While there, he was thoroughly trained in classical traditions of drawing, fresco painting and the Sienese egg tempera style, eventually choosing sculpture as his primary art form.

While in China, he lived in a mountain village 150 miles from Peking with a Franciscan priest who was building a Catholic church in stone quarried from a nearby mountain, Pattison carved Twelve Stations of the Cross for the monastery with the assistance of several local stone masons.

He won a Military Merit medal for personal bravery, and his ship received battle stars for downing several German fighter planes.

Pattison noted that the only regular paycheck he ever received was from that time when he served as an officer in the United States Navy.

At the end of World War II, Pattison returned to Chicago, and to his art, so that by 1946 he was well known in art circles as the youthful recipient of both the Logan and Eisendrath awards, and as a recipient of one of the four prizes awarded nationally to sculptors by The Metropolitan Museum.

You can show a young student how to acquire the two-percent of sculpture but the rest is up to him….only the talent within can make him a sculptor.

And in most cases, only long, hard work over a period of years will unleash all of the potential talent within a man.

The sculpture was placed in front of the dormitory of the University's football team, and angry students attacked the horse with spray paint, manure, fire and hammers, with the art department professors merely looking on.

This event became famous as the first official riot on an American college campus, and became the feature of a Public Broadcasting System movie special.

The quarter-inch thick boiler plate steel sculpture withstood the attack and remains intact, but it was immediately removed from the campus and has never returned, sitting in a local farmer's field since 1954.

And then all of a sudden the whole panoply of centuries of art spread before our eyes in books and museums and we have to be aware of all of these forms of expression.

Abbott Pattison spent his summers at his home and studio on the coast of Maine, occasionally teaching at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he also served on their Board of Governors.