Paul Manship

Paul Manship was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and always loved to draw. As a teenager, he took painting classes at a St. Paul art school. Manship might have become a painter, but he discovered he was color blind! Manship switched to sculpture and never regretted it.

When Manship was 18 years old, he set out for New York to study with older, more experienced sculptors. One of his teachers encouraged him to enter an art contest in which the prize was a scholarship in Rome, Italy. Manship won the prize and moved to Italy, where he discovered ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. He liked the simple forms and decoration used by these ancient artists. Manship was influenced by ancient art and interpreted it with a modern, streamlined twist in all of his work. It became his signature style, the sculptural "voice" he would use for the rest of his life.

Manship made this drawing of an ancient sculpture of a Ram's head that he found in the National Museum in Athens, Greece.

When Manship returned from Europe, he married Isabel McIlwaine. Together they had four children: Pauline, Elizabeth, John Paul, and Sarah Janet. The family lived in New York and Europe while Manship worked at his trade, becoming a very successful artist.

Manship was interested in everything. Instead of a sketchbook, he carried a cigar box filled with toothpicks and paraffin wax wherever he went. He used these portable tools to try new ideas and work out problems in tiny, three-dimensional scale. Manship also liked to decorate the family birthday cakes. One summer he thought he could create a sugar version of the zodiac sign Leo (a lion) by making a mold for the candy. The mold didn't work very well with sugar, but Manship later successfully used that same mold for clay and bronze ashtrays.

Paul Manship always worked in a clean shirt and bow tie, covered by a clean smock. His mustache was always perfectly trimmed. In his studio at home, or at foundries where his sculptures were being cast in bronze, Manship was clean, pressed, and neat as a pin. While many of his fellow artists appeared inin public wearing paint-covered jeans and black berets, Manship insisted on his white shirt and tie. Always the professional, he worked hard at projecting the image of a serious, capable, expert sculptor.

Paul Manship was making his breakfast in his New York apartment when he died in 1966 at 81 years old. In his will, he donated half of the works of art still in his possession to the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, and half to the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Today Manship's sculptures and drawings make up the Minnesota Museum of American Art's largest collection by a single artist.