Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Mundy, Johnson Marchant

MUNDY, Johnson Marchant, sculptor, b. near New Brunswick, N. J., 13 May, 1832; d. in Tarrytown, N. Y., 16 Aug., 1897. His boyhood was spent at Geneva, N. Y. He showed early a tendency toward copying nature, and at the age of twelve received his first instruction in the use of crayon. Not long after he secured employment with a marble-cutter in New York, and in the spring of 1884 he entered the studio of Henry K. Brown, of Newburg, who was working at that time upon the equestrian statue of Washington now in Union square. His first work in marble was a portrait bust of President Benjamin Hale, executed for the Geneva chapter of &Alpha; &Delta; &Phi;, which he began in 1860. Leaving Brown in 1881, he in 1868 settled in Rochester, where he established the first school in that city for instruction in drawing and in modelling. During his twenty years' residence in Rochester be executed many busts, statuettes, and medallions. From an early age, however, his eyesight had been defective, and by 1883 his left eye had become entirely blind and the sight of his right eye seriously impaired. He removed to his sister's home at Tarrytown, and there, guided by the sense of touch alone, he modelled the statue for the soldiers' monument at Tarrytown, unveiled on Memorial day, 1890, and his statue of Washington Irving, which he completed in 1891.