Janet Scudder (1869 - 1940) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. She had a difficult childhood being one of seven children raised by a widowed father and her blind grandmother. She had her first art success as a young girl at the Terre Haute county fair where a hammered brass tray with the head of Medusa on it won her a Blue Ribbon. Her drawing instructor talked her father into sending her to the Cincinnati Academy of Art where she studied wood carving as well as sculpture and supported herself by carving decorations for furniture.  After her graduation Janet had a difficult time, her father had died and she tried to get work as a furniture carver but the union refused to let a woman into the trade.

She was hired by Lorado Taft along with several other women sculptors, known as his "White Rabbits", to help him on the sculpture at the Chicago World's Colombian Exposition of 1893 which opened up the path for her career as a sculptor.  She was given two commissions at the Expositions for sculpture and upon seeing Frederick MacMonnies monument titled The Barge of State she was convinced that she needed to go to Paris to study, which she did. While in Paris she studied at the Academy Colarossi and worked in MacMonnies studio as an assistant, literally having to force her way into this male dominated vocation. She returned to New York after two years with a letter of recommendation from MacMonnies to an unreceptive art world. She was refused admittance to Saint-Gaudens studio and fell in to a depression because of the rejections she was receiving after her work in Paris.  The turning point came when she received a commission to design the Seal for the New York Bar Association. This led to other orders for plaques, memorial tablets, and portrait medallions. She was to sell several plaques and portrait reliefs to the Luxembourg Museum in Paris which was their first acquisitions of sculpture by an American woman artist. The Indianapolis Museum purchased fourteen portrait plaques from her for their collection. Not wishing to do Plaques, memorial busts, and urns , which was here main source of income, for the rest of her career she decided to produce fountains. She saw the success with fountains that MacMonnies had while in Paris and during a trip in 1900 to Italy she saw the wonderful renaissance fountains there.   Her timing was perfect as there was a great demand for fountains for the new renaissance revival architecture which was just coming into vogue. She set to work in her Paris studio creating many fountains with great success. They were purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, by Brook Green Gardens in South Carolina, The Chrysler Museum in Virginia, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, by the famous architect Stanford White for his many clients as well as a commission by John D. Rockefeller for his estate.

In 1913 Janet Scudder purchase a house outside of Paris where she spent the rest of her life.  She entered nine garden sculptures at the San Francisco Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915 wining a Silver Medal. She turned over her home to the YMCA during the First World War and worked for the Red Cross.  She was to leave her Ville d'Avray home at the out break of the Second World War, returning to the United States where she died of pneumonia in 1940. Janet Scudder was one of the most successful women sculptors of the early 20th Century.  She was an avid feminist and advocate of women's rights and disliked the title of Miss or Mrs. and fought against separate exhibitions of men's and women's art.  She will forever be remembered for the hundreds of fountains in public as well as private spaces thorough the world

The life of Janet Scudder is documented in the following books:

American Sculpture by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1965)
Dictionary of American Sculptors by Glenn Opitz
American Women Sculptors by Charlotte Rubinstein (1990)
Masters of American Sculpture by Donald M. Reynolds
Rediscoveries in American Sculpture by Janis Conner & Joel Rosenkranz (1989)

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