Alexander Phimister Proctor

The sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor was born in Bosanquet, Ontario, Canada, but grew up in Denver. He spent much of his youth exploring and hunting in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. He began his artistic training in earnest when he moved to New York in 1887 and studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. Proctor’s work first gained national recognition when he was commissioned to sculpt life-size animals to decorate the grounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year he traveled to France and met the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He would later work as an assistant on Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian Civil War memorials in Chicago and New York. Proctor continued to work well into his 80s and completed numerous monumental and small-scale commissions depicting western and animal subjects.