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| Note: The editor desires to make grateful acknowledgement for assistance in the preparation of this sketch to the New York Sun for the article on Mr. Shrady that appeared in March, 1922. The celebration of the dedication of the Grant Memorial on April 27, 1922, was a gala occasion, with men marching, flags flying, and horses prancing to the music of military bands. But there was sadness in the hearts of those familiar with the progress of the work on the memorial, for Henry Merwin Shrady, the sculptor, whose imaginative brain conceived and whose skillful hands created this, the most colossal sculpture that any country has, in modern times, erected to any man, had died just 15 days prior to the dedication exercises. Of all the vast throng who witnessed the unveiling there were only a few perhaps who knew the dramatic story behind the unfinished panels in the marble pedestal, planned in the original design to be bronze bas-reliefs of Infantry groups. To those who knew the story of these missing panels, the occasional thumb prints of the sculptor which have been perpetuated in the bronze were eloquent of this 20 years of unremitting labor in his devotion to his task – a devotion that took his most constructive years, his health, and, in the end, his life. Henry Merwin Shrady was born on October 24, 1871, in New York City, the son of Dr. George Frederick and Mary Shrady. He came from a long line of public-spirited American professional men. One ancestor was the founder of Kings College, now Columbia, at which institution Mr. Shrady studied law, though he never practiced at this profession. When in April, 1902, the advisory committee, consisting of Lieut. Gen. John M. Schofield, Maj. Gen. Wesley Merritt, Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Daniel C. French, passed on all models submitted in the competition for the Grant Memorial, they recommended the award unanimously to Henry Merwin Shrady, sculptor, and Edward Pearce Casey, architect. These two had collaborated on a massive group, with a base or pedestal 252 feet long and a central figure rising 65 feet above the ground. Mr. Casey, the architect, was widely known as the man who had completed the magnificent Congressional Library, planned the bridge over the Potomac to Arlington, and otherwise had contributed distinctively to the architecture of the Capital. But who was Mr. Shrady? Five years before, Mr. Shrady, then just out of Columbia University, was employed in the office of a match-manufacturing company. He was hesitating between the law and a business career when an attack of typhoid fever took him out of the world of active affairs altogether. During the long, slow months of his recuperation Mr. Shrady amused himself sketching animals. He knew anatomy fairly well through his courses in biology and zoology in the university. Sometimes he would stop before the window of a bird store to sketch the caged animals there, and whole afternoons were spent in wandering through the zoo. No idea of the serious pursuit of art had yet entered his head. Even when his friends commented on the genius his first sketches revealed, he refused to take them seriously. It was Mrs. Shrady who took the first definite step toward shaping his life career. She took a sketch of a dog to the National Academy exhibition, and the committee found it acceptable for hanging. Mr. Shrady was quite innocent of the plot when his wife a day or two later took him for a stroll through the exhibition rooms. He halted in surprise before his own sketch. And yet another surprise was in store for him. The sketch had been sold for $50. Soon after that he began to take art seriously. He experimented in clay, modeling several small figures, a riderless cavalry horse, a buffalo, some dogs. All of them disclosed an amazing grasp of anatomy and the sure technique of an artist. The city of Brooklyn announced a competition for an equestrian statue of George Washington to stand on the plaza of Manhattan Bridge. A member of the commission, seeing one of Mr. Shrady’s figures, the riderless cavalry horse, in the window of a jewelry store, invited him to compete. He submitted a model and won the commission. About the same time his lifelike animal miniatures came to the attention of the Pan American Exposition Art Commission with the result that his buffaloes were cast up to heroic size and used extensively in the decorative statuary of the exposition grounds in Buffalo. |
