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American sculptor

Bessie Potter Vonnoh (August 17, 1872 – March 8, 1955) was an American sculptor best known for her small bronzes, mostly of domestic scenes, and for her garden fountains. Her stated artistic objective, as she told an interviewer in 1925, was to “look for beauty in the every day world, to catch the joy and swing of modern American life.”

In March 1903, the New York Times noted that the Vonnohs were two of a dozen painters and sculptors who got together to create a building specifically for their studios, at 27 West Sixty Seventh Street in Manhattan. In mid 1903, the Vonnohs began summering in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and became long time members of its Old Lyme Art Colony. Vonnoh's small scale works were suited to the size and style of the average American home, and had broad appeal. Many of her works, such as Water lilies, were portraits. Vonnoh's statue Water lilies (1913) was based on the daughter of fellow artists Helen Savier and Frank DuMond at Lyme. In December 1912, the New York Times, writing about her works at the New York Academy of Art, called her figurines "lovely", of a "charming style", and said "we must applaud once more her skillful harmonizing of detail in the contemporary costume, her selection of the most distinguished line for emphasis." In 1915, Vonnoh exhibited in the Armory Show. In 1921, she was elected an academician of the National Academy of Design. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1931. In 1933, her husband died at age 75. In 1937, Vonnoh completed her best known large scale work, the Burnett Memorial Fountain in Central Park.

After her first husband's death, Vonnoh produced relatively little. She married again in 1948, to Dr. Edward L. Keyes, Jr., a widower, who died only nine months later. Vonnoh herself died in New York City in 1955, at age 82. She is buried alongside her first husband, Robert Vonnoh (1858 – 1933), in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut.