Later Years
In between commissions Proctor frequently returned to the West for rejuvenation and inspiration, seeking out members of various Native American tribes to pose for his works.
On a hunting trip to Alaska in 1947 Proctor shot a bear, seventy years to the day after which he had bagged his first one.
Proctor died in Palo Alto, California, where he was living with his daughter, just a few days before his ninetieth birthday.
A sculptor of the "old school," Proctor resisted even the vestiges of modernism that many of his contemporaries adopted. Examples of his legacy are scattered from coast to coast throughout America. As one of the witnesses of the death of the old America (many other artists saw only the birth of the new one) Proctor’s works showing the animals and peoples of frontier America remain popular and as vital today as when he produced them.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Phimister Proctor
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“It would astonish if not amuse, the older citizens of your County who twelve years ago knew me a stranger, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat—at ten dollars per month to learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)