George Julian Zolnay (Gyula Zsolnay)[citation needed] (July 4, 1863 – May 1, 1949) was a Romanian, Hungarian, and American sculptor called the "sculptor of the Confederacy".[1]
He grew up in Bucharest, attending the Saint Sava National College.[4] As George's talents in the arts were noticed in his childhood, he initially wanted to become a violinist, attaining a scholarship at the Music and Drama Conservatory; his father's disapproval kept him from violin, but he did learn to appreciate art. At age twenty he assumed a brief career as a cadet in the Romanian cavalry regiments, where he modelled many military objects and individuals. At his father's wish, he entered the civil service upon leaving the military, but decided to learn sculpting on the side.
Zolnay came to the United States in 1893 to attend the World's Columbian Exposition, at the behest of the U.S. consul-general to Vienna. He intended to return home, but chose New York City for his new home in 1894, eventually becoming an American citizen.
He became a favorite sculptor of Southerners in 1897 after he sculpted a statue of Sam Davis, a Confederate spy who was executed; as no pictures of Davis survived, Zolnay based the likeness on Davis' relatives.[14][2] Zolnay's numerous creations, scattered throughout the South, earned him the name "Sculptor of the Confederacy."
Zolnay was first described as the "sculptor of the Confederacy" as early as July 1899, in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the Jefferson Davis memorial. He'd already "received so many commissions from the South" to earn the name, which was repeated in subsequent coverage.[16] The widow of Jefferson Davis and former First Lady of the Confederate States, Varina Davis, had moved to New York City that same year, and was quoted in the article with kind words for Zolnay, with whom she'd collaborated for six months on the statue. For verisimilitude, she'd loaned Zolnay the clothes in which Davis had been captured.[17]
Family sources and Zolnay's biographer describe his friendship with Varina Davis, and access to the social circle she'd built in New York City, as the foundation of a whole phase of his American career, his "Confederate Period", from 1899 to 1923.[18]
In 1903 Zolnay moved to St. Louis to head the sculpture department of the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, taking the place of Robert P. Bringhurst, and teaching there several years while continuing to pursue commissions, many in the south. Among Zolnay's students in St. Louis were Caroline Risque, Nancy Coonsman, and Adele Schulenburg Gleeson. As of November 19, 1903, Zolnay was the instructor of modeling at the school, curator of sculpture in its associated Museum of Fine Arts, and had just been appointed to the three-man board overseeing the Art Department at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a role in which he would report to Halsey Ives, who had founded the school 20 years prior.[19] Zolnay also contributed two significant figures for the Transportation Building at the fair.
In the same years Zolnay and his studio assistants received a large commission for the two eight-ton lion and tiger,[20] to be placed on top of 40-foot columns, flanking the Delmar road entrance to newly-founded University City, Missouri, an inner suburb developed in parallel with the 1904 fair.[21] Their client was the founder and first mayor of U. City, promoter and publisher Edward Gardner Lewis.
After the lion and tiger were completed in 1909, Zolnay left the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and went to work for his client Lewis, taking at least two of his student proteges (Coonsman and Risque) along. Mr. Lewis was a font of interlocking schemes, on a national scale, and the head of a lucrative publishing empire. He made Zolnay the head of the sculptural program at the Art Academy of the People's University of the American Women's League, which meant contributing to an ongoing building program in U. City, devising sculptural education material suitable for correspondence courses, and designing a hearth sculpture a proposed national network of League chapter houses of the League, such as the completed example in the Katy Hamman-Stricker Library, Calvert, Texas.
In 1913 Zolnay moved his studios to Washington, D.C.[22] Beside his sculptural activity, and holding sculpture classes at the Zolnay Atelier,[23] he also delivered lectures on Romania, illustrated with traditional Romanian music and by lantern slides, at the Smithsonian Institution[24] and did illustration work for the two volumes of the book The Roumanians and Their Lands[25] issued by the Roumanian Relief Committee of America in 1919.
Personal life
Zolnay married Abigail (Abbie) Rowan Gillim on November 23, 1902.[26] She was a Southerner;[27] her parents had come from Ireland and settled in Kentucky. They had two daughters, Margaret and Elisabeth.[3]
The Zsolnay family have enriched the culture of the city of Pécs and added to its wealth. The artworks of successive generations can be seen everywhere from the facade of old and new houses, on roofs, on sculptures and reliefs, in shop-windows, on commemorative plaques. The sculpture of the Saracen boy decorating the fountain was made by George Zsolnay.
Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free, stamped concrete pediment sculpture, Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1898
^Adrian-Silvan Ionescu, Un artist Bucureștean cu strălucită carieră în Statele Unite ale Americii: George Julian Zolnay, in "Fifth International Congress of Romanian Studies", Constanța, Romania, June 25–28, 2007
^Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, By Report of the U.S. National Museum, 1919
^Stoica, Vasile (editor), The Roumains and Their Lands I: The Roumanian Question and The Roumanians and Their Lands II: The Roumanian Nation and the Roumanian Kingdom, Pittsburgh Printing Co., Pittsburgh, 1919; Gusbooks.com
