Stallion

Born in New York City, Malvina Hoffman was a portrait sculptor of pieces that expressed the fluid movement of dancers and lofty human values. Some of her sculptures are enormous in scale and include war monuments. However, her masterpiece is considered to be The Races of Man, done in 1933. It was commissioned by the Marshall Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and it includes one-hundred five separate life-sized statues of members of the world’s diverse human cultural groups cast in bronze.

In 1910, after her father died, Hoffman and her mother moved to Europe and after several rejections she was accepted as a student of the famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917). Rodin encouraged Hoffman to study anatomy in depth, which she did. The sculpture seen here, of a rearing stallion, displays her talent for creating a static object cast in bronze and imbuing it with the power and realism of being in motion.