Arthur Lee was born on May 4, 1881 in the seaport city of Trondhjem, Norway. His parents Knute Sivert Hoel and Mette Haugan emigrated to the United States in 1889 and changed their name to Lee. The family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota.
His interest in art showed up at age 12 when he discovered a passion for the study of the human form and drawing. A fascination with Bullfinch's Age of Fables served to firmly set him on a clacissist track.
At the age of twenty-one he moved to New York City where he began studying sculpture at the Art Students League. While enrolled there he met Gertrude Vanderbilt who sponsored him for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Immediately after graduating from the Art Students League he left left for Paris where he spent the next four years.
After his return from France he met Frederika Doehle whom he married in 1911. Over the next couple of years he started producing his first sculptures and exhibited them together with his drawings at the 1913 Armory Arts Show in New York City. Several nude figures from that show brought him wider recognition and he was awarded a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 for one of them, a nude male figure titled The Ethiopian.
Mrs. Florence Jaffrey Harriman's financial assistance enabled him to return to Paris for another four years from 1914 to 1917. While there, he created the sculptures Volupte, Dawn, Belgian Soldier, and Torso of Youth.
In 1918 the young couple returns the New York City and quickly welcomes their first child, a daughter named Ingaboyd. The following years bring both artistic and financial success as he receives multiple prestigious awards and Mrs. Vanderbilt purchases a Volupte for $3,000, later donating it to the Metropolitan Museum.
Sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as the "American Maillol," Lee was preoccupied throughout his career with the harmony of form and rhythms of the idealized nude figure. He was an instructor at the Art Students League until he opened his own drawing school in 1931.
He remained a strict classicist until his death in Newtown, Connecticut, in 1961.
Sourced mainly from the Smithsonian Institute and the Arthur Lee Foundation.