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Mar. 1955 8th
Bessie Potter Vonnoh Dies; Her Sculpture in Museums

Mrs. Bessie Potter Vonnoh Keyes, eighty-two, who as Bessie Potter Vonnoh became one of the nation's best-known sculptors, died Monday at her home, 33 W. 67th St.

A tiny woman who loomed large in her chosen field, Mrs. Keyes approached her work with a practical viewpoint that belied the delicate artistry of the result. She regarded it respectfully as a job into which she must put her very best.

Mrs. Keyes had little time for indulgence in "artistic temperament," which she bluntly described as "artistic bunk." When controversy over the bizarre in art was at its height, she told an interviewer, "Bizarre art is like hiccups or measles. It must wear itself off. Ugliness as long as it represents character is not to be deplored. It is actually desirable. But neither ugliness because it is ugly nor prettiness because it is pretty has any cause for existence."

Sense of Humor
She also was endowed with a sense of humor, enough to tell another interviewer that after more than thirty years of prominence as a sculptor, her work was shown in museums in almost every important city in the nation——except in her native city of St. Louis.

Mrs. Keyes, then Bessie Potter, was brought up in Chicago, where she was introduced to sculpture as a child in school. Before she was in the eighth grade she had been introduced to Lorado Taft, who suggested that she be sent to the Chicago Art Institute.

She had just finished three years of study there when the Chicago World's Fair started, and she worked with Mr. Taft and others on sculptors for it. She did an eight-foot figure for the Woman's Building and also exhibited in the Art Gallery.

It was while she was working in Mr. Taft's studio before the fair that she met Robert W. Vonnoh, a distinguished painter. She later recalled that they became engaged after she had accepted commissions to do a heroic bust of Maj. Gen. S. W. Crawford for the Smith Memorial in Philadelphia and a life-size figure of Maude Adams for the Exposition of 1900 in Paris.

Mrs. Keyes' first exhibition was in 1891, when she was not quite twenty, and she said she "turned professional" in 1894 when she rented her first studio. After her work at the Chicago Fair and in Europe, she received the Julia A. Shaw prize for "Enthroned," and was elected a member of the Society of American Artists. She won the John J. Agar prize at the exhibition of the Society of Women Sculptors in 1920.

Among her best known works in the metropolitan area are a bust of Dr. Frank M. Chapman in the American Museum of Natural History, the Theodore Roosevelt bird fountain memorial at Oyster Bay, L.I., and the Frances Hodgson Burnett Memorial Children's Fountain in Central Park.

Work in Museums
She also is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cochran Art Gallery in Washington, and the Brooklyn Museum. She was a member of the National Academy of Design, the National Sculpture Society, and the National Arts Club.

Her first husband, Mr. Vonnoh, died in 1933. She was married in 1948 to Dr. Edward L. Keyes, famed urologist, who died the following year. No immediate relatives survive.