Henry Jackson Ellicott


Henry Jackson Ellicott was an American sculptor and architectural sculptor, best known for his work on American Civil War monuments.

Biography

The son of James P. Ellicott and Fannie Adelaide Ince, he attended Rock Hill College School in Ellicott City, Maryland, and Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. He studied at Georgetown Medical College, and may have served in the Civil War.
At age 19, he completed a larger-than-life plaster statue of Abraham Lincoln - likely an entry in the Lincoln Monument Association's competition for a marble statue - that was exhibited for two years in the United States Capitol rotunda. The competition was won by sculptor Lot Flannery, whose statue is at District of Columbia City Hall. The fate of Ellicott's Lincoln statue is unknown.
He studied at the National Academy of Design, 1867–1870, under William Henry Powell and Emanuel Leutze; and later studied under Constantino Brumidi.
His first two commissions were for monuments at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Lothian, Maryland and Greenwood Cemetery in Laurel, Maryland. He was the likely modeler of an Infantryman statue for J. W. Fiske Architectural Metals, Inc. of New York City, that was mass-produced and used in numerous municipal Civil War monuments. Company records list the sculptor's name as "Allicot."
He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and modeled architectural sculpture on buildings for the 1876 Centennial Exposition. He remained in Philadelphia, and exhibited occasionally at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1878 and 1891.
Ellicott was appointed Superintendent and Chief Modeler for the U.S. Treasury Department in 1889, responsible for all federal monuments. He moved to Washington, D.C. He died on February 11, 1901, in Washington, D.C. He was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery.

Personal

In 1883, he married Lida Dyre, of Maryland, a woman eighteen years his junior. They had no children.

Selected works

Civil War monuments

Goddess of Victory, bronze, atop Soldiers' Monument, Veterans Park, Holyoke, Massachusetts, 1875–76.

Portrait busts

Vice-President George M. Dallas, marble, United States Senate Vice Presidential Bust Collection, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 1893Rear-Admiral George W. Melville, bronze, United States Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, MarylandGeorge Yost CoffinGeneral John SchofieldSenator Daniel W. Voorhees

Attributed works