Herbert Adams (1858-1945)

An allegory of youth, Herbert Adams' La Jeunesse pays homage to Italian Renaissance sculpture with its innovative polychrome finish. An example executed in applewood, marble, paste jewels and twisted wire is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. According to curator Thayer Tolles, "In or about 1899 Adams authorized a Mr. Hall to reproduce La Jeunesse in terracotta. In 1933 Adams recalled that '4 or 5 copies were made, but...after giving one to Daniel Chester French, had ordered the others destroyed.' In 1932, there surfaced another terracotta, which Adams acquired. The polychromed terracotta (dated 1899) given to French is at Chesterwood, his summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts...The Metropolitan's version, the only example in mixed media, was created about 1899...French, a neighbor of the Adamses on West 11th Street, facilitated the Metropolitan's purchase of the marble and wood version of La Jeunesse in 1911. As his correspondence confirms, French had wanted to procure the piece for the Museum several years earlier. In 1907 he wrote: 'This bust has received the endorsement of the whole fraternity of sculptors and painters in New York as well as in some other places and no sort of criticism could be made in its regard to its acquisition for the museum. It ought to be there.'" (American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. I, New York, 1999, p. 364)