Isaac Newton Phelps

Isaac Newton Phelps

Chauncey Bradley Ives

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In May 1854, Isaac Newton Phelps (1820-1888), a successful businessman and banker, sailed to Europe with his wife and two daughters. While in Rome, Phelps commissioned Ives, who by then had a solid artistic reputation in the Eternal City, to make this bust, as well as a bust of Sarah, his older daughter, and a statue of the younger Helen (later Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes) who recalled that everyone except her mother was "immortalized in marble" by Ives. The finely wrought bust of Phelps captures his intelligent and serious features as well as the fashionable hairstyle. The likeness is alert and truthful and reveals the artist’s neoclassical bent, as he depicted his subject draped in a toga, a typical portrait convention.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.