Monumental Art Deco Bronze Wall Fountain / Sculpture by Janet Scudder

Incised signature and foundry mark to base ‘Janet Scudder Roman Bronze Works NY’.

years as a sculptor
After her move to Chicago in 1891, Scudder intended to earn a living as a wood carver and was briefly employed in a furniture factory that produced architectural decorations.She left the job because the union did not permit women members. In 1892–93, Scudder found work with the sculptor Lorado Taft as one of his assistants, earning US$5 a day for her work on monumental sculptures for the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Scudder was one of a group of women sculptors and assistants working for Taft who were nicknamed the White Rabbits.Scudder was also commissioned to create a figure of Justice for the exposition’s Illinois Building and modeled the Nymph of Wabash sculpture for the Indiana Building at the fair. For her work at the exposition, Scudder won a bronze medal, as well as US$1,000 from the citizens of Terre Haute, who expected to display her Nymph sculpture at the city’s library

After seeing Frederick W. MacMonnies’s fountain “the Barge of State” at the World’s Fair, Scudder decided to go to Paris in 1894, hoping to study with him. Scudder traveled to France with Zulime Taft (Lorado Taft’s sister) and persuaded MacMonnies to hire her. At the age of twenty-five, Scudder became the first woman he employed at his atelier. Scudder assisted MacMonnies on projects such as his Shakespeare for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in addition to studying at the Académie Vitti and at the Académie Colarossi.Scudder abruptly left MacMonnies’s Paris studio in 1896, after a colleague gave her the inaccurate impression that he disapproved of her work. She returned to the United States and tried unsuccessfully to find work as a sculptor in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s studio in New York City.[10]

First major commission
Through her friendship with fellow art student Matilda Auchincloss Brownell, whom she met during her trip home from France, and Brownell’s father, Silas B. Brownell, the secretary of the New York Bar Association from 1878 to 1916, Scudder secured her first major commission in 1894. The US$750 she received to design a seal for the New York Bar Association provided her with the funds move to a better location in the city. The project also led to opportunities for steady work making plaques, portrait medallions, architectural ornamentation, and funerary urns, as well as sculpting.Scudder was especially adept at bas-relief portraiture, which became a specialty.[11]