American Art Collaborative

John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was a prominent Gilded Age financier. When Pierpont died in 1913, Paul Manship began working on a memorial tablet commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which eventually received almost forty percent of Pierpont’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art. This uniface cast represents one of the signs of the zodiac that line the sides of the Morgan tablet, which appears in the southeast wall of the museum’s vestibule. Manship intended these figures to represent the “Cycle of the Year” or the “Compass of Life.