Philip H. Martiny (May 19, 1858 – June 26, 1927)[1] was a French-American sculptor who worked in the Paris atelier of Eugene Dock, where he became foreman before emigrating to New York in 1878—to avoid conscription in the French army, he later claimed.

He lived in Bayside, Long Island, and had a sculpture studio in McDougal Alley, a fashionable former mews behind Washington Square Park.

Karl Bitter diplomatically characterised Martiny's technique: He works with incredible rapidity and apparently with little reflection, but always with such an instinct for the right thing, decoratively speaking, that he rarely fails in his results[3]The sculptures, which were carried out in staff, a weather-resistant plaster, were destroyed with the exhibition buildings, but the successful effect they produced led to further similar commissions at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York (1901) and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis (1904).

[4] Though he was a member of the National Sculpture Society, Philip Martiny was not considered by his contemporaries as a sculptor of the first rank, and the assignation to him by the Tammany Hall architects given the plum project of completing designs for the New York City Hall of Records (later the Surrogate's Court) after the architect John R. Thomas's unexpected death in 1901, raised objections that tested the New York Art Commission's authority to accept or reject sculpture by Henry Kirke Bush-Brown and Martiny for the building.

[9] An extensive list of Martiny's executed commissions, is on-line at National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Research Information.