Putto on Seahorse

Evelyn Beatrice Longman was the first female sculptor to be elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1919. During her lifetime she was famous for having made the second-largest sculpture in New York (after the Statue of Liberty), and having carved parts of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In Putto on Seahorse she formulates her answer to Andrea del Verrocchio’s Putto with a Dolphin from the Italian Renaissance, of which plaster casts and bronze copies were plentiful in America at the time. Longman replaced Verrocchio’s slippery dolphin with a seahorse and skillfully depicted the boy grinning mischievously as he manages to dominate the surprised creature.