He early exhibited a decided taste for modelling, and at 12 years of age made out of wax candle ends a bas-relief copy of a picture representing the wisdom of Solomon, which was afterward cast in silver.

During this time, the Royal Academy awarded him a large silver medal for the best copy in bas-relief of the Apollo Belvedere.

After a short stay in New York, and then Philadelphia, he settled in Boston, where he produced busts of Washington Irving (1836) and Edward Livingston, and a large bronze of mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch for Mount Auburn Cemetery (1847).

He made Little Nell and the group Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman, whose plaster models went to the Boston Athenaeum, but were never carved in marble.

Among his later works were a model of an equestrian statue of Washington, intended for the city of Philadelphia, a Crucifixion, and a Mary Magdalen.