Sylvia Shaw Judson

A child of a well-to-do family, Sylvia Shaw Judson enjoyed idyllic carefree summers and the benefits of private schools, foreign travel, social connections, and several years of training and internship with the best teachers.

Even after she became an acclaimed artist in her own right, she continued to be identified as the daughter of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a prominent architect who died in 1926, early in her career.

Forty years after her father's death, Judson dedicated her book For Gardens and Other Places to him, and wrote that "he intended me to be his own private sculptor."

In the same year her father bought 50 acres of land on Green Bay Road in Lake Forest (40 miles (64 km) north of Hyde Park) and started building an English Arts and Crafts country house that would be the family's summer home.

They had a meadow and virgin prairie, an old farmhouse and barn, a cottage for the farmer, an orchard, vegetable garden, pasture for horses and cows, sheds for chickens and sheep, and even an outdoor theater where Sylvia and her sisters recited poems and acted out their mother's plays.

In the sculpture of Aristide Maillol she valued "a passionate striving for unity and simplicity, a paring down, but together with a fullness of form, a growing outward from within," all of which would be attributes of her own subsequent work.

Selected in 1964 for the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at the White House, where it has been standing ever since, and another copy presented to the Philippines in 1966 by President Johnson as a gift from the American people.

In 1968, for admission to full membership in the National Academy of Design, Judson was required to submit a work that she regarded as her best; she chose the Little Gardener.

[c] In 1936 Judson asked a 9-year-old girl to pose for a figure whose tilted head and sad eyes make it appear that she is resigned to her fate: her slender arms must forever hold two bowls.

This image, reminiscent of female forms in Classical Greek architecture, is echoed in the deep folds of her long skirt, which are shaped like the flutes of a Grecian column.

Bird Girl was at the center of eighteen sculptures in the exhibition, but at that time she was known as Fountain Figure, which may hint that Judson originally intended for her to stand above a garden pool, water gently flowing from her bowls.

It depicts a woman in Quaker attire seated on a meeting house bench, her head bowed, her hands in her lap, steely resolve evident in her eyes.

In 1961-62 she experimented with religious art in an unfamiliar medium, sandcasting Stations of the Cross, fourteen low relief bronze plaques for a Catholic church.

Judson's last major work, created in 1969, shows two children in a playful pose: a 3-year-old boy on the shoulder of a 12-year-old girl, looking into each other's eyes, finding joy and fun in their friendship.

[g] Sixteen years after she died, Judson suddenly became nationally known after the publication in 1994 of the sensational Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, whose cover was a hauntingly beautiful photo of a sculpture in Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery.

The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a record 216 weeks and crowds of tourists descended on Savannah hoping to glimpse the little cast-bronze girl whose weary arms seemed to be weighing good and evil.

To stop illegal copying, her daughter Alice (as executor of Judson's artistic estate) in 1998 authorized the sale of accurate replicas in reduced sizes, with royalties supporting the Ragdale Foundation.