Essay by Sarah Berndt, Class of 2015

A celebration of youth and beauty, Harriet Whitney Frishmuth’s Playdays was a small-scale decorative bronze sculpture crafted in 1925. The sculptor captures the vivacious personality of thirteen year-old model Madeline Parker. According to Frishmuth’s assistant Ruth Talcolt, “Whitney asked young Madeline what she would do if she was standing on a flat rock in a shallow pool and there were frogs nearby, and the girl said that she would probably try to tickle the back of one of the frogs.”(Aronson 140). The artist masterfully depicts the innocent, graceful demeanor of a young girl just entering adolescence.

Frishmuth was an American sculptor who worked during the Gilded Age, marked by increased independence and opportunity for women. While not fully accepted as equal to their male counterparts, female artists in the 1920s enjoyed more recognition and demand for their artwork. With the Great Depression and the Second World War, women would not see the same kind of opportunity in the art industry again until the 1970s Folk Art movement (Fahlman 40).

Characteristic of the Art Nouveau style, sleek curvilinear contours give the sculpture rhythm and energy. The slender, almost androgynous figure echoes the ideal female form embodied among flappers and suffragettes of the 1920s. One can see the influence of the emerging free-form style of dance that would later be referred to as Modern Dance. The lively figure and her active pose engage with the viewer’s space.

The lighthearted nature of this work contrasts with some of the realities of childhood at this moment in history. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, many lower class children were not granted the luxury of enjoying childhood because they worked in factories to support their families. This work highlights the dissonance between an artist’s ideal vision of childhood and the social reality of the time. A sculpture created to inspire joy and exalt the aesthetic beauty of the female form, Playdays can also speak to gender dynamics and social issues of the era.