Born: 25 January 1869, United States
Died: 9 November 1963
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Frances Taft Grimes
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Frances Grimes “has the inborn aptitude for the sculptor’s way of recording the strength and sweetness and mystery of life, visible or invisible,” noted friend and writer, Adeline Adams, in 1915. Grimes was an artist best known for her marble portrait busts and delicate low relief sculptures. Aside from her own pieces, she also worked as a studio assistant for Augustus Saint-Gaudens and saw to completion some of his unfinished commissions after his death.
The daughter of two physicians, Grimes displayed an early interest in art. As a young adult, she enrolled in the ‘Normal Art Course’ at Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn. After graduating in 1894, she worked as a studio assistant to her former modeling instructor, Herbert Adams. He thought very highly of his former pupil and considered her “the best marble-cutter in America.” Through Adams, Grimes met Augustus Saint-Gaudens and became his principal assistant and confidante from 1900 until 1907. Saint-Gaudens believed that “there was no one on whose fidelity to his own mind’s wish he could so wholly rely.” She assisted Saint-Gaudens with The Pilgrim and remained in the studio for a year after his death to finish the uncompleted Phillips Brooks Monument at Trinity Church, Boston. She also executed the remaining caryatids which adorn the Albright (Knox) Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
She established her own studio in New York where she completed many portrait commissions. In 1911, Grimes completed a bust of Bishop Potter for Grace Church in New York City. Several years later, she executed a relief evoking the Legend of Sleepy Hollow for the Washington Irving High School (now the Washington Irving Campus) in Manhattan. Grimes was recognized by the National Sculpture Society, 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, and National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
Grimes was a strong advocate for women’s suffrage and other reform causes in both New Hampshire and New York City.
While the group of well-known artists in Cornish largely dissolved later in her life, Grimes retained strong connections to the community. She regularly summered in Cornish by the 1920s, served as a trustee of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, and consulted on the display of Saint-Gaudens’ work at his former estate. Her late in life interviews and writing life shed light on the history of the Cornish Colony. She died at the age of 94 in New York and is buried in Cornish.