John Quincy Adams Ward was the foremost American proponent of realism in bronze sculpture during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1849 he became the student of the prominent sculptor Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886). Ward remained with Brown for seven years and eventually worked as his studio assistant on such projects as Brown’s equestrian sculpture of George Washington, 1853-56 (Union Square, New York). He worked in Washington, D.C., sculpting portrait busts of politicians and visited Ohio before opening his own studio in New York in 1860. Although he established his reputation with The Indian Hunter, 1858 (example in LACMA; q.v.), and made several other ideal figures, such as Freedman, 1863 (example in American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York), he abandoned such subjects for portraiture. He was frequently commissioned to make both small portrait busts and public monuments. He executed major full-length statues and equestrian and other complex monuments, memorializing, among others, President James Garfield, Major General George H. Thomas, Horace Greeley, and Henry Ward Beecher.

By the early 1870s he was considered among the preeminent American sculptors. He also began to be active in art organizations: he participated in the formation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as president of the National Academy of Design in 1874 and president of the National Sculpture Society from its inception in 1893 to 1904. In 1872 Ward visited Europe, obtaining the advice of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bar-tholdi (1834-1904) regarding the purchase of plaster casts for the National Academy of Design. The literal naturalism of his work was transformed somewhat by his response to French art. Although he never relinquished naturalism, his surfaces became increasingly invigorated and his figures expressed greater movement. In his late, multifigured monuments the more complex relationship between the figure and their base reflects the influence of Beaux-Arts aesthetics. At the end of his life Ward was involved in planning the sculptural ornamentation of the Library of Congress, contributed to the triumphal arch erected for Admiral George Dewey in New York in 1899, and four years later collaborated with the young Paul W. Bartlett (1865-1925) on the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange Building.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albany (NY) Institute of History and Art and New-York Historical Society, John Quincy Adams Ward Papers (those in New-York Historical Society on microfilm, Archiv. Am. Art) § New York, National Sculpture Society, Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late John Quincy Adams Ward, NA., exh. cat., 1911 § George W. Sheldon, "An American Sculptor," Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 57 (June 1878): 62-68 § Adeline Adams, John Quincy Adams Ward: An Appreciation (New York: National Sculpture Society, 1912), with chronological list of major statues § Lewis Inman Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward: Dean of American Sculptors, An American Art Journal/Kennedy Galleries Book (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), with catalogue raisonné, bibliography.