Edmond Thomas Quinn
Edmond Thomas Quinn was an American sculptor active from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, with work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Ireland. Among his sitters were Playwright Eugene O'Neill, Painter Leon Kroll, and architect Cass Gilbert. Among his outdoor sculptures visible today are Edwin Booth as Hamlet in Gramercy Park, composer Victor Herbert near the Naumburg Bandshell on the Central Park Mall, and baseball pioneer Harry Wright.
Education
Quinn was born December 20, 1868, in Philadelphia, to John and Rosina McLaughlin Quinn. He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. Following Eakins's February 1886 forced-resignation from PAFA, Quinn followed him to the Art Students League of Philadelphia, and later became that short-lived school's curator. In Paris he trained for a time as a sculptor in the studio of Jean Antoine Injalbert.Career
He exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, showing paintings in 1891, 1893, 1905, 1906 and 1907. He first showed his sculpture there in 1908, and annually for many years, usually portrait busts. He won a silver medal for his bronze sculpture of model Audrey Munson at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. He also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago.He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1920, and was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the Century Association, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Players Club, for whom he executed his statue of Booth.
Quinn was recognized as being a fine portraitist whose work "shows taste and conscience." His portrait busts include Franklin Hooper, Sylvester Malone, Edwin Markham, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Padraic Colum and Eugene O'Neill. His half-length, oil-on-canvas portrait of Attilio Piccirilli, the sculptor whose studio executed many works of American Beaux-Arts masters, is in the National Academy of Design, as are his painted portraits of Furio Piccirilli and Sherry E. Fry. The National Portrait Gallery has a large number of his portrait busts.
Death
In May 1929, Quinn tried to kill himself by drinking poison. He was found drowned off Governors Island, New York City in September 1929, a suicide.Quinn's papers are at Yale University.