Papers of Cornelia Chapin, 1822-1959

Cornelia Van Auken Chapin was born in 1893 at Waterford, near New London, Connecticut. She was the youngest child of Lindley Hoffman Chapin and Cornelia Garrison Van Auken Chapin, and part of a prominent family. Cornelia Chapin was a descendant of Judge George Andrews, who presided in the trials of former slave traders, and Cornelius Garrison, a wealthy merchant involved with the building of railroads. Cornelia Garrison Van Auken Chapin and her mother, Catherine Andrews, were very active in the New York City social scene in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Chapin's sister was poet Katherine Biddle, and her brother in-law Francis Biddle was a former United States Attorney General.

Chapin spent her childhood in New York City where she attended private schools, and also traveled extensively in Europe, often keeping diaries and notes about her travels. Her interests included book collecting, dramatics, and aeronautics; she became one of the first women to receive a pilot's license. Though she had previously dabbled in pencil sketches and watercolors, in the early 1920's, Cornelia Chapin decided that sculpture was her main interest, and she studied with Gail Sherman Corbett. In 1930 she began to exhibit her work, and in 1934 she studied in Paris as the only pupil of Mateo Hernandez. From Hernandez Chapin learned the art of direct carving, and from that time on, all of her exhibited works were carved directly from life in stone and wood, without making preliminary models or sketches.

Cornelia Chapin is noted for her stone models of birds and animals, although in later years she added human figures to her repertoire. She quickly gained wide renown and exhibited in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California, Washington, DC, New Jersey, Maine, and Paris; lectured informally at museums and schools on "Carving Direct From Life, Some Tales and Tools"; and was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Design in 1945. Chapin was also active in numerous artistic organizations, maintaining memberships in the National Sculpture Society, the "Philadelphia Ten" (a group of female artists who exhibited work in Philadelphia), and Artists for Victory, Inc. She was as well the only foreign and only woman sculptor elected to the Societaire Salon d'Automne, Paris (in 1936). Chapin won numerous awards and prizes for her sculptures during the 1930's and 1940's.

After returning to the United States in 1939, Chapin worked in a New York City studio which had formerly belonged to sculptor Gutzon Borglum, sharing the space with friend and fellow sculptor Marion Sanford. In their later years, Chapin and Sanford lived and worked together in Lakeville, Connecticut, where Chapin remained until her death in 1972.