Sculptor, born in Oklahoma City. He was accepted at the US Military Academy, graduating from West Point in 1953. He spent four years as a pilot with the US Air Force, but then entered a Wall Street investment banking concern, in 1959 moving to Mexico City, where he gave much of his spare time to playing jazz piano. His interest in sculpture dates back to the mid-1960s, when, on his 35th birthday his wife presented him with a lump of clay. In 1966, the year of the great Arno flood, he and his family travelled to Florence, where they stayed for the next two and a half years. Already, in 1966, Dean had received his first commission for a public statue, a portrait of General Douglas MacArthur for the Texas Military Academy in San Antonio. This statue was cast in Florence in 1969, by which time Dean had commenced work on his first statue of President Eisenhower. This was produced in the garage of his parents’ home in Denison, Texas, and was erected in the nearby grounds of Eisenhower’s birthplace. Further versions of Dean’s Eisenhower statue were subsequently erected at West Point, and in front of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. (Following the relocation of the embassy to Nine Elms in 2018, the Grosvenor Square statue was placed in storage.) Dean has also produced a statue of General George S. Patten, and his portrait busts include Vince Lombardi, Helen Keller and Will Rogers.
Bibliography: Eisenhower Birthplace website; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 58–60, 233, 443.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, November 2024