THE AMERICAN-SCANDIN AVIAN REVIEW 
605 
Carved Panel for Dining-room 
in Hammer and drove him on to wider and wider travels. When he 
had had his till of the Continent he decided to go to America, that 
fabulous land of the West, where smiling Fortune waits to receive 
European artists. 
When Hammer came to this country from Norway in 1904, he 
was an obscure young art student whose efforts in sculpture had not 
gone beyond a little modelling in clay. He had started out to be a 
decorative painter, and made that art his major study in the school 
in Christiania. But sculpture called to him, even in those early days, 
and he took some work in modelling under the sculptor, Matthias 
Skeibrok. And sculpture continued to call him. Though he worked 
as a house painter, and as a decorator of church and theatre interiors, 
when he fiist came to New York, his avocation was wood carving, 
modelling', and metal work. He built himself a little workshop in 
his home, where he spent his leisure hours releasing from wood and 
metal those rugged yet subtle designs which first made him known 
among the architects and sculptors of the metropolis. 
Hammer, it seems to me, has always had the true sculptor’s pas¬ 
sion, the desire to realize an object in three dimensions through all its 
profiles, instead of representing its bulk on a flat surface. He has 
Carved Doorhead 
