Enid Yandell (1869-1934)


Enid Yandell
Naiad with Frog

plaster
signed
dated indistinctly
7 1/2 x 5 x 5 inches

$850


Enid Yandell, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, was one of America's pioneering women sculptors. She was a colleague of Malvina Hoffman and Janet Scudder and a contemporary of Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Anna Hyatt Huntington and Harriet Whitney Frishmuth.

Yandell studied at the Cincinnati Academy of Art in the 1880s. Among her teachers was the celebrated Benn Pitman, under whom she learned woodcarving. She toured Europe upon graduation. In 1893 she worked at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, creating sculptural decorations for the fair. Yandell studied with Philip Martiny at the Art Students League in New York City and under Auguste Rodin and Frederick William MacMonnies in Paris. She had studios in both cities and was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon.

Yandell's best-known works are public pieces, such as her Daniel Boone statue and Hogan’s Fountain, both in Louisville. Her public sculptures can also be found in Tennessee, Rhode Island and Connecticut. She was profoundly affected by her relief work during World War I and devoted herself to teaching, founding the Branstock School of Art in Massachusetts.

Yandell was represented in the ground-breaking exhibition Kentucky Women Artists: 1850-2000 in 2001-2002.