Isaac Scott Hathaway was born in 1872 in Lexington, Kentucky.  He became determined at an early age to memorialize prominent African-American individuals.  This goal led him to Chandler Junior College in Lexington, where he graduated in 1894.  Hathaway went on to Boston where he attended the Art Department at the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving training in sculpture and dramatics. He taught elocution and stone carving to offset the costs of his tuition. It was while he was a student here that Hathaway made his first sculpture of Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

After completing his training, he moved to Cincinnati where he studied ceramics at the Cincinnati Art Academy. Hathaway completed his first death mask here - of Professor George W. Bailey, a high school principal in the city. According to the exhibition catalog to accompany a 1996 exhibition held at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff, Hathaway was compelled to create his first death mask while witnessing a funeral procession. Hathaway describes this first experience which was not entirely successful as he neglected to apply oil to ensure an easy removal. (1)

Hathaway returned to Lexington in 1897 and became the first Negro artist in the city to open a studio selling his sculpture. The Isaac Hathaway Company opened in the early 1900s at 208 Pine Street in Lexington. (1)

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By 1910, Hathaway was living in Washington DC and had established himself as THE go-to individual for his sculpting prowess - especially in plaster of Paris. Notable works included anatomical models for the State College in Lexington, a model of the main building of Transylvania University that was shown at the Louisana Purchase Exposition, in St. Louis, MO, and a model of the Bath Furnace Meteorite that fell in Sharpsburg, Kentucky, the casts of which are now in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute and the Field Museum, Chicago. He also had gone to Tuskegee to make life masks of Booker T. Washington, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, and Bishop Henry M. Turner, after a chance meeting with Washington. Hathaway sold small busts door to door, and later re-opened his shop selling busts and decorative ceramic objects by mail order.

He was known as the Dean of Negro Ceramics, and as such he developed a ceramics program for Branch Normal College, now the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff in 1915, and in 1937 did the very same thing at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He became good friends with George Washington Carver and the two experimented with the local clay. In 1946, Hathaway was chosen to design two half dollar coins for the mint, honoring two African Americans (Booker T. Washington and George W. Carver), thus becoming the first African American to design a coin, and also the subjects were the first two African Americans honored on a coin.

(1) Walker, Odelia, and Kendrick Moore. Isaac Scott Hathaway (1874-1967), Sculptor: Exhibition Leedell Moorehead-Graham Gallery, Isaac S. Hathaway-John M. Howard Fine Arts Center, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Pine Bluff Arkansas, February 15-March 16, 1996. Dept. of Art, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, 1996.

Death Masks/ Life Masks

In an age before photos, the death mask served as a way to reconnect with the past and memorialize prominent individuals. They, along with their life mask counterparts were used by painters and sculptors as a means of capturing the truest impressions of the subject in their work. This tradition was evident as early as The Middle Ages and continued through the early 20th century. Many important people were the subjects of either life or death masks, and many well known artists employed this technique. Abraham Lincoln was the subject of two different life masks. Napoleon, Beethoven and Voltaire were all the subjects of death masks.