Thomas Ridgeway Gould

Thomas Ridgeway Gould (1818–1881) turned to sculpture in mid-life, leaving the Boston dry-goods trade to study under Seth Wells Cheney from 1851. His early busts of Christ and Satan, shown at the Boston Athenæum in 1863, established his reputation before the Civil War cost him his fortune and prompted a move to Florence in 1868, where he built a productive studio practice among the city's American expatriate sculptors.