THOMAS

See also:

• BALL (in Mid. Eng. bal; the word is probably cognate with " bale," Teutonic in origin, cf. also Lat. falls, and Gr. 7raXXa)
• BALL, JOHN (1585-1640)
• BALL, JOHN (1818-1889)
• BALL, JOHN (d. 1381)
• BALL, SIR ALEXANDER JOHN, BART
• THOMAS BALL (1819- )

BALL (1819- )  , American sculptor, was born at Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the 3rd of June 1819 . He was the son of a house-and-sign-painter, and after starting, self-taught, as a portrait painter he turned his attention in 1851 to sculpture, his earliest work being a bust of Jenny Lind . At thirty-five he went to Florence for study; there, with an interval of work in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857-1865, he remained for more than thirty years, being one of the artistic colony which included the Brownings and Hiram Powers . He returned to America in 1897, and lived in Montclair, New Jersey, with a studio in New York City . His work includes many early cabinet busts of musicians (he was an accomplished musician himself, and was the first in America to sing " Elijah "), and later the equestrian statue of Washington in the Boston public gardens, probably his best work; Josiah Quincy in City Hall Square, Boston; Charles Sumner in the public gardens of Boston; Daniel Webster in Central Park, New York City; the Lincoln Emancipation group at Washington; Edwin Forrest as " Coriolanus," in the Actors' Home, Philadelphia, and the Washington monument in Methuen, Massachusetts . His work has had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States and especially in New England . In 1891 he published an auto-biographical volume, My Three Score Years and Ten .