Chauncey Bradley Ives American, 1810-1894

A farmer’s son from Hamden, Connecticut, Ives moved to Florence in 1844. His first full-length ideal work in Italy, A Boy holding a Dove (Chrysler Museum of Art), initiated a series of successful, sentimental images of children. Ives moved to Rome where he spent the next fifty years producing busts, ideal compositions and some public commissions almost exclusively from American patrons. The present figure is typical of Ives’ popular child subjects and was made after 1851 when Ives relocated to the Eternal City.