American Art Collaborative

This bronze gate was one of six commissioned for the William Church Osborne Memorial Playground in Manhattan’s Central Park. Each panel shows a tale from Aesop’s Fables, a collection of ancient Greek stories that teach moral lessons to schoolchildren. In The Fox and the Crow, the fox flatters the bird in order to make her say "thank you" and drop a piece of cheese from her mouth. The fox immediately gobbles up the food and runs away, leaving the crow to "beware of flattery." Manship connected the animals by an unseen diagonal line stretching from the fox’s empty mouth to the crow's cheese. To communicate the story, however, he included a brief summary in the upper right-hand corner.

This object is currently on view on the first floor of the Museum in the north corridor