1889-92
John Hemenway Duncan

The bronze quadriga, The Triumphal Progress of Columbia, by Brooklyn-born Frederick W. MacMonnies, was installed in 1898, followed in 1901 by MacMonnies’s The Army: Genius of Patriotism Urging American Soldiers on to Victory. The spandrel sculpture is by Philip Martiny, and the inner walls of the arch are graced by bronze reliefs bearing equestrian portraits of Abraham Lincoln (the only known equestrian depiction of the sixteenth president) and of Ulysses S. Grant, by Thomas Eakins and William R. O’Donovan. Architectural historian Henry Hope Reed said this is the “finest triumphal arch of modern times, second only to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,” and one of America’s greatest works of art. The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch is a NYC Individual Landmark and listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places.