Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about the statue. The Pioneer Woman monument is a bronze sculpture pioneer woman Ponca City, Oklahoma, designed by Bryant Baker and dedicated on April 22, 1930.
The statue is of a sunbonneted woman leading a child by the hand. Around 1925 Marland sketched out an ambitious sculptural program to sculptor Jo Davidson involving numerous statues based on the theme of the settling of the American West and attempted to persuade Davidson to take it on. While Davidson was producing his three Marland statues E. He acted as if he was the sculptor, and in conversation would say that he was doing the figure – that I was his hands. Marland’s inspiration for this project included his pioneering mother and grandmother.
Marland’s original idea was to have a woman in pioneer dress accompanied by a child, and so he provided a sunbonnet to each sculptor. While the artists were not limited to these ideas, nine of the twelve models included a sunbonnet and all save for Jo Davidson’s included a child. Mahonri Young’s biographer Thomas Toone relates that Young produced not only the required three foot tall statuette, but also a plaster version of the entire Pioneer Memorial as he envisioned it, replete with detailed bas-reliefs of western scenes around the base of a massive pedestal and platform, on top of which the pioneer woman “holds her child in the embrace of a Renaissance Madonna. Toone also adds that the winning sculptor, Baker Bryant used, “a professional actress as his model, which produced a glamorous figure, representing Western myth more than reality. There are some questions raised about the winning design by Donald De Lue, at that time Baker Bryant’s assistant. Roger Howlett makes several points about the Pioneer Woman statue. De Lue executed the thirty-three inch competition model for the sculpture in 1927, with Baker supervising and completing the face.
James Earle Fraser based his almost Impressionistic statue on his favorite aunt, Dora, who was herself a pioneer woman. This model is unique among the ones submitted to the competition, and perhaps in the entire world of Pioneer Women Statues, in that the woman, caught breast feeding her child, exposes a bare breast. No stranger to multi-tasking, she still manages to hold on to her rifle while feeding the baby. Many years after the competition Wheeler Williams’ model was re-discovered, enlarged, cast, and now sits in front of the public library in Liberty, Kansas. The submitted bronze models were unveiled at the Reinhardt Galleries in New York on February 26, 1927 where they remained in exhibition until March 19. Pictures have we in plenty of the stern Pilgrim Fathers and the gallant gentlemen of the friendlier Virginia soil, but we are forced to draw on our imagination somewhat for pictures of the mothers.
When these women started West all their earthly possessions could be packed on a horse or in a wagon. What sturdy broods they bore, ever pushing westward, ever making homes on the lands their husbands gained. Marland reserved the right to make the final choice for the monument, but he sought input from the public and so these models then began a tour of museums and art galleries across the nation. From its opening at the Reinhardt Galleries, the tour moved on. The models were the subject of much discussion at the time, and photographs of them were included in full-page pictorials of both the New York Times and the LA Times. Times reported that art critic Helen Appleton Read felt that “no adequate tribute had been paid to the pioneer woman” and that “most of the competitors failed to produce anything monumental”.