Four Continents | |
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Artist | Daniel Chester French and Adolph Alexander Weinman |
Medium | Marble sculpture |
Location | New York City, New York, U.S. |
40°42′15″N74°0′49″W / 40.70417°N 74.01361°W |
Four Continents is the collective name of four sculptures by Daniel Chester French, installed outside the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green in Manhattan, New York City. [1] French performed the commissions with associate Adolph A. Weinman. [2]
The work was made of marble [3] and sculpted by the Piccirilli Brothers, [4] [5] with each sculptural group costing $13,500 (equivalent to $440,000in 2022). [4] The sculptures were first shown to the public in 1905. [3] From east to west, the statues depict larger-than-life-size personifications of Asia, America, Europe, and Africa. [6] [3] The primary figures are female, but there are also auxiliary human figures flanking each primary figure. In addition, Asia's figure is paired with a tiger, and Africa's figure is paired with a lion. [3]
Daniel Chester French was an American sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is best known for his 1874 sculpture The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1920 monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House is a government building, museum, and former custom house at 1 Bowling Green, near the southern end of Manhattan in New York City, New York, United States. Designed by Cass Gilbert in the Beaux-Arts style, it was erected from 1902 to 1907 by the government of the United States as a headquarters for the Port of New York's duty collection operations. The building contains the George Gustav Heye Center museum, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, and the New York regional offices of the National Archives. The facade and part of the interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is listed on both the New York State Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as a National Historic Landmark. It is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, listed on the NRHP.
Bowling Green is a small public park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City, at the southern end of Broadway. Located next to the site of the original Dutch fort of New Amsterdam, it served as a public place before being designated as a park in 1733. It is the oldest public park in New York City and is surrounded by its original 18th-century fence. It included an actual bowling green and an equestrian statue of King George III prior to the American Revolutionary War.
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