Sally James Farnham

Though Sally Farnham came late to an artistic career, she rose quickly to prominence as a sculptor of large-scale monuments, one of the few women to achieve success in this kind of work in the early 20th century. She first became interested in sculpture while traveling with her father through Europe, but it was not until she was bedridden for a time in the late 1890s that she tried her own hand at sculpting. Her husband, Paulding Farnham, a painter and designer for Tiffany & Co., gave her some modeling materials to work with and she began experimenting. She was further encouraged by artist Frederic Remington, who was both a friend and mentor from her hometown of Ogdensburg, New York. Farnham had a lifelong love of horses, and a trip to a ranch in British Columbia in 1905 inspired her to create western subjects, many featuring the horses she knew and loved so well. Farnham opened a studio and steadily began to acquire commissions—first for portraits, then for war memorials and other monuments. Her most significant public work was an equestrian sculpture of Simon Bolivar that was placed in New York’s Central Park in 1921, a gift to the city from the Venezuelan government.