Rhys Caparn

The second woman was Lee Wood Haggin (1856–1934).

Like Alexander, Lee Wood Haggin was a wealthy widow whose philanthropy contributed to New York culture in general and to artists in particular.

Both women were connected to the MacDowell Club.

Haggin was its founder and leading financial supporter and Alexander was active in its affairs.

They were both residents of Onteora, the private community where Caparn was born.

Caparn later said of Haggin, "Mrs. Haggin helped me a great deal, simply because of the kind of person she was."

Rhys Caparn (1909–1997) was an American sculptor known for her animal, landscape, and architectural subjects.

Her works were mostly abstract but based on natural forms.

In many of them she employed free lines and used a restrained style that nonetheless conveyed what critics saw as an emotional charge.

In the animal sculptures for which she became best known, she achieved what a critic called "a graceful curvilinear balance."

Another critic put this aspect of her style in terms of the arch of a cat's back in one of her pieces: "A cat's arched back is a pleasingly rounded shape and well balanced on the foundation of paws. But it is still a cat's back, embodying a cat's peculiar physical response to fear or affection."

Her foundational influences included an ancient Greek statue and the abstract works of Constantin Brancusi.

From her most prominent instructor, Alexander Archipenko, she said she learned to seek out the underlying ideal in a natural form, the point at which "form and idea become one."

Her works were mostly small and almost all made by modeling.

She received her training in Paris and New York.

Caparn was born in 1909 in a resort town north of New York City.

Her father was a noted landscape architect and her mother a successful voice teacher.

In 1926, during her senior year in a local private school, her mother brought her to France for a visit with her sister Anne who was studying in Paris.

During a visit to the Louvre, Caparn encountered an ancient sculpture, a kore of a young female acolyte from the Heraion of Samos.

The sculpture is a standing figure missing its head wearing traditional garments with almost no body parts exposed.

The piece has been described as a subtle handling of the layered fabrics' lines and folds.

Caparn later said it became a major influence in shaping her approach to art.

After graduating from high school, she spent two years as a student in Bryn Mawr College where an art history course in ancient Greek sculpture captured her attention.

Her realization that a four-year liberal arts education was not for her coincided with a minor crisis in the life of her older sister, Anne.

Despite the stock market crash of 1929, their mother found money enough for the two sisters to spend a year in Paris.

Once there, Caparn began studies under an animal sculptor, Édouard Navellier, at the École Artistique des Animaux.

She later recalled that the school maintained a menagerie including a wild boar.

The boar, she said, was tame in comparison with a savage goose that was also present.

With the support of her parents and two wealthy widows, she was able to devote her time to study and creative work and her sculptures made an immediate impact when first shown in the early 1930s.

Throughout the rest of her long career, she exhibited frequently in commercial galleries, museums, and the shows of the nonprofit associations of which she was a member.

Returning home at the end of 1930 she took a further two and a half years of instruction from the avant-garde sculptor Alexander Archipenko in his school in Manhattan.

She sculpted human torsos during this period but soon realized that she preferred animal forms.

She began going to the Bronx Zoo and for the next two years made many drawings of animals.

Caparn later credited two women with the guidance and financial aid she needed to complete her studies and embark on a career as a professional sculptor.

The first was Elizabeth Alexander, widow of the painter John White Alexander.

Elizabeth Alexander helped make Caparn's time in Paris "the most wonderful year in the world" by giving her and her sister a place to live, by finding studio space for her to work in, by arranging for her to study with Navellier, and, later, by encouraging her to attend classes with Archipenko.

She helped to form the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in 1940 and thereafter served as one of its leaders.

In the 1940s and 1950s, she taught sculpture classes two days a week at the Dalton School in Manhattan.

She won a prestigious and controversial award from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951.

She died of Alzheimer's disease in 1997.