“COMING OF THE WHITE MAN,” College Point

“Coming of the White Man,” by Hermon Atkins MacNeil, was executed in 1904.  The version in College Point’s Poppenhusen Institute is a plaster cast of a sculpture in Portland, Oregon.

The bronze, which was completed in 1904 for a city park in Portland, Oregon, depicts a chief of the Multnomah tribe and his medicine man standing on a large, boulder-like pedestal.  The plaster copy was presented to Institute in the early 1900s when MacNeil was serving as head of the art department.  It stood in the Grand Auditorium until 1980 when the Institute was threatened with sale and demolition, as which time it was sold.  In 2002, the plaster cast was generously donated back to the Institute by Susan Wunderlich and … stands majestically in the Grand Auditorium. Poppenhusen Institute

In 1966 Mayor John V. Lindsay signed his first local law, which renamed Chisholm Park for Hermon Atkins MacNeil (1866-1947), a College Point resident and nationally renowned sculptor. At the ceremony, the mayor was flanked by two College Point neighbors who had posed for MacNeil’s sculptures. Doris Doscher Baum served as the model for the artist’s most widely seen work: the Standing Liberty quarter, which was first minted in 1916. A local mailman, John E. Troesch, posed for the memorial to Père Marquette which stands in Chicago’s West Park. NYC Parks

5/4/15