Gold-Medal Sculptor

Gold-Medal Sculptor James Earle Fraser was eight when it first occurred to him that it would be fun to carve things out of stone. The year was 1884 and the place was Mitchell, S. Dak. Young Fraser watched the town hunchback shaping a block of soft chalkstone into an admired popular novelty: four pillars surrounding a movable ball. The boy got some chalkstone for himself and began to carve childish versions of the things that interested him most: horses, buffaloes and Indians.

Long one of the most admired sculptors in the U.S., this week James Earle Fraser, 74, is being honored with the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letter* and with a big show. Most of the work that made him famous reflects his first childhood choice of subject. The best-known Fraser sculpture of all: the Indianhead nickel, with a buffalo on the reverse, that the U.S. Treasury issued in 1913. Until it was superseded in 1939 by the Jefferson nickel, U.S. mints stamped out more than a billion of them.

A Lean Indian. The road from Mitchell, S. Dak. to national fame led through Chicago and Paris. In Chicago he attended the Art Institute, worked part time as an apprentice in a local sculptor's studio. The neoclassic splendor of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, with its acres of white buildings and heroic statues, fired Eraser's desire to go to Paris: "It was the most inspiring moment possible for a young artist."

At 20 he made the trip, took along his first major work of sculpture, End of the Trail, a statue of a lean Indian sitting exhausted on his rack-ribbed horse. The work won him Paris recognition, a $1,000 prize and a job as assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Since that day, End, of the Trail has become one of the best-known and most frequently reproduced pieces of sculpture ever made by an American.

A Rugged Likeness. With Saint-Gaudens as his master, Fraser began producing the bigger-than-life allegorical sculptures that U.S. architects like to set up in parks and in front of public buildings. He also developed a knack for catching a rugged likeness in stone or metal. Soon after he returned to the U.S. in 1900, he had more commissions than he could fill.

Though he has been chipping and modeling steadily for over 60 years, and Fraser allegories and heroes stand in conspicuous spots all over the U.S.,/- Sculptor Fraser still has a hard time keeping up with his commissions, figures he is now about two years behind in his work. A big Fraser project just completed: two 18-ft. winged horses of bronze, flanked by symbolic figures representing The Peaceful Arts. The statues, cast and gilded in Italy last year, were paid for by the Italian government as a gesture of friendship to the U.S. Sometime this summer, they will be installed on the approach to Washington's Arlington Memorial Bridge. A current project in Fraser's big, cluttered Westport, Conn, studio: a new version of End of the Trail for his old home town of Mitchell.

* Other sculptors who have received it include Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Manship.

* Among them: the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the General George S. Patton Jr. at West Point, the Thomas Jefferson in front of the State Capitol in Jefferson City, Mo., the allegorical figures flanking the steps of the Supreme Court and National Archives buildings and the Alexander Hamilton outside the Treasury Building in Washington.

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