Girl Skating by St. Leger Eberle in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2020

Girl Skating
1906

Mary Abastenia St. Leger Eberle American


Object Details

Title: Girl Skating

Artist: Mary Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (American, Webster City, Iowa 1878–1942 New York)

Date: 1906

Medium: Bronze

Dimensions: 13 x 11 1/4 x 6 1/4 in. (33 x 28.6 x 15.9 cm)

Classification: Sculpture

Credit Line: Rogers Fund, 1909

Accession Number: 09.57


Girl Skating is a sympathetic portrayal of a child hurtling forward on just one roller skate. She utters an excited cry, her outstretched arms balancing her body against the wind that sweeps back her hair and presses her ragged dress against her torso and thighs. The work reveals Eberle as an artist with a social conscience, who saw it as her mission to serve as "the specialized eye of society" through her statuettes of the urban poor, especially those living on New York’s Lower East Side. As she explained: "The children of the East Side play without restraint; their griefs and their joys are expressed with absolute abandon. . . . They are real—real as they can be. They express life."

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/480520