WOMAN IN ART
Evelyn Beatrice Longman, N. A. (Mrs. H. N. Batchelder), was born in Winchester, Ohio. She was educated at Olivet College, Mich., 1897 to 1898, and the Chicago Art Institute 1898 to 1900, where she studied with Lorado Taft for the beginning of her sculptural career. After graduating from the Institute School, she studied in New York till 1906 with Daniel Chester French. With those two masters of sculpture to guide her unfolding ability, Evelyn Longman, plus her own genius for work and subject matter, has become a genuine American artist. Her industry has created many statues and reliefs large and small, each showing her high ideals and the conscientious technique of her art.
Her first principal work was prophetic; it was "Victory," a colossal male figure holding aloft a laurel wreath and oak branch, which surmounted the dome of Festival Hall at St. Louis in the World's Fair in 1904. It was awarded the silver medal. Bronze reproductions are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Chicago Art Institute; the Union League Club of Chicago; the Toledo and the St. Louis Museums of Art. It is also used as a trophy of the Atlantic Fleet of the United States Navy. Hers was a lofty idea for the bronze doors and transom to the chapel of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, the commission for which was won in open anonymous competition of thirty-two competitors (1906). They are among the largest bronze doors in America, measuring twenty-two feet to the top of the transom. The main panels of the doors depict the study of scientific warfare and warlike patriotism, and the transom represents Peace and Prosperity honoring the ashes of the dead. The work was erected in 1909. The Ryle Memorial was placed in the Public Library of Paterson, New Jersey, in 1907. It is a bronze figure of Mercury. Heroic figures in white granite of Faith, Hope and Charity surmount the Poster Mausoleum at Middleburgh, New York. The bronze doors of Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Mass., are the work of Miss Longman in 1911, and the same year she accomplished the General Henry Clark Corbin Memorial, for the Headquarters of the Department of the East on Governors' Island, New York. It is three-quarters portrait relief in bronze with inscription and decorative frame. Miss Longman was the creator of the fountain of Ceres in the fore court of Four Seasons at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, 1915. It is a figure of Ceres surmounting a pedestal bearing fruit and flower girls in relief. At the same exposition a marble group won for the artist the silver medal award; "Consecration" is
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