Berthold Nebel

He could be confused with the German sculptor Paul Nebel from Düsseldorf, who is famous for motion studies of elks and bears that were cast in bronze on request by Kraas, Berlin.

By 1900 his parents had settled in New Jersey, and Nebel as a young boy took lessons in oil painting from “an artist lady” who told him she could teach him nothing more and that he must go to art school.

While he was working days he studied at night at the National Academy of Design and the Mechanics' Institute, and attended James Earle Fraser's classes at the Art Students League of New York.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Nebel remained in Italy and became a supply officer and interpreter for the Red Cross.

His models for this group were his future wife, her sister Francesco, and their father, who, like the literary figure he portrayed, also went blind in old age.

Later that year Nebel accepted the post of Director of the School of Sculpture at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie-Mellon University.

He was also commissioned to make portrait statues of confederate General Joseph Wheeler for the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., of General John Sedgwick for the front of the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford, and of Alexander Brown for the entrance to Brown Brothers Bank on Wall Street in New York City.

Each panel’s single figure show a representation of a people – Celt, Primitive Man, Roman, Carthaginian, Arab, Phoenician, Greek, Visigoth, and Christian Knight, who had invaded and flourished in Spain.

This depicted on the reverse side the then-unfamiliar but now recognized “mushroom cloud” of a pyrocumulus explosion over a foreground covered by mutilated human bodies.

Silver copies of this medal were presented to President Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, and Alan Villiers, captain of the second Mayflower.

Among these last are several portrait heads of his father Emil Nebel; Albin Polasek, a sculptor friend he met in Pittsburgh; Anthony Di Nardo, an architect from Cleveland; and Eugene Francis Savage, a muralist who had been a fellow Academician at the American Academy in Rome.

Another of these studies, sculpted and cast in bronze while he was working in Rome, is Conchetta, a woman carrying on her head the traditional copper water jug of the Italian hill towns.