Sundial, Boy With Spider is an outdoor sculpture and functional sundial

Sundial

A sundial is a device that measures time by the position of the Sun. In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from its style onto a surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day. The style is the time-telling edge of the gnomon, often a thin rod or a...

 by American artist Willard Dryden Paddock

Willard Dryden Paddock

Willard Dryden Paddock , was an American artist who specialized in painting and sculpting. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under the tutelage of sculptor Herbert Adams, before traveling to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi under the painters...

 (1873-1956). It is located within the Oldfields

Oldfields

Oldfields also known as Lilly House and Gardens, is a 26 acre historic estate and house museum on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The estate, an example of the American country house movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was...

 estate on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Indianapolis Museum of Art

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is an encyclopedic art museum located in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The museum, which underwent a $74 million expansion in 2005, is located on a campus on the near northwest area outside downtown Indianapolis, northwest of Crown Hill Cemetery.The...

 (IMA), in Indianapolis

Indianapolis

Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...

, Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

. The bronze

Bronze

Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...

 sculpture, cast by the Gorham Manufacturing Company

Gorham Manufacturing Company

The Gorham Manufacturing Company is an American manufacturer of sterling and silverplate.-History:Gorham Silver was founded in Providence, Rhode Island 1831 by Jabez Gorham, a master craftsman, in partnership with Henry L. Webster. The firm's chief product was spoons of coin silver. The company...

, depicts a boy sitting cross-legged with an open scroll in his lap.

Description

A young boy sits with his ankles crossed and knees spread, holding a sundial in the form of a scroll in his lap; this scroll is marked in a grid of lines with month names and geographic coordinates. In his lap beneath the scroll sits a bundle of flowers. The boy’s proper left hand rests on his left knee. His proper right hand, which is in contact with his head, casually holds a twig over the scroll. A wire wrapped around the end of the twig hangs straight down to the base, where it is affixed. A bronze spider is affixed to the wire in the correct place to act as the gnomon

Gnomon

The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts the shadow. Gnomon is an ancient Greek word meaning "indicator", "one who discerns," or "that which reveals."It has come to be used for a variety of purposes in mathematics and other fields....

 of the sundial. (The wire, twig, and spider are restorations from 2004.) The boy rests on an oval base.

Scroll

Inscribed on the scroll are a grid of lines and analemmas

Analemma

In astronomy, an analemma is a curve representing the angular offset of a celestial body from its mean position on the celestial sphere as viewed from another celestial body relative to the viewing body's celestial equator...

 marked with months, dates, and hours sufficient to plot the time over the course of the year, as well as a set of coordinates that mark the original location of the sculpture:

Lat 39º, 50 N 86º, 10 W Long

Inscribed on the proper left bottom corner:

Dial Marking by Albert C. Crehore, inventor

Base

Cast in relief along the edge of the base in Roman letters:

MARK YE THE HOURS OF LIGHT THAT SLIP AWAY ~ ~ ~ SPIN THEN THY HOUR OF SUNLIGHT WHILE YE MAY ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Inscribed on the base at proper left:

© by Willard Paddock Sculptor

Scpt. | 1916 1917

PAT. FEB 26 1918-

Stamped along base rim under “WHILE”:

O. BFC GORHAM CO. FOUNDERS

Condition

The bronze sculpture is monitored, cleaned, and treated regularly by the IMA art conservation staff. The surface of the bronze is protected from deterioration and corrosion by the yearly application of a fresh coat of hard wax. This sculpture was surveyed in July of 1993 of as part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture database, and it was considered to be well maintained. In 2004 the IMA conservation staff undertook a major treatment of the sculpture in which the surface was repatinated to unify the color and improve its readability, and the newly fabricated wire and spider gnomon were added to restore the functionality of the sundial. In June 2011, the wire and spider are currently missing from the sundial.

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