American Art Collaborative

This sculpture is a reduced version of the head of Paul Wayland Bartlett’s Lafayette on Horseback, which was unveiled on July 4, 1900, at the Louvre Museum as a gift from America to France. It was customary in the nineteenth century for sculptors to supplement their incomes by making replicas and multiple versions of their work. A sculptor might produce a miniature reproduction or replicate part of a larger work, such as a head, to stand in for the monumental sculpture. These replicas and versions were not seen as inferior to the original, and could be purchased by private individuals for their homes or displayed in museums
“In the sculptor’s conception of his subject, Lafayette is again the youth of nineteen, when, in the north of France, he first heard of the uprising in America.” Harper’s Weekly, 190