Mr. Galatly and Childe Hassam fetched me and motored me out to George
Gray Barnard’s studio. It is situated high up above the Hudson River.
I was keen to meet him because Epstein had talked to me so much and
so enthusiastically about him. As Epstein never has a good word for a
fellow sculptor his eulogy of Barnard made a great impression on me. It
was Epstein who showed me photographs of the Barnard Lincoln and the
St. Gaudens Lincoln at the time of the great controversy. I had not a
moment’s hesitation in my own mind as to which was the finer work of
art. But some one decided on the St. Gaudens for Westminster. A people
who could accept Sir George Frampton’s memorial to Nurse Cavell could
hardly be expected to select the greater of the two Lincolns!
The morning was bright, cold, and sunny. We knocked at the door of a
big building by the roadside, and Barnard himself came to the door.
Middle-aged, clean-shaven, with a mass of upstanding, gray hair, he
blinked at us in the sunlight (he has a slight cast in one eye), and
asked if I would like to see the cloister before I saw the studio.
It was too cold, he said, for him to come with us, but we would find
someone there to show us over. As we walked up the road towards a pile
of masonry with some ruins and some columns outside it, I asked about
the cloister. It was explained to me that this was built of stones and
fragments from France, Italy and Spain, which Barnard had collected. He
had designed the cloister, and built some of it with his own hands. It
represented, so they said, the soul of Barnard, and there some day he
would be buried.
In this case it seemed quite sensible that I should see the cloister
first and the builder afterwards, if the one explained the other.
We went to a door and rang an old bell, even outside in the porch there
was a smell of incense. An old man opened for us. He wore a black,
worn robe, a rope around his waist, and a skull cap. He looked like a
monk, and his face was tanned and wrinkled, but when he spoke, it was
American! Inside, the building was of old pink brick, with cloisters
all around, of beautifully matched pairs of columns of different
patterns. In the center was the stone tomb of a Crusader. Small carved
fragments were let into the walls here and there. There were side
chapels, and altars and Madonnas and Bambinos, and candle sticks and
golden gates, and everything that there ought to be. One really felt
oneself in some remote corner of Italy. Moreover, it was simple and
beautiful, in perfect taste, and built, so one felt, by loving hands.
I asked if it was meant to be Roman Catholic, but I was told “no.”...
It savored of Catholicism, it looked, smelt and felt Roman. There was
not a corner, not a viewpoint that was not a poem. And so this (I kept
saying to myself) is the soul of Barnard. I felt myself projected
forward many years.... I saw it as the burial place, the memorial of
Barnard. I felt that a proud and a grateful people would come there
some day piously and wonderingly: in the heart of America, Barnard’s
body would be in Italy.
I stood at the feet of the nameless Crusader, and wondered about the
soul of the man Barnard. It was evident that he was a dreamer and not a
commercial artist. It was evident that his soul was athirst for certain
things that his mother country lacked; for repose, mellowness of age,
and tradition. Why did he not go and live and work where these things
are? And I remembered that I, myself, love these things that Barnard
seemed to love. I too love Italy, but I know, and Barnard knows, that
Italy is a dreamland where everything is in the past and nothing is in
the future, a land in which there is no incentive to work. And Barnard,
doubtless, has energy. The man who can build a monument like this must
have great energy. A worker does not go from here to Italy, the worker
works here, where there is work to do, and so Barnard planted himself
on a still hillside within view, but out of sound, of New York, and
he collected stones, old worn stones from Italy and France and Spain,
stones that had built tradition, and he built a little bit of old world
at his gate, where his soul might some day be at rest.
It seemed to me a great whole explanation--and to contain such pathos
that I could not speak my thoughts.
Then, of a sudden, from somewhere in a loft, the sound of voices
singing. I looked around but saw no choir. Our presbyterian monk had
disappeared. It was a charming sound although it was gramaphone, and I
smiled to myself, at the jingling mixup of old world and new!
