The Statesman

Political intelligence and military might, twin necessities of the new republic, are the subject of Erwin Frey’s two figures: The Statesman and The Revolutionary Soldier. Frey, a professor at Ohio State University who had worked as an assistant to August Saint-Gaudens and Herbert Adams, was selected by the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) for both of these works. Frey’s figure of the statesman is respectably dressed and of a serious, resolute demeanor matching the soldier’s.

The Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial

The Association for Public Art established and maintains the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial, which includes three terraces and seventeen sculptures that were commissioned over a period of thirty years.

Ellen Phillips Samuel (1849-1913) was an active member of the Fairmount Park Art Association (although she could not serve on the all-male Board) and a philanthropic supporter of many cultural activities in Philadelphia. When she died in 1913, she left the bulk of her estate in trust to the Art Association, specifying that the income be used to create a series of sculptural monuments “emblematic of the history of America.” Her bequest was said to be one of the largest of its kind in the country at the time. When these funds became available upon the death of her husband J. Bunford Samuel in 1929, the Association appointed a planning committee, which decided that the Samuel Memorial should express major ideas and spiritual forces as well as chronological developments in American history.

To identify sculptors for the Samuel Memorial, the committee organized three international exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These Sculpture Internationals, in 1933, 1940, and 1949, brought together the works of hundreds of sculptors from the United States and abroad. The exhibitions contributed not only to the Samuel Memorial but also to the general awareness of contemporary sculpture throughout the Philadelphia area and beyond.

South Terrace

After the second Sculpture International in 1940, the Samuel Memorial committee selected four sculptors to express the governing themes of the new South Terrace – the settlement of the eastern coast and the emergence of the United States as an independent, democratic nation. The two principal groups were carved as reliefs, the other four sculptures, including The Quaker and The Puritan, as free-standing figures.

Other sculptures in the South Terrace of the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial

Settling of the Seaboard (1942) by Wheeler Williams

The Birth of a Nation (1942) by Henry Kreis

The Puritan (1942) by Harry Rosin

The Revolutionary Soldier (1942) by Erwin Frey

The Quaker (1942) by Harry Rosin

Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.