Hezekiah Augur

Hezekiah Augur (1791 - 1858) was an early American sculptor and inventor.

Early Years

Augur was born on February 21, 1791 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a self-taught sculptor and, unlike many other 19th Century sculptors did not travel to Europe, but spent his entire career in New Haven.

The son of a carpenter, he learned his trade as a woodcarver, carving table legs and other furniture ornament. Borrowing $2,000 from his father he was invited to join a grocery store business venture. Three years later he discovered , to his shock and amazement, that not only was his money gone, but that he owed his partners $7,000. While thus engaged he invented a lace making machine that lifted the financial burdens that he had assumed and thus allowed him to take up carving full time. Around that time he also invented a machine for carving piano legs. He switched to marble later in his career, being among the first native born Americans to do so.

Work

His bust of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Ellsworth (ca. 1837) is housed in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States United States Capitol. A portrait of Alexander Metcalf Fisher (ca. 1827) and a neo-classical]] grouping, Jephthah and His Daughter (ca. 1832), are in the Yale University art collection.

In 1833 Auger received an honorary degree from Yale University.

He died on January 10, 1858 in New Haven and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Sources

• Compilation of Works of Art and Other Objects in the United States Capitol, Prepared by the Architect of the Capitol under the Joint Committee on the Library, United States Government Printing House, Washington, 1965

• Craven, Wayne, Sculpture in America, Thomas Y. Crowell Co, NY, NY 1968

• Augur, E. P., The Augur Family (Middletown, Connecticut, 1904)

• Freedman, Frank & Bernstein, American Sculpture at Yale University, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1992

• Greenthal, Kozol, Rameirez & Fairbanks, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1986

• Opitz, Glenn B , Editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986

• Taft, Lorado, The History of American Sculpture, MacMillan Co., New York, NY 1925

See also

• Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson, John Fiske and Stanley L. Klos Six volumes, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889 ]
• Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)