Robert Ingersoll Aitken
Robert Ingersoll Aitken was born in San Francisco in 1878. He was a pupil of Arthur F. Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and later of Douglass Tilden, the well-known California sculptor. He has done a great deal of very strong, compelling work. The examples of his sculpture seen at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition are of pronounced virility and of fine composition. He is a man who excels in technique. He has done in San Francisco the Victory for the Dewey Monument in Union Square, the McKinley Monument, the Bret Harte Monument and the Hall-McAllister Monument. In the Metropolitan Museum of New York is “The Flame.” At the Fine Arts Palace are a number of works from his chisel - The Gates of Silence, the Gates’ memorial, being by far the finest.