An accomplished sculptor, Frederick Charles Shrady was born in East View, New York, on October 22, 1907. His early life was spent in Westchester County, New York, before attending The Choate School, a highly regarded boarding school in Connecticut. He studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York and the École des Beaux-Arts in Orleans, France, and undertook an apprenticeship under Japanese painter Yasushi Tanaka in Paris. At New College, Oxford University, he studied the history of art and architecture. His extensive travels throughout Europe took him to Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and Albania. In 1931, he moved to Paris to paint full time. Living in the Montparnasse district, Shrady found himself at the epicenter of the avant-garde. His neighbors included the artists Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, and his own mentor, Andre Derain. Before he turned thirty-three, he had been featured in solo exhibitions across the globe, including Dublin, Paris, Belgrade, London, and New York.

Shrady’s already impressive career as an artist was placed on hold with his enlistment in the US Army in June 1943. In July, he was appointed the head of the Fine Arts Department at Camp Upton in New York. In addition to a brief assignment with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, DC, Shrady served with the Model Making Detachment of the US Army Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. Due to his fluency in French, he was selected as a liaison officer to the Free French forces.

In August 1944, Shrady applied for an assignment with the MFAA. By June 1945, he was temporarily assigned to Third US Army to assist Monuments Men lieutenants Thomas Carr Howe Jr., George L. Stout, Stephen Kovalyak, and Lamont Moore with the evacuation of the salt mines at Altaussee, Austria. Together, they carefully packed Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, and the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. Second Lieutenant Shrady and his fellow Monuments Men evacuated these masterpieces, along with several thousand other works of art and cultural objects, to the Munich Central Collecting Point. By fall 1945, Shrady was the MFAA officer assigned to the military government detachment for the administrative district of Wiesbaden. He was a signatory of the Wiesbaden Manifesto in November 1945 as a MFAA officer from the Office of Military Government for Greater Hesse. While serving in Vienna, Austria, he met his wife, Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff, who was an interpreter for the MFAA. They married in 1946.

Following his return to the United States, Shrady abandoned painting to focus exclusively on sculpture. Such a shift was partly due to his conversion to Catholicism in 1948. His first sculpture, Head of Father Martin D’Arcy, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other religious subjects include St. Francis (Fairfield University), Joan of Arc (Pittsburgh Cathedral), St. Peter Casting his Net (Fordham University), Descent from the Cross (St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria), and Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City). In 1982, Shrady became the first American artist to be commissioned by the Vatican. His twelve-foot marble statue, Our Lady of Fatima, was presented to Pope John Paul II and resides in the Vatican Gardens. While he was best known for his religious sculptures, Shrady was also commissioned for secular works. His sweeping, fifteen-foot bronze sculpture outside FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, is engraved with the mantra, “Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity.”

In the final days of his life, Shrady continued to sculpt at his studio on a 140-acre estate formerly owned by the novelist Edna Ferber. At the time he lost his battle with cancer, he was in the process of completing a bust of poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Frederick Shrady died in Greenwich, Connecticut, on January 20, 1990.