Richard Bock

Bock was born on July 16, 1865, in Schloppe, Germany (now Człopa, Poland), and emigrated to the United States with his family as a youth, where he grew up in German neighborhoods in Chicago.

He took on a 14-year-old apprentice, James Earle Fraser, who would later design the famous sculpture The End of the Trail and the Buffalo nickel.

He created interior bas-reliefs for Chicago's famous Schiller Building, during which time, in the winter of 1891 to 1892, Bock studied under its architect Louis Sullivan.

Bock also created the Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument in Alton, Illinois, along with a bronze group of sculptures in Chickamauga, Georgia.

For the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898, Bock composed all the sculptures for the Machinery and Electricity Building, a centerpiece of the fair.

After returning from their honeymoon, Bock won a competition to help create the Illinois monument at the Shiloh Civil War battlefield.

Wright designed a sculpture studio for Bock in River Forest, Illinois, called "The Gnomes."

[3][11] Bock also worked on Wright's Unity Temple, the integrated human figures on the 1906 Larkin Administration Building,[12] two statues for the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York,[10] and the sculptural program at the Midway Gardens in Chicago, which Bock supervised.

[13] It was Bock himself who suggested that it was Wright who pushed for the central opening in the fountain, and thus he "began to lay claim to the whole project.