Jonathan Scott Hartley was born in
Albany, New York on September 23, 1845. He was educated at
The Albany Academy, and married Helen Inness in 1888. He was a pupil of
Erastus Dow Palmer, New York, and of the schools of the
Royal Academy, London; he later studied for a year in Berlin and for a year in Paris. His first important work (1882) was a statue of
Miles Morgan, the Puritan, for
Springfield, Massachusetts. Among his other works are the
Daguerre Memorial in Washington;
Thomas K. Beecher,
Elmira, New York, and
Alfred the Great,
Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State. He devoted himself particularly to the making of portrait busts, in which he attained high rank. In 1881 he became a member of the
National Academy of Design. Hartley was a founding member of the
Salmagundi Club New York and served as its president from 1903 to 1905. He sculpted three of the nine busts around the front of the
Thomas Jefferson Building of the
Library of Congress in Washington, DC. His
Nathaniel Hawthorne, often mistaken for
Mark Twain, has pride of place in the ornate west front gallery of the original Library of Congress building, finished in 1897. He also sculpted the
Washington Irving and the
Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
Noah Davis. The Emerson bust is an exact likeness, as Hartley, and especially his supervisor,
Ainsworth Rand Spofford, knew how prominent Emerson's nose actually was. Hartley died at his home in New York City on December 6, 1912. == Gallery ==