Before we left, the American monk told us to stand at the door and
have one last look, first from the left archway and then from the
right, to see it from every angle. I gave a good look round and then
inadvertently my eyes alighted on the black robed figure. He was
standing in exactly the right place, in a set attitude, motionless,
well trained. All part of the picture: “Hullo America!”
We had lingered so long, that there was not half enough time left for
the studio. Barnard showed us his colossal head of Lincoln, which he
proposes to carve out of the rock of a hillside. A magnificent idea.
We spent nearly all the rest of the time looking at his model and
listening to his explanation of a great war memorial. Here, on this
piece of land he dreams of building an American Acropolis. He showed
us the plans of the circular walls that would be decorated with bronze
reliefs, and the statues that would represent each nation and be
contributed by the artist which each nation would select to represent
them. “No war scenes,” he said emphatically--by which I gathered he
was a great pacifist. “We have had enough of war scenes, here in bold
relief would be the men and the occupations they left, and the families
and the homes they went away from. In the background, in low relief,
would be illustrated the idea and ideals for which they fought----”
He talked with his head towards us, but his eyes closed.
Introspectively, and with hand gestures, he helped to explain and
describe. His hands are strong and his fingers so short and thick that
I had the impression that they had all been cut off at the second
phalange.
His scheme was a gigantic one, here among other things was the garden
of the mothers. Seven mothers stood sentinel against a terrace wall.
They were half carved figures, showing their breasts from which the
milk had flowed that had fed the man-babes. From the waist down they
became one with the graves of their sons. The centre mother was to
represent the Mother of all the ages. She was to hold in one hand her
breast, and the other arm out-stretched as if it nursed the vanished
babe. Her abdomen was to be seared and scarred with the furrows of
child bearing. He was insistent and persistent about this. The idea
of the mother seemed to appeal to him very forcibly----He almost awed
us by his description of the warrior’s mother. He had dreamt of her,
he said. He had seen her in visions in the night. He showed us the
small sketch of his vision, and of her warrior son lying stretched
out at her feet. Even in this small wax sketch he had put his force,
his conviction, his deep feeling----It was almost frightening in its
severity.
He told us, too, of the tree of peace, all bronze and enamel, with
golden fruits, and this was to be transparent and illuminated. All
night, every night, always, it was to be lit up like a lighthouse
beacon, so that all who saw it by land or by sea would know that the
light that shined was from the tree of peace.
Even if he never carried out this part of the memorial, he had an
archway which in itself was sufficient and magnificent. The archway
was formed by a rainbow, of mosaics, and up to the feet of the rainbow
on one side came naked battalions of youths that had laid down their
lives, and on the other side, reaching up as it were to the rainbow of
hope, came the refugees, men, women and children.
There was much more that I cannot relate. Barnard told it to us for
an hour or more, and we stood and listened and watched, silently
enthralled. Every now and then Childe Hassam, putting aside his
own artist’s soul, would draw out his watch and look at the time
threateningly and suggestively. I pushed his watch aside and whispered
to him that time for this once did not exist, nor appointments, nor
meals----Could one interrupt a man’s vision by observing the time?
Lastly, he unveiled for us the marble head of Lincoln. It stood on a
pedestal facing a window of which the blind was drawn. As we stood
before it, the master slowly, very slowly, released the light, and as
he did so the shadow from beneath Lincoln’s brow was dispelled, and
his eyes seemed to have life, and to look up with all the pity and the
tenderness and the human sympathy of a superman. It was not Lincoln
the man of sorrows, it was not Lincoln the thinker, it was Lincoln the
great understanding idealist, and there was so much of love and sadness
in the marble face that I, a normal woman, had tears streaming down my
face, and I was ashamed.
Mr. Galatly has brought this Lincoln head to present to the Luxembourg
Gallery.
As for the soul of Barnard, and the vision, and the imagination, and
the energy, and the selflessness of him--it is immense.