This pair of porcelain child busts, mounted on a stunning wooden plinth, features fantastic detail, facial features, and expressions, making them great art pieces for bookends.
The busts are marked M L Torrey to the back and are both in excellent, clean condition with no chips, cracks or restoration.
Height: 15 cm
Length: 4 cm
Width: 4 cm
Mabel Landrum Torrey (June 23, 1886 – April 1, 1974) was an American sculptor best known for her statuettes and sculptures of children. Eugene Field's poetry inspired a number of her works.
Torrey was born in a sod-roofed house in Sterling, Colorado in 1886. Her father was a local judge. She studied at the Colorado State College of Education, where one day, an art teacher looked at a bust she was modelling and said, "You are a sculptor." She then worked as a schoolteacher in her hometown of Sterling. Upon saving enough money, however, she traveled to Chicago to study sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1912.
Torrey received her first major commission from Mayor Robert W. Speer of Denver, Colorado, in 1918. The resulting work, the "Wynken, Blynken and Nod Fountain", was dedicated in 1919 in Denver's Washington Park. The sculpture, which was based on the Eugene Field poem "Dutch Lullaby", remains a major Denver landmark. In the 1930 edition of his History of American Sculpture, Lorado Taft described the fountain as Torrey's most important work.