1899 he was in Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Falguière and at the académies Julian and Colarossi. He exhibited a bust at the Salon of 1898 and won a prize from the American Art Association of Paris for work exhibited there in the same year. This attracted the attention of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who took the younger artist on as an assistant. Fraser learned the art of medallion portraiture under Saint-Gaudens and helped him execute his General Sherman Monument for New York City and his memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson for Saint Giles's Church, Edinburgh. Saint-Gaudens also procured for Fraser a commission for a bust of Theodore Roosevelt (U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.), the sittings for which were held at the White House. A lifelong disciple of Saint-Gaudens, Fraser designed the Saint-Gaudens Medal for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo of 1901.
On his return to the United States, Fraser opened a studio on MacDougal Alley in New York and quickly became known for his medal and portrait work, showing proficiency in the latter in both bust and monumental sizes.
He taught at the Art Students League from 1906 to 1911 and, during these years, designed the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt now at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1913 he married his former student and fellow sculptor Laura Gardin (1889-1966; ANA, 1924, NA, 1931). They became one of America's best-known artistic couples of the early twentieth century. The year after their wedding, they built a house and studio in Westport, where they lived and worked for the rest of their lives.
The 1910s were busy years for Fraser. He designed the buffalo nickel in 1913, and shortly thereafter his End of the Trail was ordered enlarged and cast in bronze for Mooney Grove Park near Vidalia, California. (In 1968 the sculpture was moved to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and replaced at Mooney Grove with a copy.) He received several major commissions from the United States government to produce decorative and allegorical sculpture for public buildings in Washington, including the statue of Alexander Hamilton that was begun in 1917 and unveiled outside the Treasury Building in 1923. From 1916 to 1924, Fraser served on the Fine Arts Commission in Washington.
Furthermore, Fraser played an indirect but nevertheless important role in the establishment of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York by acting as agent for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the purchasing of the collection of paintings that would eventually form the nucleus of that museum. He began exhibiting at the Academy in 1910, showing mostly medallions and portrait busts, including several of members of the Vanderbilt and Whitney families. Fraser served one term on the Academy Council, from 1929 to 1932.
