Neil Carl Estern was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1926. He discovered sculpture at a young age in nearby Prospect Park, site of many spectacular 19th century figurative sculptures. The boy who played among these inspiring monuments had no idea that one day his own portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy would feature prominently at the main entrance to the park. 

 Estern graduated from the Tyler School of Art & Architecture in 1948. For many years he divided his time between Brooklyn, NY and the vicinity of the medieval Italian town of Pietrasanta, where Michelangelo created the David and the location of a bronze foundry that has been in continuous operation for centuries. For the last decades of his life Estern worked out of a studio he built at his home in rural Northwest Connecticut. 

 He created several public works in addition to the JFK bust at Grand Army Plaza. These include Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village, NY; Eleanor Roosevelt for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; several commemorative plaques in Prospect Park and elsewhere, and most prominently, a 9’ seated statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the centerpiece of the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C. Controversially, Estern chose to respect FDR’s wish to downplay his disability, depicting the president seated in his favorite chair (which had been modified with inconspicuous castors at the bottom) instead of a traditional wheelchair which many felt would be more appropriate for the modern era.

 Estern’s body of work includes intimate portraits of friends, family, fellow artists, historical figures and nudes, some of which are in museums and private collections. He also had a long career as a commercial artist working in the toy industry. Collaborating with his wife, Anne Estern, he created many original and remarkably lifelike dolls which today have become highly collectable. If a single thread can be said to connect Neil Estern’s life’s work, both commercial and artistic, it would be an unwavering conviction that the human form is the most perfect and beautiful structure in the natural world. 

 During a period in which abstracted and exaggerated depictions of the body were the accepted norm in the art world, and interestingly the doll business as well (Barbie, for example), Estern’s work remained firmly connected to classical realism and the monumental sculptors who had so profoundly influenced him throughout his lifetime.