Catherine Backus
American sculptor (1863 - 1955)
Catherine Fallis Backus (1863–1955) was an American sculptor. She created several commemorative bronze statues and busts from the 1890s through the first decade of the 20th century. She is perhaps most well known for creating a statue of William J. Colvill for the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol.
Backus was a student at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts and studied under sculptor Lorado Taft at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During her career she created a statue of the ferryman Captain John Tapper, a tablet depicting horticulturalist John S. Harris, a bas-relief portrait of poet Arthur Upson, and busts of missionary Joseph W. Hancock and Reverend H. M. Simmons. After 1911, she moved to Florida with her family where she undertook large-scale flower gardening.
Early life, family and education
Catherine R. Fallis was born on September 21, 1863, in Attica, Indiana, to Martha and John Fallis, a miller. Her family were said to be Quakers of English descent and she had four older siblings, Edward, Ida, James, and Harry.
Her parents moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1889, and died shortly thereafter. She married George Joseph Backus, a lumberman, on February 14, 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catherine Backus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.