Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Florence Sprague said the stone talked if you let it. She’d hand you a hammer, point to a block, and tell you, “Stop thinking. Listen.” If someone asked her what she meant, she’d shrugged. “Everything worth saying’s already in the rock,” she said. “You just have to shut up long enough to hear it.”

People said she had farmer’s hands and a pianist’s patience. In 1914 she created a bronze called Joy of Labor—a woman mid-stride, sleeves rolled, muscles showing. The Des Moines Register described it as “simple and strong, a hymn to honest work.” 

“Work is beautiful if you let it be,” she told a student who complained about mixing plaster. That was Florence: no theory, just doing. “You don’t need Paris,” she’d say. “You need a place to stand and something worth hitting.”

When Grant Wood started his Stone City Art Colony in the early ’30s, she packed her tools and went. The colony was supposed to give Midwestern artists a reason to stay home instead of chasing New York glory. Florence didn’t need convincing. “We’ve got better stone,” she said, tapping the local limestone. “And cheaper rent.”

She was the only woman on the faculty, not that it mattered. “Miss Sprague,” one newspaper wrote, “the colony’s sculptor and one of its most vigorous personalities, can be found in the quarry long before breakfast.” 

Every morning she led her students down the hill with coffee in hand and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. “Choose the one that fights you,” she’d say. “If it’s easy, it’s lying.” 

Isabel Bloom remembered her as “a woman who worked harder than anyone there,” teaching by doing, not talking. “We’d be sweating over the stone,” Bloom said, “and she’d just smile and say, ‘You wanted to be an artist, didn’t you?’”

She wore old work shirts, pinned her hair back, and usually had dust in her eyelashes. A student once joked she looked more like a foreman than a sculptor. “Good,” she said. “Foremen finish things.” Another said she cursed like a carpenter and prayed like a nun. “Art isn’t gentle,” she told them. “Neither am I.”

At Drake University, she ran her classes like a foundry—noise, grit, and correction by instinct. A Drake Bulletin feature called her “the department’s steel spine.” 

“Don’t tell me it’s good,” she’d say. “Tell me why it stands.” Students remembered her walking behind them, tapping a line here, carving a mark there, murmuring, “Now it’s breathing.” One recalled how she’d slap a student’s shoulder and say, “You’re almost there—don’t ruin it trying to be clever.”

Locals said her work “honest.” Critics used words like “solid” and “earnest,” which was 1930s code for “doesn’t care what Paris thinks.” She showed at the Art Institute of Chicago, but never bragged. “Chicago smells like varnish,” she said. “I’ll take quarry dust.” When a journalist asked if she wanted to move east, she laughed. “East? You mean to all that noise? No thanks. Out here, I can hear myself work.”

The press often mentioned her husband, Jefferson Randolph Smith, son of the old western con man Soapy Smith. She’d laugh about it. “He talks; I carve,” she told a reporter. “One of us makes something real.” The marriage was a lively tangle of argument, laughter, and whiskey on the porch. “He’d tell stories about Alaska,” she said, “and I’d go back to the studio. Somebody had to do the productive work in that house.”

Her bronzes turned up in local schools, courthouse lobbies, and auction rooms decades later. The faces she carved looked like people you could bump into at the feed store—jaw set, hands heavy with work. “If I can’t smell sweat on it,” she said, “it isn’t done.” When collectors praised her for her “humble realism,” she’d laugh. “There’s nothing humble about trying to make rock look alive.”

When Stone City folded after two summers, she didn’t mourn. “Everything folds,” she said. “You keep carving.” That was her philosophy—whether it was marble, wood, or life itself. “Start over,” she’d say. “That’s the whole trick. Nobody cares how many chips you sweep up if what’s left stands tall.”

Florence Sprague died in 1971, probably with stone dust still under her nails. There were no big obituaries or retrospectives, just the quiet persistence of her students and her work. 

Isabel Bloom kept a small photo of her teacher in the studio. “She was the real thing,” Bloom said. “You couldn’t fake it around Florence. She’d see through plaster.”