Enid Yandell (October 6, 1869 – June 12, 1934) was an American sculptor from Louisville, Kentucky, who studied with Auguste Rodin in Paris, Philip Martiny in New York City, and Frederick William MacMonnies.
Yandell specialized in portrait busts and monuments. She created numerous portraits, garden pieces and small works as well as public monuments. The sculpture collection at the Speed Art Museum in her hometown includes a large number of her works in plaster. She contributed to The Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair.
Artistic training
Yandell was the eldest daughter of Dr. Lunsford Pitts Yandell Jr. and Louise Elliston Yandell of Louisville, Kentucky. Her sister Maud Yandell (1871–1962) also never married; Elsie Yandell (1874–1939) married the American architect Donn Barber and moved to New York; and, their younger brother, Lunsford P. Yandell III (1878–1927) married Elizabeth Hosford of Connecticut and lived in Kentucky. Enid Yandell completed degrees in chemistry and art at Hampton College, a school for girls in Louisville. She then attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she completed a four-year program in two years, winning a first-prize medal upon graduation in 1889. Yandell also took advantage of apprenticeships with noted sculptors of the day. These included Lorado Taft, Philip Martiny and Karl Bitter.
Yandell was one of a group of women sculptors known as the White Rabbits, who were organized by sculptor Lorado Taft to complete the numerous statues and other architectural embellishments for the Horticultural Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She also designed and carved the caryatid that supported the roof garden of The Woman's Building. Yandell co-wrote a semi-autobiographical account of her involvement in planning the fair, Three Girls in a Flat (1892). (This book is not to be confused with a British one of the same title by Ethel F. Heddle, published in 1896, a roman a clef featuring Ménie Muriel Dowie, Lillias Campbell Davidson, and Alice Werner, describing 'the ambivalent experience when the freedom of living alone collides with “the sordid, matter-of-fact worries incident on having very little money.”')
In 1894, Yandell went to Paris, where she studied with Frederick William MacMonnies and other instructors at the Académie Vitti in Montparnasse. Yandell also worked with Auguste Rodin. She returned to Paris frequently, maintaining a studio there and exhibiting at the Paris Salon.
In 1898 Yandell became the first woman member to join the National Sculpture Society. In 1899 her sister Elsie married the architect Donn Barber. Yandell died on June 12, 1934, in Boston, Massachusetts, and is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, Section O, Lot 396.
Daniel Boone sculpture
Sculptures by Yandell include a nine-foot statue of Daniel Boone, which was commissioned by the Filson Club of Louisville and exhibited outside the Kentucky Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Yandell completed a plaster cast which was shown at several exhibitions before C. C. Bickel finally arranged to have the work cast in bronze for the city of Louisville in 1906. The Daniel Boone sculpture survived the Super Outbreak of tornadoes on April 3, 1974, and is now located in Cherokee Park, Louisville, Kentucky. Another casting of the Boone statue was made in 1967 and placed on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky.
Tennessee Centennial International Exposition
At age 27, Yandell was commissioned to create a monumental sculpture of Pallas Athena for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition. The Greek sculpture was in keeping with Nashville's nickname as "The Athens of the South."
Yandell created the statue in her studio in Paris. She based the design on the Pallas de Velletri, found near Rome, Italy, in the eighteenth century, which was itself a copy of an ancient Greek statue. It depicted Athena with one arm raised victoriously and the other arm with upturned palm in a gesture of welcome. The 40-foot sculpture was shipped to Nashville in sections by ship. The statue was assembled in Nashville and stood before the exposition's Fine Arts Building, which was built as a full-size replica of the Parthenon in Athens.
Like other statues in the exhibition, Yandell's Athena was made from staff, a non-permanent building material. The sculpture was never cast in bronze and within a year it deteriorated to pieces. The Nashville Parthenon was rebuilt in permanent materials, and still stands today. An entirely different Athena statue by Alan LeQuire, unveiled in 1990, stands inside the Nashville Parthenon.