André Harvey, Sculptor of the Natural World, Dies at 76

By 1969, André Harvey had been a writer and a teacher, but he could not envision continuing happily in either career. Then, on a yearlong trip abroad with his wife, Bobbie, he peered into an art gallery in Vallauris, France, and was struck by the abstract welded sculptures in the window.

Sculpture, he told his wife on the spot, was what he wanted to do.

But he had no artistic training. So he persuaded the gallery owner to teach him welding, and with his wife helping to make pottery in the gallery’s nearby studio, they were paid in meals.

After Harvey returned to the United States, his education continued. He learned mold-making while working, without pay, for the noted sculptor Charles Parks in Delaware.

The tutelage paid off. Harvey became a masterly sculptor of intricately detailed, realistic bronze figures whose works were exhibited by Tiffany & Co. in its Fifth Avenue flagship store, have been collected by museums, and were purchased by Henry Fonda, Jamie Wyeth, Barry Manilow and Danielle Steel.

Some of the sculptures are small. Some are enormous. Pigs, frogs and turtles are special members of his menagerie, but he also sculpted penguins, manatees, cows, goats and birds. There were depictions of humans, too, as well as a hornet’s nest, a ginkgo leaf and dry fruits called samara.

David Cole, executive director of the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, called Harvey a throwback to the 19th- and early 20th-century sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose gilded bronze monument to Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman stands in Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan. And his belief in the natural world’s transcendence, Cole said, linked him to Thoreau and Emerson.

“What defines his work,” Cole said in a telephone interview, “is that it is not only attentive to the forms of the natural world, but all his subjects seem to be alive. Even his plants seem to be pulsating.”

Harvey, who died Feb. 6 at 76 in Wilmington, produced one last sculpture about a year and a half ago: an oversize study of a daddy longlegs spider. On his website, where he described his sculptures, he wrote, “Early daddy longleg encounters stick in our brain and remain so embedded that, as adults, we can time-travel the long, dusty road back to our childhood.”

His wife, the former Roberta Rush, said the cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Harvey’s wildlife models included a group of pigs at the New Bolton Center School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Kennett Square, where Roberta Harvey was a laboratory technician. He plied the pigs with corn so they would be accustomed to his presence in their pen. One especially friendly sow routinely sat near Harvey and his portable sculpting table as if she were a paid model.

That cooperative pig inspired the creation of “Portrait Sitter,” a tabletop 15-pound sculpture. It was followed by “Helen,” another sitting pig that weighed in at 400 pounds.

“It’s not unusual for some of my larger subjects to take over a year to make,” Harvey told the website Town Square Delaware in 2011. “I guess the reason I study my subjects so closely for so long is I want to capture more than their look. I want to get their more elusive feel. To me, that is when a sculpture is successful, be it animal, human or object.” Harvey produced limited editions of all his sculptures. One of his 25 “Helens” was stolen from the front of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1995. “We were afraid that it might have ended up in the Brandywine,” Harvey recalled in a telephone interview. “André said, ‘I’ll bet it was a bunch of drunk kids.'”

The statue was rescued from a nearby barn several days later, and Pennsylvania state police arrested three teenagers. It was eventually returned to its place outside the museum and anchored more securely to the ground.

William André Harvey was born on Oct. 9, 1941, in Hollywood, Florida, and grew up in Pocopson, Pennsylvania, about 35 miles west of Philadelphia. His father, Edmund, was a conservationist who founded Delaware Wild Lands, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the state’s land and water resources. His mother, the former Jeanne Bright, was a homemaker.

Harvey’s rural upbringing near a creek provided some inspiration for his art: A farmhouse on his family’s property had a cow and chickens, and he and his brother Rusty enjoyed playing with snakes.

Years later, Rusty brought his pet raccoon to his brother’s studio as a model for a sculpture of a raccoon with a fish in its mouth.

Harvey did not study art in high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Virginia, became a writer for Scholastic magazines and later taught at two schools in Delaware.

Looking to change their lives, the Harveys took off for Europe and Morocco in 1969. Their several weeks in Vallauris, where Picasso worked in the 1940s and ‘50s, “showed that another way of life was possible,” Roberta Harvey said.

In the early 1970s, shortly after Harvey began to make sculptures — in fiberglass before he could afford the expensive process of bronze casting — he received an early burst of public recognition when his work was exhibited in Tiffany’s windows, thanks to an introduction to Gene Moore, the luxury retailer’s celebrated window display director, by Trailer McQuilkin, a botanical sculptor.

The sculptures were not commissioned — Harvey did not accept commissions — so he gave Tiffany what he had.

“André had five completed sculptures, and Tiffany had five windows,” said Roberta Harvey, who ran her husband’s business.

In those early years, André Harvey was focused on mastering the complexities of sculpting and foundry work. “It was a much higher level of learning than I had ever experienced,” he told Town Square Delaware.

More than 40 years later, his sculptures are in the collections of numerous museums and public spaces.

“He was one of the best animal sculptors in the country,” Gwen Pier, executive director of the National Sculpture Society, which promotes sculpture in the United States, said in a telephone interview. “His works ring true; they’re beautifully modeled, anatomically correct, and you really get a sense of the creature.”

In addition to his wife, Harvey is survived by his sister, Sally Harvey, and his brothers, LeRoy, Tad and Bruce. He lived in Rockland, Delaware, near Wilmington. Making bronze statues is expensive and labor-intensive, but their strength and endurance appealed greatly to Harvey.

“When I wanted something to personally come from me, I wanted it to be something that would last,” he told The Morning News of Wilmington in 1986. “Bronze is a proven classic.”