Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937) French, Oil on Canvas. Striking self portrait. Wearing a hat and holding an artists palette in one hand with his paintbrush in the other. This is a youthful full scale portrait of the artist and his painters palette. There are only 7 known examples to exist of Frederick William MacMonnies self portrait. Many are in museums and institutions. 

The collection comes from the Estate of Don Huber, a North Shore Long Island Community of Glen Head, New York. 
We suspect this collection likely came by descent through the artists family when they returned to the United States. 

Overall Size: 30 1/2 x 37 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 24 1/2 x 31 1/2 in. 

#9478

We accept that these paintings were painted between 1900 and 1910.  Frederick MacMonnies was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a child prodigy at carving stone. At age 18, he worked in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and then persuaded him to become his assistant, keeping models damp and covered, running errands, and cleaning the studio. In the evenings he studied at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design. MacMonnies was one of the first American sculptors to recognize the potential market of the middle class. 
After four years of study and work in New York, MacMonnies left for Paris, opting for the more modernist techniques he could learn there over the more traditional sculpture teaching in Rome.  One of his first teachers was Alexandre Falguiere, who had been an instructor of Saint-Gaudens and who injected a degree of contemporary realism into his classical figures. MacMonnies mingled with many upper class American expatriates and met his future wife, Mary Fairchild, a painter.
MacMonnies had fame in the United States and Europe in the later half of the 19th century and early 20th century. He occasionally returned to America but lived most of his life as in expatriate in France. Although he chose to live in Paris, many of his public and private sculpture commissions in future years, with the help of Saint-Gaudens and also architect, Stanford White, were in the United States.
In Saint-Gaudens' studio, he met many of the wealthy people who shared Saint-Gaudens Beaux-Arts based ideas that art and architecture should be unified in order to create public art in America equal to that of classical antiquity or Renaissance Europe. Among the men that MacMonnies met through Saint-Gaudens who later furthered his career were architects Stanford White and Charles McKim and John LaFarge, decorator of mansions of the wealthy including the Vanderbilts.