Plaster painted dark brown, circa 1929. Approximately 230 mm; 9 inches high. With the artist's name inscribed, at the edge of the base verso.
Provenance: private New York collection.
Gamin has come to symbolize African-American sculpture in the Harlem Renaissance. This fine example is the smaller painted plaster version of the life-size bronze made by Augusta Savage, which represents a turning point in her career. Theresa Leininger-Miller describes how Gamin brought Savage success at the end of the 1920s. Out of 10 works on display at Harlem's 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, Charles Russell Richards, the art director of the General Education Board of New York, singled out Savage, recognizing Gamin as a significant work. Two Harlem businessmen, Eugene Kinckle Jones, of the National Urban League, and John E. Nail, father-in-law of James Weldon Jones, also singled out Gamin for acclaim.
The sculpture was illustrated on the cover of Opportunity in June 1929, and exhibited at the Harmon Foundation in 1930. It also earned the artist a scholarship from the Rosenwald Foundation. Other versions are found today in the collections of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Howard University Art Museum, Washington, DC and the University of Virgina Art Museum. Leininger-Miller pp. 178-179; Bearden/Henderson p. 172.
