THE SPIRIT OF
AMERICAN
SCULPTURE
[Illustration: STUDY FOR HEAD OF NIKE-EIRENE
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]
THE SPIRIT OF
AMERICAN
SCULPTURE
BY
ADELINE ADAMS
WRITTEN FOR
THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE
SOCIETY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
MCMXXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY
PREFACE
Any survey of the Spirit of American Sculpture must naturally take
into account the Body of American Sculptors. On the other hand,
the outline here offered does not attempt the preposterous task of
putting everyone in his place, and thereby producing an unmannerly and
unreliable Who’s Who in Sculpture. Many sculptors whose work is dear
to me are scarcely named in the following pages. Why? Because, very
frequently, the individual achievement has been too fine to be slurred
over and shunted off with the faint praise of mere listing, while at
the same time it cannot well be appreciated at deserved length, given
the limitations laid upon the present writer,--limitations temporal,
spatial, personal. Again, it often happens in art, as in nature and
in politics, that certain forces for good are better left unmentioned;
headlines would disturb their harmonious functioning.
The brief annals of our sculpture may be divided either according to
our wars, or according to our times of peace. The critic who chooses
the former way will point out that our Revolution called into being a
national consciousness which was strengthened by the War of 1812, and
which immediately thereafter sought expression in Federal or State
buildings, and in their adornment by the arts. Side by side with
national yearnings for art sprang up half-thwarted individual longings
either to produce art, or to enjoy art, or to possess art. Not until
the close of the Civil War, with its legacy of greater national unity
and advancing prosperity, did we find out that our education in art was
too meagre to let us express in any fitting way the emotions aroused
by that conflict and its costly sacrifices. In the marketplace, we were
naïve and unformed enough to accept with more or less satisfaction and
in infinite repetition the stone soldier of commercial origin. In the
home, we thoroughly enjoyed the anecdotes, patriotic or parochial,
told by our Rogers groups. But before the Spanish War was over, our
enlightenment as to the artistic value of these productions was
rather general. With respect to the Rogers groups, we passed to the
other extreme; in our headlong attempt to register culture, we forgot
that these works had performed a genuine service. Later, the wave of
romantic rococo noted in the “red-blooded” literature of the day had
its parallel in some of our noisier war monuments, creatures surging
from a limbo that was neither art nor commerce. Since the World War,
and even before the World War, there has been, through our museums and
other sources, an honest effort toward coöperation between art and
manufacture. An up-hill task but a necessary one, in any sound national
development! The day of the stone soldier is over, but whether we are
laying up for ourselves a store of future regret in other forms of
memorial sculpture remains to be seen.
Thus to mark off by our wars the various chapters of our sculptural
history and to develop each chapter in sequence would be in the grand
style; perhaps in a grander style than is suited to the dimensions of
this sketch. It has therefore seemed better to indicate certain natural
divisions of the subject by means of those enterprises of peace, our
expositions. The Centennial of 1876, by its cruel comparisons, stirred
our sculpture from the lethargy supposed to have overtaken it in the
studios of American expatriates in Rome and in Florence. Until 1876, we
had been dreaming, stumbling, aspiring; making false moves in plastic
art. A few early triumphs shine forth from the prevailing mediocrity;
but it must be owned that Cooper, Hawthorne, and Emerson, in the
world of letters, have no vigorous contemporaries in the world of
sculpture. During the ’eighties, however, a group of really strong and
characteristic pieces of American sculpture emerges by slow degrees.
Ward had already produced his noble equestrian statue of Thomas. He
now placed his bronze Washington in front of the Sub-Treasury in New
York, and his Pilgrim in Central Park. In 1881, Saint-Gaudens put out
his incomparable Farragut; his Puritan appeared two years after Ward’s
Pilgrim. Daniel Chester French, with notable work behind him, came
into his own with the exquisite group of Gallaudet and the little
deaf-mute; in the early ’nineties he showed his Milmore Memorial, (the
Angel of Death and the Sculptor) a work of extraordinary appeal to both
artists and laymen.
While these men were creating sculpture to be proud of, younger men
were conning with all their might the vigorous lessons proffered in the
French schools, or on French soil, by Falguière, Mercié, Dubois, Chapu,
Saint-Marceaux, Rodin,--a mighty host. At the Columbian Exposition,
our country had abundant good work to show in sculpture from the hands
of returning youth. Between 1876 and 1893 were packed most of the
essential lessons our sculpture has learned, either at home or abroad.
