A sculptor who played a significant role in making sculpture in America generally popular, Chauncey Ives completed many idealized portrait busts and life-size Neoclassical figures in marble.

Most of his subjects were either from Greek mythology or romantic literature. A reoccurring theme was the vulnerability of women, a popular 19th-century idea that he expressed through innocent, modest looking female nudes. Ives, following in the wake of Hiram Powers, was one of the increasing number of sculptors able to depict nudes as long as they were cloaked in a bit of drapery in classical motifs.

Ives was born on a family farm near New Haven, Connecticut, and his early talent for art and distaste for farming led his father to apprent...