Click on the tree below to see the Ancestry of Jørgen Christian Dreyer

Jorgen Christian Dreyer, Once recognized by the Kansas City Star as the city’s leading sculptor, Jorgen Dreyer’s works are seen daily by thousands of Kansas Citians, although he has slipped into anonymity. Dreyer’s stone lionesses still guard the entrance to the Kansas City Life Insurance building at Armour Boulevard and Broadway, and his massive sphinxes watch over the Scottish Rite Temple at Linwood Boulevard and the Paseo.

Jorgen C. Dreyer came to the USA in 1903 and made Kansas City his home for more than 40 years. He was born in Tromsø, Norway in 1878 and studied at the Latin school there and at the Royal School of Art and Industries in Oslo. He showed early promise as a sculptor when, as a child, he playfully modeled a life-size snow figure that clearly resembled one of his professors.

From 1907 to 1909, Dreyer taught at the Fine Arts Institute, the forerunner of the Kansas City Art Institute. The years that followed included a number of public and private commissions that spread Dreyer’s works across the city.

The Kansas City Life Insurance lionesses were completed in 1924. They were modeled after lions at the Swope Park Zoo and carved of granite, measuring nearly 11 feet long and 5 feet high. The Scottish Rite Temple sphinxes were completed in 1928 and weigh 20,000 pounds apiece. Each of the two female heads atop lion bodies with griffin details wears a medallion that represents the Masonic order.

Dreyer also sculpted a bust of John Barber White in 1915, now located in the Special Collections Department of the Kansas City Public Library, as well as figures that adorn the Jensen Salsbery Laboratories building, designed in 1918 by Ernest Brostrom. Other works include marble figures carved for the Rose Hill Cemetery Mausoleum in 1931 and bronze plaques, designed in 1936, located above the north entrance doors of the Jackson County Courthouse. The "Mother of Stars", a gilded figure of Dawn, is the centerpiece of the lobby of the Hotel Phillips. Dreyer died in 1948 of a heart ailment, leaving his wife, Lorena, and a city abundant in his well-known works of art.