Henry Baerer
Henry Baerer is credited with several sculptures in New York, including the statue of the Civil War general Gouverneur Kemble Warren in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, the bust of Ludwig von Beethoven in Prospect Park, and the statue of Gen. Edward B. Fowler in Fort Greene.
Heinrich Baerer was born in Kirchhain, Kurhessen, Germany, in 1837. He first came to America in 1854 and later returned to Germany to be a student at the Royal Academy in Munich. He died in the Bronx on Dec. 6, 1908. In December 2010, I received an e-mail from a Gudrun Kietzke of Hamburg, Germany, who said that Baerer was her great-great-uncle. Kietzke, while helping me clean up my dates, wrote that Baerer changed his name to Henry when he came to America the first time. “At the Royal Academy,” Kietzke wrote, Baerer has “the Martrikel No. 01777 at 28 March, 1862.”