No subsequent exposition has disclosed so great an advance as that
noted in 1893. There has indeed been a further development of basic
principles, as well as a recent genial stylistic efflorescence in
manner, favored by many of our younger sculptors under the influence
of sincere post-graduate study of archaic models. And there have
naturally been occasional obscure ultra-modernistic experiments not
without service in the zigzag of progress; such works are neither
to be despised nor unduly exalted because they proclaim themselves
revolutionary. An advance as rapid as that made in sculpture during
the seventeen years between the Centennial and the Columbian is not
to be expected in the near future. Such an advance could occur only
as a strong reaction from a feebleness not now evident, or from a
retrogression not now casting its shadow. Many thoughtful painters have
pointed out that sculpture by its very essence is far less subject than
painting to the more unfortunate inroads of ultra-modernism.
We sometimes worry ourselves unnecessarily because our arts and
letters are not what is called “distinctively American.” But being
distinctively American is not in itself a merit. The distinctively
American voice, for example, has not yet been hailed as the
international model. Give our sculpture time for still further
expression, and it will become as distinctively American as need be.
A just and happy exchange of culture between peoples should not be
stigmatized as mere imitation. Oddly enough, the first timid flowering
of our American painting and sculpture took place among the Quaker
Philadelphians and even among the Puritan Bostonians. It did not follow
the footsteps of the earlier settlers of French or Spanish blood.
Culture has its curves and curious weavings forward and back. Already
in our ideals of art education a change has been noted. Many who
have studied this subject for a lifetime now believe, as they could
not with wisdom have believed a generation ago, that it is better
for the student to get his technical training in the schools of his
own country, and to learn the beauty of foreign art and the value
of foreign culture through eager vacation study abroad, rather than
through prolonged residence abroad. The vacation schools of music and
painting at Fontainebleau are watched with deep interest. Thus far,
their results speak well for this new point of view in art study.
The occasion for which this modest book was made is the opening of
the National Sculpture Society’s exhibition in the year 1923, under
the auspices and in the neighborhood of a distinguished group of
learned societies. Such an occasion invites rejoicing, rather than
lamentation. Hence in these loosely gathered chapters little is said
of commercialism, of mechanistic tendencies, of unhappy professional
rivalries, of mistaken ultra-modernism, or of other burdens or bugaboos
that hamper the spirit of American sculpture. I have tried to bear in
mind a saying of Kenyon Cox, an accomplished critic, yet honest at all
times beyond conventional expectation. Mr. Cox was asked whether in
his opinion as a critic, a certain article on a well-known painter, a
younger contemporary, was not too favorable in its judgments. Taking
time to consider, Mr. Cox answered, “No, to my mind, that critique is
not too favorable! It brings forward much of the best that is to be
found in one of our best painters, and it doesn’t harp on his defects.
As I take it, the thing was written for intelligent readers. They are
able to read between the lines. From what is said of the qualities,
they will know the defects.”
NOTE
In the preparation of the present work, the author has found herself,
through the natural insistence of her own and her husband’s feelings,
placed in a somewhat delicate position. It remains, therefore, for
those editing the volume to preface it with some expression of
admiration, however inadequate.
To sculptors, it is needless to point out the importance of the work of
Herbert Adams. It is therefore to the lay reader that some word must be
said of the man who hesitates to have recorded the admirable production
of a fruitful and influential career. The wisdom, restraint, and true
sense of the just and fitting, which for years have rendered all
relation with his calm and balanced intellect the delight of friends
and the aid of fellow workers, are mirrored in an art which so easily
reflects these qualities. To those connected with the preparation of
this exhibition it is a great pleasure to render serious tribute to
the man who among sculptors has brought such faithful homage to the
Art of Sculpture, and whose influence must be cherished as one of the
permanent forces for Truth in the Art of our land.
