The work of only six sculptors represents the 19th century. Three pieces are by French artists, Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean Léopold Morice, and Auguste Rodin, and three are by Americans, Randolph Rogers, Thomas Ball, and Frederick William MacMonnies. Barye's famous Theseus Combating the Minotaur of 1846 is the only piece dating from the first half of the century. Rodin's Fauness of ca. 1882-1884 exemplifies the expressive modeling that replaced the strict academic style at the end of the century. Morice's equestrian figure of Napoleon is a decorative piece of 1870 harking back to an earlier imperial age. The American sculptors all had studios in Rome or spent some time there. Ball's Emancipation Group of 1873 and Rogers's Indian Hunting Boy of 1866-67, both executed in white marble, exhibit the effects of this experience and the taste for a pure neoclassical style that was current in America in the second half of the century. MacMonnies's bronze Nathan Hale of 1890 subtly imbues one of the heroes of early American history with the ennobling values of classical rhetoric.

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