"A Nave and Self-Taught Artist": John Frazee Sculpts Daniel Webster, 1833

Abstract: Many artists working in the decades after the American Revolution came from the ranks of artisans and mechanics. In a republic that dispensed with aristocratic patrons and royal academies, art came to be supported by a middling populace more interested in portraits than grand history painting. Sculpture in marble, time consuming and expensive, was even more remote than paints, and the new nation lacked grand palaces or mansions for display. John Frazee, born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1790, lacked the benefit of formal instruction but still progressed from carving lettering on gravestones to fashioning busts of the rich and famous. Without formal knowledge or the constraints of European customs, American-born and trained artist-artisans such as Frazee resorted to indigenous and ingenious solutions to the problems they faced in a commercializing society, such as Frazee's mechanical invention to transfer an image from painting to a marble bust.

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