Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) was one of the most successful and internationally recognized American sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1863, MacMonnies started his career by working as a studio hand for Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the most influential American sculptor of the period. Soon afterwards, MacMonnies enrolled in modeling classes at the Cooper Union and drawing classes at the National Academy of Design. In 1884 he moved to Paris and spent time at the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts. Unfortunately, a cholera epidemic broke out in Paris and forced him to leave. Subsequently, MacMonnies traveled to Germany and then back to the United States, where he spent another year working with Saint-Gaudens before returning to Paris to begin a two-year tenure at the École des Beaux-Arts. At this time he also worked in the studios of Alexandre Falguière and Antonin Mercié.

MacMonnies's first artistic achievement, which helped establish his reputation, was his plaster model of Diana, which he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1889. He was then commissioned internationally to create many sculptures and, although he chose to live in Paris, many of his public and private sculptural commissions were installed in the United States.

In 1893 MacMonnies received a fifty-thousand-dollar commission for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The work he created for this commission, titled The Barge of State, a thirty-eight-figure extravaganza, made him internationally famous. Over the following decades he produced numerous major public commissions on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Nathan Hale statue in New York's City Hall Park, the pediment for the Bowery Savings Bank, and monumental works for Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Frederick MacMonnies was one of the first American sculptors to recognize the potential market of the middle class. He created a system, therefore, whereby he copyrighted his works and then contracted with foundries to produce some of his figures in multiple sizes, making his sculptures more widely available to American collectors than had previously been possible for a sculptor of his stature. Later in his career MacMonnies also turned to painting, producing an accomplished body of pictures that showed the influence of his long years in France. His sculptures are held in the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and other major American collections.