Ellerhusen was born on April 7, 1879, in
Waren,
Mecklenburg,
Germany and came to the United States in 1894.
Education He studied at the
Art Institute of Chicago under
Lorado Taft, and under
Gutzon Borglum and
James Earle Fraser at the
Art Students League of New York, and from 1906 through 1912 with
Karl Bitter.
Sculpture and architectural work In 1915, Ellerhusen contributed unusual inward-looking figural sculpture for the colonnade of
Bernard Maybeck's
Palace of Fine Arts, working under Bitter, who was the director of sculpture for the San Francisco
Panama–Pacific International Exposition (1915). In 1926, Ellerhusen worked with
Lee Lawrie to produce about 70 integrated sculptural figures for the
Rockefeller Chapel at the
University of Chicago. Lawrie was responsible for the figures below the 30-foot level of the building, and Ellerhusen for the higher and less visible work. Ellerhusen's most notable contribution was the
March of Religion, a series of fifteen monumental sized figures across the front gable. Unlike what is found in most churches, the people represented were not just drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition but included
Zoroaster and
Plato as well as
Abraham,
Moses, the
Prophets,
Elijah and
Isaiah and
John the Baptist.
Christ holds the center position. Next to him is
Peter, then the
Apostle Paul,
Athanasius,
Augustine,
Francis of Assisi,
Martin Luther and
John Calvin make up the remaining figures in the gable. Elsewhere on the building Ellerhusen created figures of
Amos,
Hosea,
John Huss,
William Tyndale,
St. Monica and
St. Cecilia as well as the emblems for
Matthew,
Mark,
Luke and
John. Ellerhusen returned to the University of Chicago in 1931 to execute a panel for over the main entrance to the
Oriental Institute's new building. This figures on this
tympanum symbolize the passing of writing from the East to "vigorous and aggressive figure of the West.". The East is represented by a lion in the foreground with
Zoser,
Hammurabi,
Thutmose III,
Ashurbanipal,
Darius the Great and
Chosroes farther back. The West has a bison as its totem while its great men are
Herodotus,
Alexander the Great,
Julius Caesar, a
crusader and two modern men, an excavator and an archeologist. Various examples of the great buildings form the background of both sections. The building picked to represent modern architecture is
Goodhue Livingston's
Nebraska State Capitol. Although Ellerhusen and Lawrie worked together on several buildings it is only at Goodhue's
Christ Church Cranbrook (1928) that it is difficult to determine who did what. It is likely that each did several of the figures independently, but their styles are so similar, and in this case the figures representing such atypically ecclesiastical people as
Wilbur Wright,
Louis Pasteur,
Michael Faraday,
Galileo Galilei,
Johannes Gutenberg,
Leonardo da Vinci,
Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington are closer to Ellerhusen's more relaxed and naturalistic style than Lawrie's. 's golden statue, the
Oregon Pioneer, in 1934 For the
Louisiana State Capitol building Ellerhusen created "four colossal corner figures standing for 'four dominating spirits of a free and enlightened people,'"
Law, Science, Art, and
Philosophy. He also produced a frieze
Louisiana: History and Life that is divided into five parts and wraps around the building at the fifth floor level. In one section Ellerhusen used a son (Solis Seiferth, Jr.) and a daughter (Carol Dreyfous) of the building's architects as models for figures of children in his design.
Later years Ellerhusen, a longtime member of the
National Sculpture Society, taught throughout much of his career, and spent the final years of his life in
Towaco, New Jersey, where he had founded an art school and taught alongside his wife Florence Cooney Ellerhusen, a landscape painter. ==Gallery==