Arthur C. Morgan

Arthur C. Morgan (1904–1994) was an American sculptor, mostly of Louisiana political and business figures. Morgan's work can be seen across his home state of Louisiana and in the Capitol Visitor Center, Washington, DC. He and his wife Gladys B. Morgan ran an art school, the Southwestern Institute of Arts, in their Shreveport home for over forty years. Born Arthur Carmine Morgan on August 3, 1904, at Riverton Plantation in Ascension Parish, he was educated in Louisiana public and private schools. At an early age Morgan went to New England and New York, where he attended art schools and graduated from Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, a mostly vocational art school in New York City. He became a private pupil and protégé of Gutzon Borglum and worked in the studios of Mario Korbel, Attilio Piccirilli, and others. Morgan began exhibiting his work at age fifteen. At least one critic called him a "boy prodigy." At age sixteen in 1920 Morgan was given his first commission, for a bust of physician Simon Baruch (father of financier Bernard M. Baruch). This led to more commissions for busts and bas-reliefs, often in bronze. He also made decorative bronzes and garden sculptures. In 1928 Morgan went back to Louisiana to begin work on a proposed Longfellow Evangeline national monument at Bayou Teche in St. Martinville. Although Morgan worked in New Orleans on models for the project, it ended at that stage owing to funding woes. That same year Morgan settled permanently in Shreveport where he taught sculpture, drawing and art history at Centenary College. There he met faculty member and watercolor artist Gladys Butler (born 1899), whom he married on July 26, 1929, in McDonald County, Missouri. In 1934 the Morgans left the college and began an art and music school in their home, calling it the Southwestern Institute of Arts. The Morgans had two daughters, Diana Morgan Welsh (born 1930) and Cynthia Butler Morgan (born 1932). Cynthia died in May 1936 following a house fire.