
Public collection via the Art Institute of Chicago
AT-00001979The Freedman
Inscriptions
Signed on base: J.Q.A. Ward. Scp. 1863
Provenance
Samuel L. Stone, Boston, mid-1940s; given by his wife to their son, Stephen Stone, Las Vegas, NV, by 1995 [purchased by Samuel Stone after 1945 and given to Stephen Stone following Samuel's death; according to letter from Stephen Stone, dated June 7, 1995, copy in curatorial object file]; sold, Sotheby's, New York, May 25, 1995, lot 177, to Conner-Rosenkranz, New York; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.
Exhibition history
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Afro–Atlantic Histories, Oct. 24, 2021–Jan. 17, 2022, no cat. no.; Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Apr. 10–July 17, 2022; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec. 11, 2022–Sept. 10, 2023; Dallas Museum of Art, Oct. 22, 2023–Feb. 11, 2024 (Washington, DC, only).
Publications
Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (Macmillan, 1924), 220–21, 229. Judith A. Barter, et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 193–195, cat. 88 (ill.). Clare Kunny and Andrew Walker, “Introduction,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 4–6. Angela Miller, “Albert Bierstadt, Landscape Aesthetics, and the Meanings of the West in the Civil War Era,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 40–41, 57–59. Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 26–39, fig. 2. Adriano Pedrosa, ed., Afro-Atlantic Histories, exh. cat. (DelMonico Books, 2021), no cat. no., fig. 85 (ill.). Thayer Tolles, "The Freedman in Multiple: A Look at Its Casting History," in Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation, ed. Margaret C. Adler, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2023), 96–111 (another example ill.).
Data retrieved from the Art Institute of Chicago on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Quick Overview
- Artist
- John Quincy Adams Ward (American, 1830–1910)
- Date
- Modeled 1862–63
- Medium
- Bronze
- Dimensions
- 49.9 × 40 × 23.9 cm (19 5/8 × 15 3/4 × 9 3/8 in.)
- Type
- Sculpture
- Classification
- sculpture
- Style
- Realism
- Place
- United States
- Department
- Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Roger McCormick Endowment
- Accession no.
- 1998.1
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Open-access museum record · AT-00001979
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