An eleven-foot bronze figure of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, standing in traveling dress — knee-high boots and a short waistcoat — his coat draped over a tree stump he leans against, left foot forward and hands clasped at his waist. The bronze stands on a tall red-granite pedestal set with four bronze panels: his name across the front, a relief of Mount Chimborazo on one side, the valley of the Amazon on the other, and a medallion portrait of the park's founder, Henry Shaw, at the rear. It faces the park's statue of Shakespeare across the drive.
Henry Shaw, who founded Tower Grove Park in 1868, commissioned this statue in 1876 as one of several works of art for the grounds. It was modeled and cast in bronze by Ferdinand von Miller II at the Royal Bronze Foundry in Munich, set on a pedestal designed by the park's architect, George I. Barnett, and dedicated on November 24, 1878; the figure cost about $5,000 apart from its base. For St. Louis's large German community, the monument to the Prussian-born naturalist and explorer was a source of civic pride. Several of its bronze elements were later lost and recovered — the Henry Shaw medallion, removed in 1952, was reinstalled and rededicated in 1997 after the missing lower portion turned up in storage, and the Amazon River panel, stolen in 1974, was recovered in 1995.
