Isaac Newton Phelps

In May 1854, Isaac Newton Phelps (1820-1888), a successful businessman and banker, sailed to Europe with his wife and two daughters. While in Rome, Phelps commissioned Ives, who by then had a solid artistic reputation in the Eternal City, to make this bust, as well as a bust of Sarah, his older daughter, and a statue of the younger Helen (later Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes) who recalled that everyone except her mother was "immortalized in marble" by Ives. The finely wrought bust of Phelps captures his intelligent and serious features as well as the fashionable hairstyle. The likeness is alert and truthful and reveals the artist’s neoclassical bent, as he depicted his subject draped in a toga, a typical portrait convention.