A world traveler, sculptor, and art lover who was once held as a prisoner of war.
Esther Jean Arnhold (1898-1963)
Some of the children came shyly; others bounded boldly up the steps from the street and into the studio. Some came nearly every day, on their way home from school. A few were occasional visitors.
Some watched silently, waiting patiently while the sculptor worked. But others were eager to start right away.
“What are you going to show us today, Mrs. Arnhold?”
The slender sculptor, dark hair drawn back in a knot, laid aside her work and began her informal lesson with the children who gathered attentively around her. Jean Arnhold always knew when school was out: the clatter on the steps, the noise at the door, the breathless voices. In summer, when school was closed, the interruptions were endless, but her patience seemed limitless; she understood that these youngsters needed her guidance. In her soft, low voice, she explained what she was doing, showed them how to use the tools she worked with in wood and stone, let them “help” her with the polishing. On Saturdays and school holidays, she often took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, expanding the education she had begun in the little studio with the evergreens outside the door, on East 70th Street in New York City. She had come a long way to be with them.
The middle daughter of David and Mary Ellen Miller, Esther Jean grew up with her sisters, Elsie and Ruth, on a farm near Oregon City, Oregon, where she was born in 1898.
After a girlhood spent in the country, Jean went to study at the University of Washington, where she received a degree in pharmacology. Her main interest was the medicinal uses of plants. After graduation, she moved to California. There she was married, but the marriage ended a few years later.
After her divorce in the 1930s, Jean decided to take a trip to Southeast Asia. She arrived in Manila with many letters of introduction and made friends easily. Eventually she went on to Shanghai, and soon she was teaching in the department of pharmacology at the University of Shanghai.
There, she met Harry Edward Arnhold, managing director of the Arnhold Trading Co. Ltd. Born in Hong Kong in 1880 and educated in London, Harry was the son of British parents. His father founded the import-export firm Harry eventually headed. A well-known figure in the cities of Southeast Asia, Harry enjoyed considerable prestige as chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, the governing body of that city’s international settlement. Harry, a widower 18 years older than Jean, was immediately attracted to her, and eventually they were married.
Harry and Jean Arnhold traveled extensively, meeting people and enjoying the rich and varied life of the Far East.
But in 1941, war came, shattering the comfortable security of their lives. Harry and Jean were imprisoned by the Japanese and held in a Red Cross internment camp in Shanghai. Jean later told friends that it was her knowledge of medicinal herbs that helped them survive the harrowing years that followed.
Eventually, on a prisoner-exchange arrangement for American citizens, Jean was released. Harry, a British subject, was held. Heartsick and frightened, Jean booked passage on the MS Gripsholm to New York, determined to do everything possible to secure her husband’s release. But Harry was kept prisoner for two more long and difficult years.
When the war was finally over, the painful separation ended for Jean and Harry. Jean returned to Southeast Asia, and the Arnholds made a home in Hong Kong. But the years in a prison camp had taken their physical toll on a man in his 60s. In 1949, the Arnholds moved to New York, and the following year Harry died at age 70.
Once again, Jean was alone and thrown on her own resources. Although she had always traveled widely and found it easy to meet people and make friends, it was harder this time. The year after Harry died, Jean and her sister Ruth and Ruth’s daughter, Ann, went to Europe. When they returned, Jean tried volunteer work in hospitals for a time, but it was not the engrossing commitment she wanted and needed.
Always interested in art, a fascination that had been nurtured by her travels and life in Southeast Asia, Jean turned to sculpturing. She found a little studio, moved into it with another sculptor, Jean McGrail, and set to work. Wood and stone were her media, and she sought out as her teacher Jose de Creeft, a Spanish artist with a reputation as one of the greatest living direct carvers. She also studied wood carving under Lorrie Goulet and took classes in anatomy at the Art Students League of New York.
Jean Arnhold explored a broad range of subjects in her style of abstract realism. One piece was the head of a prophet, carved in granite. Another was a white marble owl. A third was a highly stylized carving of an Asian woman, her flowing garments following the grain of the wood. Her work developed, and with that came recognition. Her sculptures were exhibited and sold in leading galleries in New York and Texas.
She was committed to her work, but that work was part of a larger pattern. When in New York, she was in her studio every day, stopping at lunch to read the Psalms and other favorite passages of scripture aloud with Jean McGrail, and welcoming the afternoon arrival of the children for whom she felt such concern. Occasionally she closed her studio and went on long trips that took her through Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 1962, she and Jean McGrail traveled to Egypt and the Middle East, journeying up the Nile to view the ancient temples of Egypt, and visiting Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, carried by their interests in ancient art and archaeology to remote areas where female tourists had never been seen.
As Jean Arnhold investigated the roots of her art, she also began to explore her own roots. A woman who was used to traveling and being on her own, and who had lived an independent life far in advance of her time, Jean had had little interest in family. Although she was deeply interested in children and did much for them in her studio, sometimes at the expense of her own work, she had none of her own. It was not a loss for her; she felt that her life could not include the responsibility of rearing children.
But she eventually recognized her need to unwind the threads of her own family history. And so, after a lifetime of traveling to the farthest parts of the world, she returned to the place of her origins, the Pacific Northwest, where she visited crumbling graveyards, delved into old records, and sought out distant relatives to learn the story of her beginnings.
In March of 1963, Jean suffered a heart attack. As soon as she recovered, she began to plan her next trip, this time to Afghanistan to visit the rock-walled valley of Bamiyan, where cave dwellings line the walls, and two gigantic carved statues of Buddhist saints tower more than 100 feet above the valley floor.
But she never made that trip. On Oct. 2, 1963, in her 65th year, Jean Arnhold suffered a second heart attack. She did not live out the day.
The children stopped coming to the studio on East 70th Street, but Jean’s interest in them and in other young people survived her death. Through The New York Community Trust, she established the Esther Jean Arnhold Fund. At her request, grants from this fund provide financial aid to college students, primarily undergraduates.
