Primavera

A studio assistant to Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, Bessie Potter Vonnoh worked on his sculptural installations for the Horticultural Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and afterward traveled with him to France, where she visited the studios of sculptors Auguste Rodin and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Vonnoh enjoyed success at a young age with her graceful statuettes of female figures; in the 1920s, her work was influenced by—and often explicitly designed as—garden statuary. These small-scale bronzes, usually allegorical figures, exhibit delicacy and refinement despite their strong contrapposto (meaning the shift of weight onto one leg, to suggest arrested motion). The model for Primavera was Charlotte Metzler, a teenaged dancer who often posed with her sister Louise in Vonnoh’s New York studio.