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Alexander Phimister Proctor
Continuing in our series of biographies of our founders, this issue we feature Alexander Phimister Proctor. It was Mr. Proctor's home at 433 Melville where the very first Palo Alto Art Club meeting was held.
Alexander Phimister Proctor was born September 27, 1862 in Ontario, Canada and died September 5, 1950 in a Palo Alto hospital. He was only 16 when he killed his first bear, a grizzly, and more than 85 years old when he killed his last. He was among the earliest to climb the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. He counted as friends, President Teddy Roosevelt (they went big game hunting together), James Garfield, and Augustus St. Gaudens. It was St. Gaudens who gave him one of his first commissions, an equestrian statue of General Logan. Proctor settled his family in Palo Alto in 1919 and was instrumental in the establishment of the Palo Alto Art Club.
Proctor studied at the Art Students' League and the National Academy of Design in New York City and later at the Academies Julien in Paris. His pieces can be found at Princeton University (Tigers in front of Nassau Hall), the Four Buffalo that guard the Q Street Bridge, Washington D.C., and at the University of Oregon (Pioneer Mother).
Proctor's autobiography was assembled by his daughter, Hester, who kindly donated a copy for our historical archives. Here is an excerpt, in Proctor's own words about life in New York at the Art Students' League:
"My second winter in New York I spent drawing at the Art Students' League, then situated on fourteenth Street. James Carroll Beckwith was our instructor in antique-drawing, and under him I really began to learn how to draw. Beckwith was a competent artist, but he was a hard taskmaster. Whenever he came into the room, everybody sat up and took notice, and there was complete silence. One day he entered in a quick, nervous way, and all of us realized that something was bothering him. The first easel he came to belonged to a student who had ideas of his own and was not backward about expressing them. Beckwith pointed out something radically wrong with the drawing, whereupon the boy answered rather testily that he had been told to do it that way at the last criticism, and that, anyway, he thought the drawing was about right. Well, every student perked up his ears, and those who could see the drawing were all eyes. The dressing down that fellow got was the worst I ever heard east of Denver!
When the league moved to Twenty-third Street, between Lexington and Third avenues, we had much more room, and many new students joined in the classes. It was in my drawing class that I became acquainted with Seymour Thomas, a master draftsman. Seymour later went to Paris, where he lived for many years and secured many honors, among them the Legion of Honor. Not long afterward I met several other students who subsequently made names for themselves, among them C.C. Curran, Granville Smith, and William Whitmore."
This lovely autobiography, entitled, "Sculptor in Buckskin," has wonderful stories of the wild west and what it was like being an artist in a new frontier and a complete collection of photographs of all of Proctor's work.
For those of you still interested in more about Alexander Phimister Proctor's life and works, Proctor's relatives have created a museum in Poulsbo, Washington and have a web site for you to visit: http://www.proctormuseum.com
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