Roger Noble Burnham (August 10, 1876 – March 14, 1962) was an American sculptor and teacher. He is best remembered for creating The Trojan (1930), the unofficial mascot of the University of Southern California.
Life and career
He was the eldest of the four children of Arthur Burnham and Katharine Bray. His father was an 1870 graduate of Harvard University, and a Boston banker. He grew up just outside Boston, and attended the Robert G. Shaw School and The Hale School for Boys.
Burnham studied art and architecture at Harvard, graduating in 1899. He studied privately with Caroline Hunt Rimmer, and opened his own sculpture studio in Boston, specializing in portrait works. He moved to New York City in 1903, to work on the sculpture program for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, under Karl Bitter. He assisted George Brewster on twenty relief portrait medallions for the exterior of the Fair's Palace of Fine Arts, now the St. Louis Art Museum.
Burnham graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles in 1907, and made an extended 1908 tour of the South and Southwest in a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals. He worked as an actor in early Hollywood films, and later performed Shakespeare, in Los Angeles.
He returned to Boston, and taught modeling at Harvard's School of Architecture from 1913 to 1917. He was chairman of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Chapter of the Boy Scouts of America, and moved to Hawaii in June 1917, to establish Boy Scout troops in the U.S. territory. He taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1926 to 1932.
The Trojan
The Trojan (1930)—officially named the Trojan Shrine, but affectionately called "Tommy Trojan"—is a monument on the University of Southern California campus. The university's athletic teams are the USC Trojans.
The monument consists of a life size bronze warrior, wearing a championship belt and pleated skirt, a mohawk-plumed helmet, shin guards and sandals. He wields the Sword of Knowledge in one hand, and holds the Shield of Courage in the other. The figure stands upon a concrete pedestal, with inscriptions, bronze relief panels, and a Greek key border. The front of the base features the bronze seal of the university, with "The Trojan" inscribed above it, and words listing the traits of an ideal Trojan inscribed below it: "Faithful," "Scholarly," "Skillful," "Courageous," "Ambitious." The left side of the base features a bronze relief panel representing athletics. The right side of the base features a bronze relief panel representing scholarship. The rear of the base features an incised flaming torch, and a bronze plaque with a quote in Latin and English.
Burnham's primary models for the figure were All-American USC football players Russ Saunders (head and upper half) and Erny Pinckert (lower half).
Military monuments
Burnham was living in Honolulu in April 1918, when the United States entered World War I, and joined the Hawaii National Guard. Soon after the armistice, he designed a war memorial for the entrance to the city's Kapiolani Park. "It consists of three figures, the central one typifying Liberty while beneath are a Hawaiian warrior and a Hawaiian maiden. The warrior offers his spear while the maiden extends in outstretched hands a lei." Instead of a formal monument with sculpture, the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial (1927) was built at Waikiki Beach.
He was commissioned to create a statue of Frank Luke, Jr. (1930), for the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix. An ace U.S. Army pilot who died in World War I, Second Lieutenant Luke was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. A bronze plaque on the rear of the monument's base lists the names of the other 318 Arizonans who died in the war. The monument was dedicated on Armistice Day, 1930. Luke Air Force Base, in Glendale, Arizona, was named for the pilot in 1941.
Burnham took leave from Harvard to serve in the Massachusetts Naval Reserve during the Spanish-American War. More than fifty years later, he created The Spirit of '98 (1950), the United Spanish War Veterans Memorial for the Sawtelle Veterans Home in Los Angeles County. It featured a tall, stepped concrete base, with marble figures of a soldier and sailor flanking a hooded goddess figure holding a torch. Burnham's marble statues were toppled in a 1971 earthquake. The memorial was restored with fiberglass replicas of the statues by sculptor David Wilkins, and relocated to Los Angeles National Cemetery.
He created the bronze statue of General Douglas MacArthur for the MacArthur Monument (1955), in Los Angeles's MacArthur Park.