Hezekiah Augur was an early American sculptor and inventor. He was a self-taught sculptor and, unlike many other 19th Century sculptors did not travel to Europe, but spent his entire career in New Haven.

Augur was born in New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...

. The son of a carpenter, he learned his trade as a woodcarver, carving table legs and other furniture ornament. Borrowing $2,000 from his father he was invited to join a grocery store business venture. Three years later he discovered, to his shock and amazement, that not only was his money gone, but that he owed his partners $7,000. While thus engaged he invented a lace making machine that lifted the financial burdens that he had assumed and thus allowed him to take up carving full time. Around that time he also invented a machine for carving piano legs. He switched to marble later in his career, being among the first native born Americans to do so.

Augur's bust of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Ellsworth

Oliver Ellsworth

Oliver Ellsworth was an American lawyer and politician, a revolutionary against British rule, a drafter of the United States Constitution, and the third Chief Justice of the United States. While at the Federal Convention, Ellsworth moved to strike the word National from the motion made by Edmund...

 (ca. 1837) is housed in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States United States Capitol

United States Capitol

The United States Capitol is the meeting place of the United States Congress, the legislature of the federal government of the United States. Located in Washington, D.C., it sits atop Capitol Hill at the eastern end of the National Mall...

. A portrait of Alexander Metcalf Fisher (ca. 1827) and a neo-classical

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

 grouping, Jephthah and His Daughter (ca. 1832), are in the Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 art collection, and in 1833 Auger received an honorary degree from Yale University. He died on January 10, 1858 in New Haven and is buried in Grove Street Cemetery.

Sources

• Compilation of Works of Art and Other Objects in the United States Capitol, Prepared by the Architect of the Capitol under the Joint Committee on the Library, United States Government Printing House, Washington, 1965

• Craven, Wayne, Sculpture in America, Thomas Y. Crowell Co, NY, NY 1968

• Augur, E. P., The Augur Family (Middletown, Connecticut, 1904)

• Freedman, Frank & Bernstein, American Sculpture at Yale University, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1992

• Greenthal, Kozol, Rameirez & Fairbanks, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1986

• Opitz, Glenn B , Editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986

• Taft, Lorado, The History of American Sculpture, MacMillan Co., New York, NY 1925