Thomas Waldo Story

Thomas Waldo Story (1854-1915) was an American sculptor who spent virtually his entire career in Rome as part of the substantial expatriate American artistic community that had gathered there during the nineteenth century. Born in Walton-on-Thames, England, during his family's European residence, he was the son of the celebrated American sculptor and writer William Wetmore Story, one of the most prominent American Neoclassical sculptors of his generation. Growing up in his father's remarkable Roman studio at the Palazzo Barberini, the younger Story was raised at the very center of American artistic and literary expatriate life, in an environment where visitors regularly included Henry James, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and countless other leading cultural figures of the era.

Story received his artistic training under his father, and this direct paternal apprenticeship gave him unusually intimate access to the great traditions of Italian sculpture and to the practical operations of a leading international sculpture studio. Working alongside his father across many productive years, he absorbed both the technical discipline required for serious marble carving and the cultivated cosmopolitan sensibility that shaped so much of the American expatriate sculptural tradition. His mature practice continued the Neoclassical vocabulary his father had helped define, though he also engaged with the increasingly varied stylistic possibilities that emerged in European sculpture during the late nineteenth century.

Story's practice included portrait busts, ideal figures, garden and fountain sculpture, and architectural and decorative commissions. His works were acquired by American and European collectors during his lifetime, and his fountain designs and decorative pieces found their way into important private gardens and estates. He also produced significant funerary monuments, including work associated with the Story family's own memorial projects following the death of his father in 1895.

Story spent essentially his entire working life in Rome, dying there in 1915. His sculptures are held today in significant American and European collections, where they remain valued examples of the late Neoclassical and eclectic Beaux-Arts sculpture produced by the expatriate American community in Italy during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth.