Dario Viterbo was born in Florence, Italy, in 1890. He was a student of Augusto Rivalta in Florence and had exhibited his work there and in Rome before holding a one-man show in Milan in 1922. Viterbo won prizes for work exhibited at the International Decorative Arts Show in Paris in 1925. He then moved to Paris and became a French citizen. He came to New York as a war refugee from Paris in 1941. His sculptures were shown in New York at the Wildenstein Galleries in 1944. He maintained studios and homes in both New York and Florence until his death in 1961. Other bronzes by Viterbo are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library.

This sculpture, “The Enchantment,” was created by Viterbo in 1942 and was shown in New York at the Sculptors Guild Annual Show in the Argent Galleries in 1950. Images of the sculpture from that show appeared in The New York Times and The Art Digest, where it was described as making “cleaner use of bronze to express simple convex and concave sculptural volumes” (Art Digest, April 1, 1950: page 9). “The Enchantment” was purchased by Marie Wilson Howells and donated to the University of Arkansas in 1956.

Marie Wilson Howells was an Arkansas philanthropist from the celebrated family in east Arkansas for whom the town of Wilson is named. Ms. Howells, who lived in New York for many years, was proud of her Arkansas heritage and made many generous gifts to her home state. She had a deep interest in the intricacies of the human mind as well as a profound concern for higher education. She established a scholarship and speaker series for the Psychology department at UALR, and there is a Marie Wilson Howells Chair in Psychiatry at UAMS. At the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, the Marie Wilson Howells endowment provides funding to support graduate student research in the form of grants to allow students to carry out their masters thesis and dissertation research.