John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke

John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke (1869–1953) was an American sculptor specializing in medals. Mowbray-Clarke was one of the organizers of the influential 1913 Armory Show in New York.

Biography

Mowbray-Clarke was born in Jamaica on August 4, 1869.

His wife, Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke, was an art critic, instructor, the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn bookshop at 2 East 31st Street in New York City. She was also a prominent anarchist, interested in fomenting political and social revolution. She ran the Sunwise Turn with Madge Jenison, and the bookshop served as an important intellectual and social center for artists, writers, and revolutionary political thinkers in New York in the early nineteen-teens and twenties. In addition to selling books, art, textiles, and sculpture, Sunwise Turn published small editions (including the first edition of The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays by Ananda Coomaraswamy, introducing the American public to Indian art and culture) and hosted readings and literary events until it closed in 1927.

The Mowbray-Clarkes lived in Rockland County, New York at a farm and studio called Brocken, just six miles from Arthur B. Davies. Like the Sunwise Turn, Brocken became a social center for exchange of political ideas from socialism to anarchism, and a place for communion between "free spirits."

In the 1930s and 40s Mary Mowbray-Clarke established herself as an award-winning landscape architect, designing public spaces in Rockland County.

John Mowbray-Clarke died in 1953.

In 1919, the Kevorkian Gallery in New York City published an exhibition catalog of Mowbray-Clarke's work, which includes reproductions of his sculpture and medals. The catalog lists a total of seventy-three works, and reveals a radical evolution in Mowbray-Clarke's style during the nineteen-teens. Early works were executed in a small scale and had a rough finish, in a manner that "emphasized the artist's hand." By contrast, later sculptures such as Broadway, c. 1919–which the artist intended to be 40 feet high and ideally stand in Times Square–were executed on a monumental scale, and featured a smooth and refined finish.