Ulric Dunbar

Ulric Stonewall Jackson Dunbar was born on January 31, 1862, in London, Ontario, the son of Alexander Dunbar and Susannah Jackson.[1] He attended the Art School of Toronto with his brother Frederick and in around 1880, Ulric Dunbar emigrated from Canada to the United States to pursue a career in sculpting.[2]

Thomas A. Hendricks by Ulric Dunbar.

After working for five years in Philadelphia,[3] Dunbar moved to Washington, D.C. In 1886, he was commissioned to sculpt a model of Vice President Thomas Hendricks that took some four years to complete and was praised for its "straightforward, sober likeness with a degree of honest naturalism".[4] Dunbar subsequently completed a "first-rate" marble bust of President Martin Van Buren.[3] In his lifetime, Dunbar also sculpted models of Sitting Bull, William Wilson Corcoran, and Frederick Douglass, among many others; more than 150 sculptures are attributed to him. He was awarded a bronze medal at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and a silver medal at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[2] Dunbar served as the secretary of the Society of Washington Artists and counted Rudulph Evans and Louise Kidder Sparrow among his students.[5] Ulric Dunbar died in Washington, D.C. in 1927.[3]

A copy of Dunbar's bust of Thomas Hendricks, formerly in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, was upon that institution's dissolution transferred to the American University Museum.[6]