Sylvia Shaw Judson (1897–1978) was a professional sculptor who worked first in Chicago and later in Lake Forest, Illinois. She created a broad range of sculptural artworks, notably garden pieces depicting children and animals. For more than fifty years she sculpted life-size human figures in an era when critics and curators favored abstract works. Many years after she died, her serenely simple Bird Girl came to be widely known and admired.
A child of a well-to-do family, Sylvia Shaw Judson enjoyed idyllic carefree summers and the benefits of private schools, foreign travel, social connections, and several years of training and internship with the best teachers. Even after she became an acclaimed artist in her own right, she continued to be identified as the daughter of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a prominent architect who died in 1926, early in her career. She called him "the most important influence on my life as a sculptor."
Forty years after her father's death, Judson dedicated her book For Gardens and Other Places to him, and wrote that "he intended me to be his own private sculptor." But as much as she evidently wished to give him credit for her success, it was largely the result of her own artistic creativity and hard work. The exact number of works she created is uncertain, probably about eighty in all. They were meant to be objects of quiet contemplation, and most are not on public view.
Early life and education
Sylvia was born in Chicago on June 30, 1897, to Frances Wells Shaw (a poet and playwright) and architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. They lived in upscale Hyde Park, not far from the University of Chicago. In the same year her father bought 50 acres of land on Green Bay Road in Lake Forest ( north of Hyde Park) and started building an English Arts and Crafts country house that would be the family's summer home. He called it "Ragdale." They had a meadow and virgin prairie, an old farmhouse and barn, a cottage for the farmer, an orchard, vegetable garden, pasture for horses and cows, sheds for chickens and sheep, and even an outdoor theater where Sylvia and her sisters recited poems and acted out their mother's plays. Sylvia spent most of her summers in this bucolic setting, and it profoundly influenced her sculpture.
She was educated at the University of Chicago Laboratory School and School for Girls, and in 1914-15 attended Westover School, a college preparatory school for girls in Middlebury, Connecticut. She had decided to become a sculptor, and in a school magazine essay she wrote confidently, "My specialty is going to be garden pieces." She spent the summer of 1915 working as an intern with Anna Hyatt at her studio on Cape Ann in Massachusetts.
Instead of going to college, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for intensive training in human figure sculpting under Albin Polasek. Sylvia interrupted her studies in 1917 for an extended tour of the Far East with her father that she said was a continuing influence, especially Chinese animal sculpture. After graduating from SAIC in 1918, she briefly rented a small studio in New York City, but "feeling the need for more study" she went to Paris.
Studying with Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière broadened her perspective. Years later she wrote, "At that time it was a rediscovered idea that a work of sculpture should be a work of architecture in itself." In the sculpture of Aristide Maillol she valued "a passionate striving for unity and simplicity, a paring down, but together with a fullness of form, a growing outward from within," all of which would be attributes of her own subsequent work.
Early professional experience
Sylvia Shaw married Clay Judson (an attorney) in 1921. Their daughter Alice was born in 1922 and in that year Sylvia declared that she was a professional sculptor. They lived in an apartment in Chicago and she set up her studio in a shared basement laundry room. One of the first sculptures she created as a professional was the amusing Naughty Faun (1923). In 1925 three-year-old Alice posed for the curiously endearing half girl / half fish Merchild, her face hidden by her curls as she tries to pry open an oyster; for this work, Judson was awarded an honorable mention at the Arts Club of Chicago exhibition in the following year.