Henry (Weber) Mitchell
Birth Date: 1915
Death Date: 1980
Artist Gallery
Born in Canton, Ohio, in 1915, Henry Mitchell attended Woodland Elementary School as a child. He graduated from Princeton University, then received his MFA from Temple University and was a Fulbright scholar at Academia DiBerera in Milan, Italy. Mitchell, whose favorite medium was bronze, specializing in animals, but he was not an animalier in the 19th-century tradition. Those sculptors used animals metaphorically and didactically, to impart moral lessons. Mitchell was more interested in establishing an atmosphere of playful abandon and intimate communion with wild creatures, unlike Bayre, who epitomized the "tooth-and-claw" approach to animal sculpture characteristic of his time. He was primarily interested in transforming natural patterns in figures, such as the cheetah's spots and the zebra's stripes, into negative spaces. This tactic had a practical side; cutting out the giraffe's spots creates hand and footholds for young climbers on his large scale sculpture. Mitchell chose to portray nature's gentle side; even his running cheetah is a study in grace rather than ferocity which the animal he was sculpting could portray.