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The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Website ... is one of more than 1,000 memorials featured at ... dcMemorials.com |
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| It was while Mr. Shrady was at work on the Washington Statue for Brooklyn that news of the Grant Memorial competition reached his ears. At first he had no intention of entering. The Brooklyn task was absorbing all his time and energies. Then one day the elevator which he used to hoist horse models up to his studio on the second floor of an old barn in Westchester County broke down. With several days, perhaps weeks, of idleness ahead of him, he began to consider the Grant Memorial competition. Mr. Shrady had more than a passing interest in the great Civil War hero. His father, Dr. George F. Shrady, had been a surgeon in the Army during the Civil War and attended General Grant in his last illness, and out of the father’s personal acquaintance intimate, moving glimpses of the general had been handed down to the son. Some fragmentary ideas occurred to him. He made rough sketches and began to work them out in miniature. Then came the inspiration, and in a few weeks’ time his idea, now a comprehensive, daring, living whole, was embodied in delicately wrought plaster. Collaborating on the proportions and the pedestal with Mr. Casey, he submitted his model to the commission. The result was a surprise to many. The biggest art commission of the century had been awarded to a man practically unknown, who had never taken a lesson in art or sculpture in his life. So with that background of family tradition and artistic training, Henry Merwin Shrady began work in 1902 on the Grant Memorial. |
