Clark Mills (sculptor)
Clark Mills (September 1, 1815 – January 12, 1883) was an American sculptor, best known for four versions of an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, located in Washington, D.C., with replicas in Nashville, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Florida, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Early years Mills was born on September 1, 1815, near Syracuse, in Onondaga County, New York. When his father passed away he was sent to his uncle's but found that he was too harsh so he ran away. He had very little formal education. Before he turned 22, he had worked as a "teamster, lumberjack, farmhand, carpenter, and millwright." When he was quite young Mills was apprenticed to a millwright in New York. When he was twenty years old, in 1835, he overwintered in New Orleans. In 1837, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he began to work as an ornamental plasterer. In the 1840s, he developed a faster, easier method of making plaster life-masks, which he then used to make portrait busts. E. Wayne Craven, author of the 1968 book Sculpture in America, wrote that "What he learned he acquired from the life-mask itself, and this established his style as one strongly dependent upon naturalism." His first stone