Albert Laessle

Artist Biography

Animal sculptor Albert Laessle, associated with the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1877. Taking a page from similar criticism leveled against the great French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, Laessle recalled that his work was so realistic, that, as a young artist, his fellow students accused him of casting his animals directly from life, rather than modeling them. Whereupon Laessle made a wax sculpture of the same subject to prove them wrong.

Two Laessle sculptures, Locust and Pine Cone and Frog and Butterfly are in The Peabody Art Collection, in the Maryland State Archives, Annapolis. Albert Laessle sculpted lions to flank the three portals of the loggia of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, California. His 1917 sculpture of Penguins, may be found in Fairmount Park (East Park and West Park on the banks of the Schuylkill River) in Philadelphia and Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. Laessle’s two-foot-high sculpture of a goat, Billy, based on an animal belonging to the Laessle family, has stood since 1919 in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. A park at the Walt Whitman Center, in Camden, New Jersey, has Laessle’s 1928 sculptural group of Pan, Dancing Goat, and Duck and Turtle Fountain. Johnson Park, in that city, also features Laessle’s animal sculpture.

Laessle’s sculptures can be found in numerous public collections, including: Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; and The Baltimore Museum of Art.