Bacchante and Infant Faun is MacMonnies' second best-known sculpture. The life-size nude was offered as a gift to the Boston Public Library by the building's architect Charles Follen McKim in 1896, to be placed in the garden court of the library. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union caused such a public outcry citing its "drunken indecency" that the library had to refuse the gift, and McKim gave the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The spectacle that was made regarding this gift, a salvo in the American Culture Wars, gave MacMonnies and this sculpture a great deal of notoriety in the United States: examples of the Bacchante can be found in the permanent collections of most of the large museums in the United States and France. A reduced-size version of the sculpture, rendered in bronze, resides in a private collection in Provenance, New York. The miniature rendition, which stands 30 1/8" tall, of the work that once struggled to find a home sold for $4,800 at an auction.
A copy of the statue (illustration, left) has now taken its place in its intended original location in the Boston Public Library. The original statue, loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by George Robert White in 1910 and bequeathed to the MFA in 1930 by White's sister, Mrs. Harriet J. Bradbury, is now on display in the MFA's new Arts of the Americas Wing.
Read more about this topic: Frederick William MacMonnies
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