Woman Walking, Circa 1911; cast circa 1917

According to Gaston Lachaise himself, the model for Woman Walking was created in about 1911, that is, shortly before he moved from Boston to New York City and began his early masterwork, Standing Woman (Elevation) ([LF 55] (1912–15; first cast in bronze in 1927; The Art Institute of Chicago). It was one of the statuettes he cast in bronze in about 1917 in preparation for his first solo exhibition, held at the Bourgeois Galleries, New York, in early 1918. (Whether the work appeared in that show is not known.) The statuette represents a fashionable young woman captured in dynamic motion, the veil of her hat pressed against her face as she strides forward. The statuette was evidently created by Lachaise in response to the beautiful American women who passed him on the street, a subject deliberately chosen to express his desire to seek artistic inspiration from the vitality of daily life around him, not from repeating art of the past—an approach he publicly articulated at the time of the show and more fully in the following year in an essay for a group exhibition at the Bourgeois Galleries in 1919 (Gaston Lachaise, “Modern Sculptures,“ in Exhibition of American Sculptures, exhibition catalogue, New York: Bourgeois Galleries, 1919, [n.p.]).

The sculptor revisited the theme of an energetically striding, contemporary American woman in his famous Walking Woman [LF 31] modeled in 1919, and first cast in bronze several years later (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire). According to Lachaise, the subject of Walking Woman [LF 31] is his wife (Interview, New York Herald-Tribune, January 14, 1935, p. 7). It is very likely that the earlier statuette is also inspired by her.