This bronze life-size sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi at the spinning wheel in our Gandhi Memorial Center was sculpted from life at Sevagram Ashram by sculptor, Clara Quien in 1946.   

The Gandhi statue first arrived in Washington, D.C. to be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in 1969 for the Centennial Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. It was then loaned to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Foundation and and eventually made its permanent home in the Gandhi Memorial Center.

In 1995 the Gandhi statue was displayed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for the 125th Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi when the “Moha-Mudgar” dance-drama based on Swami Shankarachariya’s 16-verse text was presented by the Gandhi Memorial Center in collaboration with the Embassy of India.

About the Sculptor:

Clara Quien (1903 to 1987) was a British artist and humanitarian, the only sculptress granted the privilege of sculpting a life size statue of Gandhi from life. 

Clara Quien was born in England and spent much of her childhood in and out of China. Her father was the financial director of the company in charge of making the Wang Poo River navigable from the Yellow Sea to Shanghai. He also directed the construction of Cheefoo Harbor.

As a very young woman, Clara studied in Switzerland. She then went on to Florence to study under the late Maestro Andreotti. In Florence she studied carving, casting and the history of art. From Florence art studies took Clara to Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. Her first solo exhibition in Amsterdam brought her great acclaim. 

In 1935 Clara Quien travelled overland by car with her mother to India and there, Clara married a Dutch architect, F.J. Hopman. They settled in Srinagar, Kashmir.  One of Clara’s great pieces of work, her life-size Pieta, was the outcome of a walk in the hills of Kashmir with her young children. She said that as they walked through the glorious country with the beautiful flowers growing up through the ice, she reflected on the violence of man, and decided her Pieta must be done.

Clara explained that as a child she traveled to China with her father on a train through Russia, just after the tsar was killed, and the sad sights that she saw on this journey stayed in her memory always. Because of this preoccupation with the violence of man against man, she did a series of 34 anti-war sculptures that were housed in the Peace House in The Hague until the sculptures were destroyed by the Nazis.

Clara attempted to stress in her Pieta, the sorrow and suffering of those left behind after death. Through her life-size pieta, “Love One Another,” which she offered for philanthropic purposes, she met Mohandas Gandhi, who placed this work in the Gandhi Museum Garden at Maganwadi AIVIA, in Wardha after it had brought in a large sum of money for the village uplift movement. It was through this statue that Clara came to meet Gandhi and to do a life-size sculpture of him. “He was a man totally free of hatred,” Clara said, “and he was full of jokes, but never at the expense of anyone.” 

The life-size statue of Gandhi was sculpted in clay at Wardha and then sent to Italy to be cast in bronze. From there it traveled to California before it was presented to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Foundation, Inc. in Washington, DC.

Meeting and sculpting Gandhi was a turning point in her career. She was later commissioned to model Pandit Nehru and his daughter, as well as Maharajas, and the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten and his wife. In portraying all these personalities Clara Quien used her capacity to complete her work in a few hours without people posing for her. Her reputation as a portraitist spread to Persia where she sculpted Princess Ashraf, a bronze equestrian statue of the Shah and several princes. Back in Bombay in 1951 she received the highest award for sculpture for her “Return of Gautama” at the annual Art Exhibition. In 1952 she returned to Europe to join her children in Goldern, Switzerland.  

In 1957 Clara Quien completed a large winged-lion and eleven bronze line panels in cooperation with F.J. Hopman for decoration of the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. She then continued to paint well over a hundred non-figurative pictures as well as a number of garden and other sculptures. She also taught modeling of clay and lectured on a wide variety of subjects, including Gandhian ideals.