George Gray Barnard was born on May 24, 1863, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a little more than a month before the nearby Battle of Gettysburg altered American history. The fascinating layer connecting his birth to his life’s work is that Barnard grew up to become a sculptor obsessed with the heavy toll of human struggle and the legacy of the Civil War. When he was later commissioned to create a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln, he chose to reject the traditional, idealized image of a pristine statesman. Instead, he sculpted a raw, weary, and rugged Lincoln with worn shoes and a slumped posture, sparking a massive international art controversy because critics felt his realistic depiction of the President was far too coarse for public viewing.