10/08/2026
This week's features Sculptor Katherine Thayer Hobson, FNSS (1889-1982).
Hobson lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her sculptures of racehorses, war memorials, and portrait busts.
Hobson was born in Denver, Colorado and received her education in the United States and continued her art studies in Europe. Her early career focused on commissioned portrait busts, war memorials, and relief sculptures, including a relief of St. George (1945) at St. James Episcopal Church in New York City, and a World War I memorial installed in Dresden during the 1920s. In the mid-1960s, after watching the horse Buckpasser win a stakes race, Hobson sculpted his bust, after which she earned additional commissions for the racehorses Dr. Fager and Ruffian. On the craft of sculpting, Hobson had this to say:
“Personally, I believe in realistic sculpture. Art is a form of expression, and unless I can coherently communicate my pleasure, anger, grief, fear or love to the people who see my work, I have been speaking a foreign language. Besides this, there is a personal working pleasure in technique, such as a violinist must feel when he plays some very difficult passage.”
