Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
For results outside of Tributes please use the general search or click here.
In this year of 1966 we have suffered grievous loss in the persons of some of this country's most distinguished sculptors. Laura Gardin Fraser, one of the most important women sculptors of our time, has now joined those who have gone on before, leaving a legacy of exceptionally fine sculpture.
Mrs. Fraser was an internationally famed artist who created great and powerful sculpture and a medallist who designed and executed medals and coins with great taste and understanding.
The Frasers were most highly regarded, for Laura married James Earl Fraser, the creator of many of this country's finest portrait statues, heads, medals and coins, and great monumental groups. In 1914, the Frasers built a large studio at Westport, Connecticut, where each worked independently of the other in his own individual way.
Mrs. Fraser's last works were three large bronze panels depicting dramatic events in American history for the new library of the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1936 her model for a double equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was selected by competition and gained for her international recognition. This group stands in Wyman Park, Baltimore. It is the only statue in the country that has two horses and two riders.
Another of Mrs. Fraser's large groups is the "Flying Pegasus," executed in Mount Airy granite at Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. It is a symbolic group of a flying horse and man, representing vision and inspiration. She also did the huge bas-relief of the Oklahoma Run, twenty feet long, representing the mad rush of many horses, riders, and stage coaches into that territory.
That Mrs. Fraser had a love of horses and other animals is attested by the excellence with which she modeled them. Horses form a dominant theme in much of her work and her special feeling for them reveals itself in the spirit and power of her sculpture.
She is perhaps best known for the many fine medals she did, and they number over one hundred. She won competitions for designs for Congressional medals of General George C. Marshall, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Benjamin Franklin, and Admiral Richard E. Byrd; and for the George Washington Bicentennial Medal.
Mrs. Fraser is one of the few prominent American artists to execute a design for regular coinage, a Philippine coin with the head of General Douglas MacArthur. Her commemorative coins include the Alabama State coin, the Grant Memorial, the Oregon Trail fifty cent piece of 1926, and others.
Early in her career Mrs. Fraser began her rise to recognition and fame in the field of sculpture. She was elected to the National Sculpture Society in 1912 and to the National Academy of Design and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1931. Among other honors conferred on her were three awards of the National Academy of Design: the Helen Foster Barnett prize, 1916; the Julia Shaw Memorial prize, 1919; and the Saltus Gold Medal, 1924. The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors awarded her the Agar prize in 1929, and she received the Saltus Gold Medal of the American Numismatic Society in 1934.
With more than half a century of work behind her, Mrs. Fraser continued to work right up to the last. She will be sorely missed by friends and countless admirers of her art.