Modeled by Frederick W. MacMonnies in Paris in 1893–94, "Bacchante and Infant Faun" epitomizes the dramatic quality of the French Beaux-Arts style that dominated American sculpture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The sculpture captures a nude young woman in exuberant motion, her right toes on the ground and her right arm holding a bunch of grapes high over her head. Her left knee pushes upward in a dancing motion, and with her left hand she secures a nude infant sitting in the crook of her elbow. MacMonnies first presented the bronze statue to the American architect Charles Follen McKim in appreciation for a fifty-dollar loan that had facilitated MacMonnies's trip abroad in 1884. McKim intended it for the courtyard of the neo-Renaissance Boston Public Library that his firm, McKim, Mead and White, had designed for Copley Square. After a great storm of public protest stirred by temperance unions, clergy, and other angry Bostonians against the statue's "drunken indecency," McKim withdrew the gift and then offered "Bacchante" to the Metropolitan in May 1897. The Board of Trustees enthusiastically accepted it, and the bronze was displayed for many years in the Museum's Great Hall with other examples of modern sculpture. Because of the statue's enormous popularity, numerous reductions of it were cast in two sizes. There are also four smaller bronze versions (68 in. H.), two large marble replicas, and three other located over-life-size bronzes.

• Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

  Signature: [top of base, right]: [cursive] F MacMonnies / 1893
  
  Marking: [foundry mark, back of base, bottom edge]: THIEBAUT. FRERES. Fondeurs. PARIS

• Provenance

  the artist (until 1894); Charles Follen McKim, New York (until 1897)

• Timeline of Art History (2000–present)
  Thematic Essays

  Americans in Paris, 1860–1900

  From Model to Monument: American Public Sculpture, 1865–1915

  Timelines

  The United States and Canada, 1800–1900 A.D.
• MetPublications
  American Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1965)

  American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865 (1999)

  Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor (1985)

  Bronze and Iron: Ancient Near Eastern Artifacts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1988)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (1994)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Arabic) (2014)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Chinese) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (French) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (German) (2014)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Italian) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Japanese) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Korean) (2014)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Portuguese) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Russian) (2014)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (Spanish) (2012)

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 9, The United States of America (1987)

  Nineteenth-Century America: Paintings and Sculpture (1970)

  One Met. Many Worlds. (2014)

  A Walk Through The American Wing (2002)