Verisimilitude: Works of Neil Estern – A Show and Sale

The Cornwall Library is honored to present Verisimilitude, a selection of studies, reliefs, busts, portraits, nudes, and maquettes (small preliminary models) by celebrated sculptor Neil Estern (1926-2019). Perhaps his best-known sculpture is the nearly nine-foot statue of a seated, caped FDR at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC, which also features his statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and the president’s beloved terrier, Fala.

Although he worked during a period in which abstracted and exaggerated depictions of the body were the accepted norm in the art world, Estern’s work remained firmly connected to classical realism —verisimilitude—and the monumental sculptors who had so profoundly influenced him.

Estern acknowledged that his work was also influenced to a “subtle, unconscious” degree by his personal feelings about the subject. When Life magazine commissioned him to illustrate a cover story about J. Edgar Hoover entitled “The Emperor of the FBI,” Estern represented Hoover as a Roman potentate carved in marble. “It was a caricature and emphasized a bit of what I thought was his evil side,” he said. “There are some innate elements, some vibrations that a person is sending out that I absorb and want to get into the sculpture. Something below the surface is going to make that piece of sculpture unique.”

His public works, mostly cast in bronze and displayed in prominent venues, include (in addition to those mentioned above) sculptures of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Irving Berlin, and John F. Kennedy. His bust of Jimmy Carter was on the cover of Time magazine.

He also created many intimate portraits of friends and family, nudes, and other smaller works.

Estern graduated from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. After graduation he began to make dolls, notably the Patti Playpal line for Ideal Toys, for which his wife created the wardrobe. Within a few years, this financial success enabled him to turn from dollmaker to full-time sculptor, working out of a studio in Brooklyn Heights, a foundry in a medieval town of expatriate artists in Northern Italy and, for his last decades, at his beloved studio in rural West Cornwall, Connecticut.

Estern’s children, filmmaker Tory Estern Jadow and cinematographer Evan Estern, curated this show. Their selection of objects includes pieces for purchase, with part of the proceeds benefitting the library.