Clare Pfeifer Garrett

Clare Pfeifer Garrett (July 26, 1882 – May 15, 1946) was an American sculptor of considerable interest in St. Louis in the 1910s.

Both her parents were German-born, and came from Germany as children, the mother, Marie Rotteck, in 1848, and the father several years later.

Her brother, H. J. Pfeifer, followed in his father's footsteps, was the engineer, maintenance of way, of the Terminal Railroad Association of St.

[2] At the age of eighteen she first attended classes at the art school in the old museum on Locust Street, where Robert P. Bringhurst was her first and the most efficient and painstaking instructor she ever had.

Garrett related that she did nothing serious for the first year; she played and wasted her time, and it was not until the closing week of the term that she thought of her work other than as a diversion and a lark.

From that time until 1902 she maintained her own studio in St. Louis, where she became busy with her first commissions, and a number of large pieces, among them the already referred - to bust of President McKinley, in the McKinley High School, a fifty-foot frieze of children in the Eugene Field School (1901), and a memorial bas-relief at the Mary Institute.

[2] According to Mary Powell in Public Art in St. Louis, the Eugene Field School frieze was still in place in 1925, but currently the piece is lost.

[3] For two years after finishing the course she lived an altogether social life, but tiring of it, finally fell back on her art, which occupied time that had come to lag heavily, and gave her an opportunity to express the latent talent she had allowed to lie dormant.

Garrett preferred modeling children wherever the opportunity presents itself, and made a number of very good nudes of little cherubs which were put on the cornices.

[2] In 1902 Garrett was able to realize the cherished ambition of every aspiring artist, to study in Paris, where she entered L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, under Marquette and Mercié.

Emile Bourdelle, the French sculptor, renowned for great subtlety in his work, she chose as her critic.

For each criticism his fee was 50 francs ($10) ($352 in 2023 dollars), from which we learn that not only is art long and life short, but that it is expensive, too.

A portrait in low-relief (bas-relief) of her husband was exhibited by the National Sculpture Society, New York, in 1905, and by it awarded honorable mention.

[7] In 1906 her Boy Teasing a Turtle, a fountain figure exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1903 and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, in 1904, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

[1] It was purchased by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, the director of the museum, from the Gorham Company, Fifth Avenue, New York, through whom Garrett sold her smaller pieces exclusively.

Among them, not already mentioned, was one which carried a strong appeal, Budding Womanhood, owned by David Belasco; a medallion portrait relief of Mrs. Hudson E. Bridge, and a life-size group of a French lady with her young daughter.