Dogwood Garden and Dogwood Pond

Dogwood Garden

A.A. Weinman must have thought of Apollo in his Riders of the Dawn, the sun god who made the daily voyage from horizon to horizon. However, this god is on horseback and the myth described a flaming chariot, so maybe not.

Berthold Nebel’s Nereid is a sea nymph in the Greek tradition. In this piece, she lounges on the back of a lion and rests an elbow on its head.

Walter Rotan’s Reclining Woman with Gazelle evokes the many occasions when Zeus assumed the form of an animal in order to lie with a beautiful young woman.

Joseph Nicolosi’s Dream continues this theme with a sleeping girl resting her head on the forehead of a doe and encircling an arm around the animal, just as a child might hug a plush toy.

Joseph Renier’s Pomona drapes a wrap around her arms and swivels her torso in a cross-legged position to look over her right shoulder. Pomona was the goddess of fruitful abundance in the Roman religion, and unlike most goddesses, she had no Greek counterpart.

Dogwood Pond

Albert Wein’s Phryne Before the Judges depends heavily on your liberal arts education to make sense of the sculpture. A man standing behind Phryne is removing her robe, revealing all. According to the myth, Phryne was a famed beauty and courtesan brought up on charges of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries. By some accounts, her defense attorney chose the unique legal tactic of removing her robe before the judges as a means of tipping the scales of justice in her favor. In another version of the fable, she tore off her own robe. In any event, she was acquitted.

Willard Hirsch’s Joy of Motherhood balances a curly-haired baby on the knees of a precariously reclining young woman. She dandles her small baby on her knee right at the brink of a vast, dark body of water.

Charles Parks created American St. Francis, a young man with two dogs and a fox, an apparent salute to the Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals.