Seated Girl is among the smallest figural sculptures William Edmondson ever produced. Diminutive, elegant, and intimate, it is one of two carved in this carefully balanced seated pose, offering unique insight into the artist’s experimentation with material and his observation of the human form.

Edmondson crafted his powerful sculptures from repurposed limestone blocks, each with its own irregularity and personality, and he let his material direct the final forms. Seated Girl emerges from a square stone, which is unique among his sculptures of women and girls, which are often carved from rectangular starting blocks. The jagged stone edge remains visible along the bottom of the sculpture, allowing unharnessed qualities of the material to remain present, but in contrast to, Edmondson’s sophisticated chisel marks.

Where many of Edmondson’s figures rely on a stable, rectangular skirt base or steady, grounded even feet, this figure is an exploration of weight transfer and how the human body moves and shifts. Girl is an off-center and balancing body rather than a static form. With legs folded under her, she rests her weight on one arm while the other drapes over her ankles. Edmondson lived and worked near the 1897 full-scale replica of The Parthenon, in Nashville, and Seated Girl’s pose may have been influenced by the friezes on that landmark.

The other known Seated Girl, carved in a large scale (21.5 x 16.75 x 10.5 in.), is now at the Newark Museum of Art (Bequest of Edmund L. Fuller, 1985, obj. no. 85.32). While both versions are highly detailed, the large-scale version is more angular and abstract, where the present work is a rounded, well-considered carving that focuses on facial details and musculature as well as geometries. Both sculptures were in the collection of Edmund Fuller, renowned early scholar of Edmondson’s work and author of “Visions in Stone: The Sculpture of William Edmondson” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).

Born to former slaves on a farm near Nashville, Tennessee, Edmondson moved with his family to Nashville proper around 1890 when urban expansion obliterated his childhood farm. He held two jobs for much of his adult life: from 1900 to 1907 he worked for the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway, and from around 1907 to 1931 he served as a janitor at the Nashville Woman’s Hospital. While he did not come to artmaking until his late fifties, Edmondson had long dabbled with stonemasonry. His first foray possibly occurred in the late 1890s, when he likely worked on the construction of stone fences at Whitland Farm in present-day southwest Nashville. He was employed again as a stonemason during the early years of the Great Depression (Ann Percy with Cara Zimmerman, Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (Philadelphia, 2013), pp. 67-68). After losing his job at the Woman’s Hospital in the early 1930s, Edmondson established a stonecutting business next to his home to create tombstones for his community. Over time, he also began to carve freestanding sculptures of religious figures, famous and local people, and various animals. Edmondson carved from blocks of locally gathered discarded building limestone and, on occasion, purchased stone from local suppliers.

Edmondson’s yard quickly attracted attention from art lovers. In 1936 Vanderbilt University affiliate Sidney Hirsch came across Edmondson’s yard, and he introduced his friends Alfred and Elisabeth Starr to the artist. The Starrs in turn brought Harper’s Bazaar photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe to the yard, and she photographed the artist and his work multiple times in 1936 and/or 1937. After seeing the Dahl-Wolfe photographs, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then-director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, authorized a 1937 exhibition of works by the sculptor, making Edmondson the first African American to have a solo exhibition at MoMA. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Edmondson’s home remained a destination, drawing visitors such as famed photographer Edward Weston. The artist also received support from the Work Projects Administration during this time; he worked for the organization from 20 November 1939 to 6 July 1940 (under the supervision of Kershaw), and from 11 November 1940 to 26 June 1941 (Cheekwood Museum of Art, The Art of William Edmondson (Nashville and Jackson, Mississippi, 1999), p. 43).