Q. David Bowers
BELL, Enid
Enid Bell (Mrs. E.B. Palanchian) was born on December 5, 1904. She studied art in Scotland, under Sir W. Reid Dick in London, and at the Art Students League in New York. Her work was exhibited at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937, the Museum of Modem Art, and numerous other events and locations. She designed the congressional medal honoring Lincoln Ellsworth. For post offices in Mt. Holly (New Jersey), Boonton (New Jersey), and Hereford (Texas) she created decorative art.
Miss Bell illustrated the book, Forsaking All Others (by Alice Duer Miller), and wrote and illustrated Tin-work as a Hobby. Beginning in 1944 she was a teacher at the Newark (New Jersey) School of Fine and Industrial Arts. For many years she maintained a studio in North Bergen, New Jersey. In 1936, when she designed the Robinson-Arkansas half dollar obverse, her studio was in Union City, New Jersey.
Commemorative credit: 1936 Robinson-Arkansas half dollar (obverse or portrait side).
BELL, Sidney
Sidney Bell, born in London, England in 1888, became a professor of art at Ladies' College, Cheltenham, England. He later came to the United States, taught at the University of Oregon, and became known for his portraits of figures in Oregon history. In the 1920s he lived in Portland, Oregon.
Commemorative credit: 1925 Fort Vancouver Centennial half dollar (Bell prepared the designs which were subsequently revised by Laura Gardin Fraser).
BENSON, John Howard
Born in Newport, Rhode Island on July 6, 1901, John Howard Benson studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League after which he specialized in calligraphy and stonecutting and became very well known in his field. In 1928 he purchased the John Stevens stone cutting shop in Newport, which was believed to have been the second oldest continuously operating business in the United States.
He produced many works, including memorial tablets for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire), gravestones and cemetery memorials, and the Harvard Tercentenary medal.
Beginning in the 1930s he was an instructor, author, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. At RISD he specialized in lettering (as an instructor 1931-1944 and head of the Letter Workshop from 1945 onward) and was head of the Sculpture Department (1936-1945). He remained a lecturer at RISD until his death. In 1940 he was co-author of The Elements of Lettering. For the Boston Museum of Fine Arts he produced Lettering Portfolio. Numerous other books and studies on calligraphy were created as well.
John Howard Benson died in Newport on February 23, 1956. He was survived by his widow, Esther Fisher Benson (formerly of Philadelphia); his mother, Elizabeth H. Benson; and three sons, Thomas, John H., Jr., and Richard.
Commemorative credit: 1936 Rhode Island Tercentenary half dollar (prepared the designs with his friend, Arthur Graham Carey).
BORGLUM, Gutzon
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born of Danish-American parents, Jens Meller Haugaard and Christina Mikkelsen Borglum, in Ovid, near Bear Lake, Idaho on March 25, 1867 (beginning in 1932 he gave his birth year as 1871 to anyone who inquired; he also gave varying information concerning his parentage; in fact, different accounts of this life are apt to contain different information). His father, who fathered nine children, was a well-known physician.
Known as Gutzon Borglum, he attended public schools in Omaha and Fremont, Nebraska, later attending St. Mary's Academy in Kansas City for six months, after which he briefly studied law and, in succession, worked as a machinist, lithographer, and artist, the last-named interest having been developed after talking with an Irish poet whose name he was unable to recall in later life. By the age of 19 he had run away from home three times and was well known for his temper tantrums. He always appreciated human emotions and from an early age was attracted to many causes. At age six he saw an Indian beating a pony and persuaded the Indian to sell the horse to him for sixty cents, beginning a lifelong interest in animals and their welfare.
In 1888 he studied art in San Francisco under Virgil Williams and William Keith. To Keith, a painter of landscapes, Borglum later credited his interest in the dramatic and romantic expression of art subjects. In 1889 he married his painting instructor, Elizabeth ("Liza") Janes Putnam, 18 years his senior. In 1890 he and Liza went to Paris, where he studied for six months at the Academic Julian. Remaining in Paris, he exhibited a statue of a horse standing over his dead Indian master, a work which gained him membership in the prestigious Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts. Borglum became a friend of sculptor Auguste Rodin and spent much time in his studio.
The Borglums returned in 1893 to America where he painted and sculpted in California, returning to Europe in 1896 to open a studio in London. In 1901 the Borglums went to Paris. In the same year Gutzon left Liza and went to New York City, where he opened a studio at 166 East 38th Street. In 1903 he was elected into the prestigious National Sculpture Society, but he soon resigned following a bitter argument about policies and ethics. In 1904 he won a gold medal for one of his sculptures at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (but at that fair" gold medals" were given so freely that they were actually made of bronze to save expense!). Later works included numerous statues for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York City), and an equestrian statue of General Philip Sheridan (Washington, D.C.).
Borglum had not given much consideration to the serious aspects of sculpture in stone until one day he learned that a Greek ship had arrived in port with a ballast of marble. He made arrangements to acquire the largest uncut stone, which weighed many tons. After a struggle, it was transported to a small shack in Greenwich Village he used as a studio, and where he often engaged in his hobby of boxing (which at one time he considered for a vocation; other career options in addition to those already mentioned included aeronautical engineering, politics, and oration indicating either a man of many talents or a man of indecision). After much work he produced a colossal head of Lincoln (1907), which attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt and was displayed in the White House in February 1909, after which a private donor purchased it for permanent display in the rotunda of the Capitol.