Henry Merwin Shrady

Henry Merwin Shrady was the winner of the public design competition. Twice. Born in 1871 to a prominent New York family, Shrady’s life was originally not on course to be an artist and sculptor. It took two major setbacks for Shrady to find his calling.

Shrady graduated from Columbia University and went on to spend one year at Columbia Law School before leaving to pursue a career in his brother-in-law’s business. Unfortunately, the business went bust. Around the same time in 1895, Shrady contracted typhoid fever. He spent three years recuperating back to full health. It was during this convalescent period that the trajectory of Shrady’s life changed as he developed the artistic skillset that would set him on a path to monumental achievement.

Shrady took to going to the Brooklyn Zoo as part of his recovery from typhoid fever. He began drawing the animals he saw there and in 1896, Shrady’s wife, Harrie, took some of his drawings without him knowing and submitted them to the National Academy of Design, where they were accepted and sold quickly. Suddenly, a new career was born for Shrady. Still, Shrady continued to expand his artistic horizons.

During 1896, he began making small models out of clay of the animals he was drawing. He began doing studies of his own horse, frquently wetting his horse down before riding him so he could see the muscles at work more clearly. This research would lead to Shrady’s first major clay sculpture, “Artillery going into Action” in 1898.

Cavalry Charge

Artillery

An image of Shrady’s sculpture was published in 1899 and seen by Theodore B. Starr who had a firm that represented artists specializing in jewelry and sculptures. Starr immediately signed Shrady to a contract with his firm to be able to represent and sell his future productions.

Shrady partnered with Roman Bronze Works in New York City to turn his clay models into bronze statues. In 1899, having signed with Starr’s firm and solidifying the partnership with Roman Bronze Works, Shrady cast his first bronze sculpture, “Monarch of the Plains,” featuring an elk buffalo. He would expand on this and create a new bronze, “Bull Moose” in 1899. “Empty Saddle” was his first equestrian bronze statue in 1900. His work would be displayed in the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. In 1901, after “Empty Saddle” was seen in Theodore Starr’s studio window, he was encouraged to enter the competition for a statue of President George Washington, depicting him as the General he was during the American Revolution, at the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. It was the first competition Shrady won. It was on the heels of these strong of successes that the still relatively unknown and self-taught Shrady would enter the competition for the General Grant Memorial.

To make the Grant memorial as accurate as possible, Shrady did deep research, not just on General Grant, but on the animals, men, and scenes he wanted to depict. He continued his study of horses, even dissecting some to fully understand their anatomy and movement. For the military scenes, he sought official help.

Artillery

Shrady went to visit West Point, where the Army cadets reenacted the scenes Shrady wanted to depict. The cadets showed him cavalry charges and how soldiers where tasked with pulling and positioning artillery with the help of horses. This gave Shrady the visualization he needed to create the scenes that would elicit so much visceral pain and movement to the monument of General Grant. The scenes in bronze that resulted from this research evoke the passion, drama, and pure emotion of what the soldiers in the Civil War felt in battle.

Then, between them, would sit General Grant, overseeing the action as he always had, atop his Kentucky thoroughbred, a beaten hat on his head, shoulders slumped so low, showing the weight of the war on the man who would win it. To inform his work on General Grant, Shrady turned to interviewing those that knew him, Grant’s memoirs, and a rather close former acquaintance of the later former President Grant, Shrady’s father, George Frederick Shrady.

George Frederick Shrady was a leading physician of his day, and an acclaimed artist himself. He was the one treating Grant as he wrote his memoirs while he was dying of throat cancer. Through these sources, Shrady was able to compose an accurate and true bronze portrait of the General.

In a sense, this monument commemorates more than General Ulysses S. Grant: it keeps the men who lived, fought, and died under his command alive, and memorializes the monumental talent of an unknown, self-taught sculptor, Henry Merwin Shrady. Shrady died two weeks prior to the public debut of his life’s work. Still, it has lived on in his stead for generations and will continue to for enerations to come.