(1879–1847)
Born and raised in Albany, New York, Edward Francis McCartan moved to New York in the late 1890s to study at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute under Herbert Adams. In 1901 he entered the Art Students League of New York where he studied sculpture with George Grey Barnard and Hermon Atkins MacNeil and drawing with Bryson Burroughs and Kenyon Cox. McCracken spent three years in Paris beginning in 1907, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts with Jean Antoine Injalbert, and at the American Academy in Rome before returning to the United States in 1910. He opened his own studio in New York in 1913 and the following year became director of the sculpture department of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design.
During the 1910s, McCartan focused on sculpting elegant fountain and garden figures including The Spirit of the Woods, a bacchante figure executed for the Harold Pratt estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, and Girl Drinking from a Shell (Reading [Pennsylvania] Public Museum). His Diana, originally modeled in 1920, was awarded a medal by the Concord Art Association in 1925 and a cast of it was purchased for the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Among McCartan's monumental works are the Eugene Field Memorial in Chicago (1922); the figures of Progress and Industry (1928) which flank the large clock on the New York Central Building (now the Helmsley Building) in New York; and an allegorical figure, Interstate Transportation (1934-35), designed for the Department of Labor and Interstate Commerce Building, Washington, D. C.
McCartan began exhibiting at the National Academy in 1910, and was elected an associate of the Academy in 1922 and Academician in 1925. In 1940, he became the first vice-president of the Academy. He was a member of the American Sculpture Society and of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. When poor health forced him to cut back on his sculptural production after the 1930s, he concentrated on teaching. In addition to his position at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, he was director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute from 1943 until his death in 1947.
