Abastenia St. Leger Eberle
Mary Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, born in Webster City, Iowa, spent her childhood in midwestern towns, including Kansas City, Missouri, where her family lived for seven years. In 1888 they settled in Canton, Ohio, there Eberle studied the cello and planned for a career in music. However, after her father, a physician, introduced her to one of his patients who made busts and lifemasks, she turned her attention to sculpture. She took modeling classes at the local Y.M.C.A. under Frank Vogan and studied the marble and stone figures she found in the local cemeteries.
In 1898 Eberle's father was appointed a Army physician, assigned to Puerto Rico. His family accompanied him, but Eberle began to spend winters in New York studying at the Art Students League (1899-1902). Her teachers included Charles Y. Harvey, George Grey Barnard, and Kenyon Cox. In New York and Puerto Rico, she began making small figural sculptures, such as "Puerto Rican Mother and Child" (ca. 1901) and "L'Isolée" (ca. 1901), a study of a nude, contemplative woman that prefigured the genre and allegorical works for which she would become best known.
The first work for which Eberle received public notice was "Men and Bull" (whereabouts unknown), created in collaboration with the sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt (later Huntington), with whom she shared rooms in New York. Hyatt modeled the bull and Eberle the men; the work was shown at the 1904 annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists and, later that year, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The artists collaborated again in 1905 on "Boy and Goat Playing" (whereabouts unknown), a life-size sculpture that received some attention in the New York press.(1) Meanwhile, Eberle continued to produce small sculptures on her own, notably "Roller Skating" (1906), a bronze cast of which was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1909.(2) (Another cast is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.) This was the first in a series of sculptures of New York street children that Eberle produced.
The income from these and other works, as well as the tuition paid by students whom she taught on an informal basis, allowed Eberle, in 1907, to make the first of several brief trips to Italy, where she had works cast in bronze by a foundry in Naples. Some of these were shown in New York at the Macbeth Gallery group exhibition of small bronzes in 1907. This occasion marked the beginning of Eberle's long affiliation with the gallery. At the same time, she established a studio in Greenwich Village and began working at the Music School Settlement on the city's Lower East Side. The children who participated in the Settlement programs as well as the inhabitants of the Village, especially the urban poor, became subjects of many of Eberle's small genre sculptures. One of these, "The Windy Doorstep" (1910), won the Helen Foster Barnett prize at the National Academy of Design winter exhibition in 1910. Three years later, Eberle's "White Slave" (1913), which addressed the controversial issue of prostitution, was exhibited at the Armory Show.(3) Eberle received more press coverage that year than she had or would.
During the 1920s, Eberle continued to investigate genre subjects and socialist themes. Twenty-one of her Lower East Side works were featured in a solo exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in 1921 and, the following year a slightly larger show of her work took place at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey. Ill health plagued the sculptor throughout the 1920s, however, and in 1930 she moved from New York to Westport, Connecticut. Her physical condition and the public's waning interest in small bronzes caused her to be less productive during these years. She died at the New York home of her friend and companion, Virginia Hart, early in 1942.
