John Adams Jackson

The Reading Girl

John Adams Jackson (November 5, 1825 — August 30, 1879) was a noted American sculptor.

Jackson was born in Bath, Maine, and apprenticed to a machinist in Boston, where he gave evidence of talent by modelling a bust of Thomas Buchanan Read. There he studied linear and geometrical drawing and produced crayon portraits. Going abroad in 1853, he visited Florence, where he created several portrait busts in marble, then went to Paris in 1854, where he studied academic life drawing at the Académie Suisse. In 1858 he went to New York City, remaining until 1860, when he moved to Florence, Italy, which was afterward his home.

Jackson's portrait busts include those of Daniel Webster (1851); Adelaide Phillips (1853); Wendell Phillips (1854); "Eve and the Dead Abel" (1862); "Autumn"; "Cupid Stringing his Bow"; "Titania and Nick Bottom"; "The Culprit Fay" (many times repeated); "Dawn" (repeated); "Peace"; "Cupid on a Swan"; "The Morning Glory" (a medallion repeated fourteen times); "Reading Girl" (1869); "Nusidora" (Vienna Exposition, 1873); "Hylas" (1875); and "Il Pastorello," an Abruzzi peasant-boy with his goat. He designed a statue of Dr. Elisha Kane, the arctic explorer, for the Kane monument association (1860); a group intended for the southern gate-house of the former Croton Lower Reservoir in Central Park, New York (1867, not installed);^[1] and the Civil War soldiers' monument at Lynn, Massachusetts (1874).

Jackson died in Pracchia in Tuscany on August 30, 1879.

References

1. In 1867 Jackson made a visit to New York and presented models for a group and several single figures for the Croton Water Board, intended to be placed on the Reservoir's southern gate house; the design was approved, and engravings of the sculptures were engraved for Croton Water Board bonds, but nothing came of the venture; see Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and their Works: A handbook vol. II (1889:2, s.v. "Jackson, John Adams")

• Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889.
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