Nathan Hale

Sculptor Frederick MacMonnies portrayed Nathan Hale, an American soldier and spy captured during the Revolutionary War, in the moments before he was killed by the British in 1776. MacMonnies rendered the bronze figure with naturalistic details: his waved locks of hair, parted overcoat and rumpled 18th-century dress, and ropes tied around his upper arms and ankles. Hale’s deliberate gaze and the open gesture of his hands convey a strong emotive quality attuned to the finality of the imminent punishment. This is a reduced version of the large-scale sculpture Nathan Hale installed in City Hall Park in New York, one of MacMonnies’s first public commissions.