Bessie Potter Vonnoh (born August 17, 1872, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died March 8, 1955, New York City, New York) was an American sculptor known for her delicate portrayals in bronze of mothers and children and young women. Her Impressionistic style and intimate designs set her apart from other sculptors of her generation.
After the death of her father, the Potter family moved from St. Louis to Chicago, and Bessie found her element at school in modeling clay. In 1886 Vonnoh met sculptor Lorado Taft and began studying alongside him at his studio. She took a class taught by him in 1890 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Along with several other women, such as Helen Farnsworth Mears and Janet Scudder, Vonnoh became one of Taft’s assistants (called his “White Rabbits”) on his sculpture commissions for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Vonnoh also exhibited one of her own works, a personification of art, in the exposition’s Illinois Building. The next year she opened her first studio in the city. She exhibited her work in New York and later studied in Paris, where she visited the studio of Auguste Rodin, who became a significant influence on her work and inspired her to work in bronze. Vonnoh created her best-known work after her trip to Paris—A Young Mother (1896), a bronze tabletop sculpture of a mother cradling an infant in her arms. About that time the Art Institute of Chicago acquired several of her sculptures, the first sculptures by a woman in its collection.
In 1899 she married Impressionist painter Robert Vonnoh and moved to New York. The two exhibited together in New York during the 1910s and ’20s and once in St. Louis in 1916. After relying on commissions from wealthy patrons—primarily for plaster portraits—she began to focus on her favoured subject, women and children. She was working almost exclusively in bronze by the turn of the century but sometimes also experimented with terra-cotta.
The fluidity and emotional ease of Vonnoh’s figures was striking, and she enjoyed a steady stream of commissions through the early 1930s. She had a solo exhibition in 1910 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and in 1913 at the Brooklyn Museum (then the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences). In 1921 she became the first woman sculptor named an “academician” (a permanent member) of the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum), which awarded her that year’s Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal for sculpture for her work Allegresse (1921). She was the recipient of several other prizes throughout her career, including a bronze medal in 1900 for one of her sculptures at the Paris exposition and a gold medal in 1904 for her sculpture at the St. Louis exposition, and she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1931.
Vonnoh’s notable works include Minuet (1897), Girl Dancing (1897), the Frances Hodgson Burnett Fountain group in New York City’s Central Park (begun 1926; dedicated 1937), the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bird Fountain in Oyster Bay, Long Island (begun 1923; dedicated 1927), and In Arcadia (1926). She is represented in many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.