Pictures 2010
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Information about the sculptor and the sculpture

Jonathan Scott Hartley (1845 - 1912)

Jonathan Scott Hartley, a late nineteenth century sculptor, helped influence the newly developing artistic center of Montclair, New Jersey. Hartley, son-in-law to the famous landscape painter George Inness, was born in Albany, New York and was first employed in a marble monument yard. It wasn’t until later that he was able to work in a studio with one of the most famous neo- classical American artists of the day, Erastus Dow Palmer. Hartley then went abroad, spending most of his time in London, Berlin, and Paris, where he studied the great sculptors. He returned to New York in 1875, and soon produced his acclaimed piece The Whirlwind, in 1878.

After his marriage to Helen Inness in 1888, Hartley moved to Montclair, where he continued to work as a sculptor. “The Hartleys lived next to the great landscape painter in a reconstructed farmhouse, connected to the Inness house by a covered passage. There was a large studio on the grounds which was used by both the painter and his sculptor son-in-law.”(1) At this time his focus was on the production of portrait busts, many of them actors portraying their most famous roles.

Toward the end of his life Hartley returned to New York, where he died in 1912.

Dana E. Stoy (2003), The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

(1) William H. Gerdts, Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1964), pp.189-190


The Whirlwind

Hartley began exhibiting at the [National] Academy in 1870, but fame came to him only when his [clay] work The Whirlwind was shown in the 1878 annual. (In 1896 he reworked the conception [in bronze], a version of which is in the collection of the Montclair Art Museum.) The artist’s attempt at employing violently swirling drapery to depict movement in the traditionally static medium of bronze caused a minor controversy. Nevertheless, critics soon realized that his was a particularly versatile talent.

Mr. Hartley’s fame is largely due to his ideal subjects in clay, one of which, entitled “The Whirlwind,” created no end of public discussion in 1878. This remarkable work, the personification of the whirlwind, was first exhibited in 1878, the year in which Mr. Hartley was made an associate of the Academy of Design. This beautiful nude figure of a woman, involved in whirls of drapery, appears to spin in perfect poise, in a pillar of cloud. The criticism which it aroused was due to a certain feeling that action is not permissible in sculpture. Mr. Hartley’s works are exceedingly numerous, and include the statue of Ericsson, which graces Battery Park, and a splendid statue of Daguerra, in Washington.

from Theodore Dreiser, America's Sculptors, NY Times Article, September 25, 1898
 

J. Scott Hartley
1896, Bronze
Montclair Art Museum
Gift of W. I. Lincoln Adams