| Alexander Phimister Proctor | ||
| Birth Date: September 27, 1860 |
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| Death Date: September 5, 1950 Artist Gallery |
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| During his lifetime, Alexander Phimister Proctor was recognized as the leader among American animalier sculptors and as one of the most prolific sculptors of outdoor monuments. Proctor was the first sculptor to create monumental equestrian statues depicting the American cowboy, and one of the first to depict the Native American.
Proctor, one of eleven children, was the last to be born of his family in Canada. Before the birth of his sister Mary in 1862, the Proctors moved south to Michigan via covered wagon. From there they moved to Newton, Iowa, and then on to Des Moines. At the state fair in 1869, the family heard Horace Greeley make one of his famous “go west, young man” speeches, and they were soon off again, this time to Denver. This is where Proctor would spend his most formative years in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
Encourage by his father, Proctor studied art at both the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York, but also at the Académie Julian in Paris.
You may find his work in public places throughout the country. Some of which are the Pioneer Mother in Kansas City, Missouri, William Tecumseh Sherman and Sherman’s horse found in New York’s Grand Army Plaza, and his four massive buffaloes on either end of the Q Street Bridge in Washington D.C.
In Proctor’s autobiography “Sculptor in Buckskin”, the following can be found “I am eternally obsessed with two deep desires - one, to spend as much time as possible in the wilderness, and the other, to accomplish something worthwhile in art.” He continued to work until his death in 1950 at the age of eighty-nine.
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