Gaston Lachaise

New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., Carved and Modeled: American Sculpture, 1810-1940, 1982, no. 53, p. 86, illustrated

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2008-14 (on loan)

Exh. Cat., New York, C.W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, An Important Collection of Paintings and Bronzes by Modern Masters of American and European Art, 1922, n.p., another cast listed

A.E. Gallatin, The Arts, vol. 3, no. 7, 1923, p. 397, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Arts and Crafts in Detroit, 1977, no. 86, pp. 100-01, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, American Art from the Collection of Vivian and Meyer P. Potamkin, 1989, pp. 5, 11, illustration of another cast

S. James-Gadzkinski & M.M. Cunningham, American Sculpture in the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1997, pp. 204-05, illustration of another cast

Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1865 and 1885, vol. II, New York, 1999, no. 311, p. 671, illustration of another cast

J.D. Burke, St. Louis: Painting, Sculpture, the Decorative Arts (The Saligman Collection), Portland, Oregon, 2012, pp. 84-85, 901-91, 202, 219, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, LLC, Gaston Lachaise: For the Love of Woman, 2016, fig. 11, pp. 6-7, 32-33, illustration of another cast

We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for her assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for this work.

One of Gaston Lachaise’s most popular works, his resplendent sculpture of three peacocks captures a sense of the magnificence and vitality of these wild creatures. The work’s plaster model, created in 1918, was first exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries, New York, in 1918, as “Paeons” (“The Peacocks”), when the composition’s “obvious outward beauty” was referenced by a reviewer (Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1918, p. 16.) The initial bronze cast—made in June 1922, the same month in which the sculptor obtained a copyright for the work—is now owned by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Thirteen other casts were made between 1923 and 1929, including the present example. The last six of the entire edition of twenty casts that Lachaise had sold to C.W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, New York City, were never produced, and the plaster model, used to make the casts, was last recorded in 1932.

In addition to the Phillips cast, six of the casts of The Peacocks are now in public collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California: the Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia. Two of the other casts have not been located in recent years. The Peacocks has been given the identification number LF 315/LF 198 by the Lachaise Foundation, New York.