Frederick Charles Shrady (October 22, 1907, East View, New York — January 20, 1990, Easton, Connecticut) was an American painter and sculptor, best known for his religious sculptures.[1]
Biography
The son of the sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady, he graduated from the Choate School in Connecticut, studied painting at the Art Students' League in New York City, and attended Oxford University in England. He moved to Paris, France, in 1931, studied under Yasushi Tanaka, and lived and painted there for nine years. He was awarded a medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition.
He married in Europe, and returned to the United States in 1940, with his wife and young son, Henry.
He joined the U.S. Army during World War II, and served as one of the Monuments Men, helping to retrieve looted art.[2] In Bavaria, he met Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff (1924-2002), an Austrian translator with the U.S. Army Fine Arts and Monuments Department, who became his second wife.[3] They had six children.
He converted from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism in 1948, and turned to painting religious subjects. In 1950, he completed his first sculpture.
Clare Boothe Luce's 19-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, a student at Stanford University, was killed in a 1944 automobile accident. In her memory, Luce built Saint Ann's Chapel near the campus in Palo Alto, California, and commissioned works of art to adorn it. Shrady's colossal bronze sculpture on the building's facade, Saint Ann and the Virgin Mary, portrays the mother (St. Ann) teaching her young daughter (the Virgin Mary) how to read.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II commissioned him to create a statue of Our Lady of Fatima for the Vatican Gardens. He was the first American artist to receive such a papal commission.
Saint Francis Feeding the Birds (1983), formerly in front of Egan Chapel, it now stands in-between the DiMenna-Nyselius Library, and the Marion Peckham Egan School of Nursing & Health Studies, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut.[29]
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