Madeleine Park (1891-1960)
Madeleine Fish Park was born in Mt. Kisco, New York on July 19, 1891, and the only child of Edwin Bennett Fish and Mary Elizabeth (Sutton) Fish. At an early age she often played with family pets which may account for her ease in handling and sculpting them later in life. After attending the Emily Fowler School in Mt. Kisco, Madeleine went away to Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey. She graduated from Blair in 1910.
Pursuing her interest in the arts, Park enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York in 1910. Although her grandmother had been an artist, her parents would never have approved of an art career for their daughter. She was working in a Life Class when her fiance, Harold Park, visited one of her classes. He was mildly shocked by the nude models and told her family. This was the end of her term at the Art Students League and hastened her marriage to Park, which took place on October 2, 1913.
Madeleine Park’s future as a sculptor was put on hold temporarily for the pursuit of family life until after the birth of two children, Harold, Jr. in 1916 and Barbara in 1919. Her first clay was used to model a head of her young son. The second effort was a dancing girl which the children “broke into a thousand pieces” to the relief of her mentor and teacher, Fred Guinzberg, with whom she studied for about three years. Under the tutelage of another painter, George Barse, who also lived in Katonah, New York, Madeleine studied anatomy around 1926. The Barses took her to Italy in 1928 to encourage and guide her study. Her desire to sculpt animals led her to the best sculptor in that field, A. Phimister Proctor. Park traveled three days a week to his studio at Wilton, Connecticut. She took the children who played with the Proctor children while she studied. This study lasted about three years. From Proctor she learned her greatest lesson: “Don’t copy others. Do it from life.” Park went to the zoo but ultimately became a regular at the circus when it came to town.
Her first circus effort was an elephant named Cutie belonging to Somer’s Circus. Park then took commissions to sculpt champion show dogs and horses. Since many of the owners would not permit the sculptures to be exhibited publicly, she began working at Ringling’s, sculpting wild animals. While working at Hunt’s Circus, she was asked to travel to India to purchase wild animals for Charles Hunt in 1948. She was successful and kept for herself one of the panthers, named Brutus, as a pet.
Her first major solo show was held at the Katonah Library in the spring of 1931. Madeleine was pregnant with her third and last child, Sylvia. This did not stop her from becoming a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design, Pen and Brush Club, and National Sculpture Society among others. In 1933, Park won the American Women’s Association first prize. Park was represented by Argent Galleries of New York which held an exhibition of twenty-two of her animal sculptures in October of 1936. Madeleine won the Pen and Brush Club Malvina Hoffman Award in 1938. She was included in the 1940 Whitney Museum National Sculpture Society Exhibition with her bronze, Koko, a chow owned by Count Camillo Ceriani-Sebregondi. The J.B. Speed Memorial Museum held a one-person exhibition of Park’s work in June of 1944. Park won numerous awards throughout her career including the Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt prize (1940), and the Anna Hyatt Huntington prize (1954), and the National Academy of Design Honorable Mention (1958).
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., November 2003.