Katharine Cornell, 1930, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Queer Places:
Berkshire School, 245 N Undermountain Rd, Sheffield, MA 01257
Forest Lawn Cemetery
Buffalo, Erie County, New York, USA
Anna Glenny Dunbar (May 28, 1888 – March 19, 1980) was a sculptor and acted as honorary curator of sculpture at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy.
She was born in Buffalo, NY, on May 28, 1888, the daughter od Bryant Burwell Glenny (1848–1917) and Charlotte Stedman Miller (1864–1946). Since 1901 they lived in a 320-acre property called Bella Vista on Undermountain Road, Sheffield, nesltled below Mount Everett. Anna Glenny Dunbar christened the house Glenanna. The farmhouse was the old Isaac Spurr's farm house. The family had a staff of nine, including a tutor and a governess for Anna. An old road through the property ascended Mount Washington and came out a little north of Mount Everett. It was called the Wagon Road in Sheffield, the Indian Trail in Mount Washington. In 1907 educator Seaver Burton Buck leased the property to establish Berkshire School, and after few years bought the estate. The main house became a dormitory and library. It burned in the late 1910s. Buck built a smaller-scale Glenny House and used it as his residence for many years. The old Spurr house is now called Chase House. The old road up the mountain became a ski run known as Elbow Trail.
Anna Glenny married Davis Townsend Dunbar in 1916 and had two children, daughter Joan Dunbar Binkerd and son Davis Townsend Dunbar, Jr.
She was a student of Antoine Bourdelle and was responsible for bringing a solo exhibition of his work to the United States. Dunbar created the bronze bust of Walter G. Andrews, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, that stands in a congressional office building in Washington, D.C.
In 1917 and 1922 she exhibited at the Albright Art Gallery during the annual exhibition of the Buffalo Society of Artists. At the 1922 exhibition she was given an honorable mention for the sculptured head of Lou Tellegen, in bronze: "It shows the work of a serious mind, and has an energy of conception, a boldness of treatment, and an originality of thought, remarkable in so young an artist. Mrs. Dunbar has a fertile fancy, and a creative instinct which shapes everything on which it lays hold into a new and vital form of art. Her stirring head of Lou Tellegen is an admirable example of the virile strength which impresses all of her work."
Katharine Cornell, 1930, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
In 1930 she made a bronze of Katharine Cornell.
In 1936 she was judge of prize sculptures for the Howard Hanson Exhibit mounted by the Art Fellowship of Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY.
She resided in Stockbridge, MA, and then New York City (for 20 years), and died in Greenwich, CT (where she had moved 3 years before), after a short illness at 91 years old, on March 19, 1980.
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