Medal of Award, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco

This gold medal was awarded to Fulper Pottery for its display at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The medal was donated to the Museum along with one of the monumental vases (1984.256) that flanked the entry to the Fulper Pottery display at the fair.
Flanagan was a pupil and studio assistant of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in New York and later studied under Alexandre Falguière at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although he produced numerous life-size sculptures, it was ultimately Flanagan’s coins and medals that established his artistic reputation. The obverse bears an ambitious composition of two nudes representing the joining of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. The reverse presents a detailed architectural rendering of Thomas Hastings’s Tower of Jewels behind Alexander Stirling Calder’s "Fountain of Energy."