American Art Collaborative

After studying in Italy, Henry Kirke Brown returned to New York and created sculptures with distinctly national themes for the American Art-Union, an organization that distributed artworks by lottery to a broad middle-class audience. The Choosing of the Arrow was the first bronze sculpture ever cast in the United States. Although Brown visited Mackinac Island in Lake Huron to study Ottawa and Ojibwe people, he depicted this nude Italian youth as a young Apollo preparing for the hunt.