Bacchante and Infant Faun (1894): Art, History and Details

Bacchante and Infant Faun (1894) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frederick William MacMonnies (American, 1863–1937).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This sculpture is a smaller version of a three-quarter life-size bronze given by the artist to Charles McKim, the architect for the Boston Public Library who placed the statue in the fountain of the library's courtyard. Although the vast majority of Bostonians supported the statue, a small but powerful group denounced it as "debauched," "vice-ridden," and "treason to purity and sobriety and virtue, and Almighty God." The opponents included the Boston Brahmins—a group of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite—and various religious, temperance, and antivice organizations. Feeling threatened by the swell of immigrants and by the changing roles of women, these groups hoped that the library would offer an alternative to the saloons frequented by Boston's lower classes. But a statue of a nude woman reveling under the effects of wine from the Roman god Bacchus only devalued this bastion of civilization. Consequently, the Boston Art Commission rejected the statue in 1897. However, in 1992 Boston's Art and Humanities commissioner and the library trustees returned a version of the original to the courtyard without public protest.

Object facts

• Title: Bacchante and Infant Faun
• Date: 1894
• Creator attribution: Frederick William MacMonnies (American, 1863–1937)
• Culture: America
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 86.4 x 25.4 cm (34 x 10 in.)
• Collection: American - Sculpture
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1919.589

Collection credit

Anonymous Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Solender, Katherine. The American Way in Sculpture, 1890-1930. Cleveland, OH: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• "Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 6, no. 7/8 (1919): 132-34.
• W. M. M. "Contemporary American Bronzes." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 6, no. 10 (1919): 151-63.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.