Cool piece! This statue is located here in NYC at Union Square Park. George Washington is an outdoor sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown (1814–1886), located in Union Square, Manhattan, in the United States. The bronze equestrian statue was dedicated in 1856 and is the oldest sculpture in the New York City Parks collection.
This is fairly common CWT. The Fuld numbers are 173/273a. It was made by Scoville Manufacturing Company in Connecticut. It's rated as an R-2. There are five minor variations of the obverse. One scarcer variety has Washington with his head turned looking at you. It's kind of eerie looking. Henry Higgins made a copy of this design. It's now one of his Indiana Primitive designs. Here it is. Finding an Indiana Primitive CWT in Mint State is unusual. I located it when I was a dealer and had the money to set it aside. Henry Higgins made the obverse of this piece by taking an existing token and using it to make an impression in soft steel. Some of the detail was lost, but he a copy of a more complicated design. Higgins made the die for the reverse on the piece above from scratch. Designs like this make his "primitive tokens" popular. Here is an example of the token Higgins used to make the piece shown above.
A long time ago, I read a piece on Horse symbolism in sculpture. Riding on a horse with one hoof in the air meant the rider was wounded in action. If both hooves are in the air, the rider died in battle.
