Diana, Paul Manship

Paul Manship was considered to be America’s greatest sculptor in the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is perhaps best known for his large Prometheus Fountain at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Manship combined preclassical and non-Western traditions with modern streamlined form to create a vigorous new style known as Art Deco. Diana is a prime example of his elegant, decorative manner. This sculpture illustrates part of the story of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt and the hunter Acteon. Acteon surprised Diana while she was bathing and to punish him for seeing her nude, the goddess shoots him with an arrow that turns him into a stag. Here, Diana is seen leaping through the air in the moment immediately after she has released the arrow from her bow.

The artist gave this over-life-sized, original plaster model to the museum in 1947.