THE COMMITTEE.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
NOTE xv
CHAPTER
I MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE PROLOGUE 3
II OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS 29
III OF THREE LEADERS, AND OF MORAL EARNESTNESS IN ART 47
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD 57
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 67
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 76
IV OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS 87
V THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE 101
VI OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES 125
VII THE ART OF RELIEF, HIGH AND LOW 145
VIII OF GARDEN SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENT 159
IX OF SMALL BRONZES AND GREAT CRAFTS 177
X THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY 191
XI INFLUENCES, GOING AND COMING 213
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
STUDY FOR HEAD OF NIKE-EIRENE _Title_
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
PAGE
STATUE OF WASHINGTON 8
By Jean Antoine Houdon
BUST OF WASHINGTON AT MOUNT VERNON 26
By Jean Antoine Houdon
CLYTIE 42
By William H. Rinehart
WHITE CAPTIVE 44
By Erastus D. Palmer
STATUE OF WASHINGTON 62
By John Quincy Adams Ward
STATUE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT 68
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
MEMORY 78
By Daniel Chester French
STATUE OF MAJ.-GEN. MACOMB 108
By Adolph A. Weinman
PORTRAIT BUST OF J. Q. A. WARD 118
By Charles H. Niehaus
MARBLE PORTRAIT OF BABY 120
By Paul Manship
THE GOLDEN HOUR 122
By Rudolph Evans
HORSE TAMERS 136
By F. W. MacMonnies
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF GENERAL SHERMAN 142
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
WELCH MONUMENT 148
By Herbert Adams
VICTORY 152
By James Earl Fraser
PLAQUETTE 156
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
BACCHANTE 162
By F. W. MacMonnies
FOUNTAIN FIGURE 164
By Janet Scudder
CENTAUR AND DRYAD 180
By Paul Manship
VICTORY 234
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
THE SPIRIT OF
AMERICAN
SCULPTURE
CHAPTER I
MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE PROLOGUE
I
What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American
world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not
chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor,
Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,--Quaker, wax-image-maker,
traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and
the movements of British troops! Had his mind’s eye but once seen her
in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the
town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the
flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside
that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself.
Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters,
had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole’s concerning the
“artistess,” he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging
as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as “inexplicable, grand,
preposterous” as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some
of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for
our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible
eye-witness and letter-writer.
Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the “hearty buss” with which the
sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that “there
was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room,
and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life,
I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was
finally told that it was only wax.” And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs.
Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist
and patriot, notes that “the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped
originality on all her acts and language.” He tells us that the British
king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would
induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and
where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of
her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.
The intrepid if somewhat incongruous figure of this Quaker artist
abroad will serve very well as herald or prologue to the drama of
American sculpture. Nor can I think that either Mr. Greenough or Mr.
Powers, Mr. Ward or Mr. Saint-Gaudens, Mr. French or the very youngest
sculptor newly laureled by our American Academy in Rome would object
to that assignment of rôle. Surely in any play, it is allowed that
the herald may seem somewhat more fantastic and legendary than the
kings and counselors that come after. Mrs. Wright and her wax-works
are important to us, but not because anyone now accounts her the
“Promethean modeller” her enthusiastic contemporaries charged her with
being. She is important because her vogue reveals the artless taste
of her time, its awe in the presence of perfect imitations of nature.
Not that such awe is unknown to-day in the world of art. Indeed, our
herald brings vigorously upon the scene one of the major problems that
still perplex the American sculptor in his work. I mean the problem of
likenesses, those “strong representations of real life,” as Abigail
Adams would say.
II
A strong representation of real life was exactly what Thomas Jefferson
wanted for the State Capitol of Virginia when he induced the great
French sculptor Houdon to “leave the statues of Kings unfinished,”
and to cross the Atlantic to take casts, measurements, and artistic
cognizance of the person of George Washington, in order to create that
marble portrait statue still holding its own in the good top light
of the Rotunda at Richmond. To cross the Atlantic, what an adventure
for a home-keeping Frenchman in the eighteenth century! Yet in the
year 1785, there must have been uneasiness at home as well as abroad
for Monsieur Houdon, so soon to become _le citoyen_ Houdon. In the
midst of our early Republican simplicities, there had been talk of
an equestrian statue also. Justified in the hope of obtaining the
commission equestrian as well as the commission pedestrian, Houdon
accordingly spends a fortnight at Mount Vernon, taking casts, and
“forming the General’s bust in plaister.” Later, however, the project
of the equestrian statue is dropped, to Houdon’s natural regret.
[Illustration: STATUE OF WASHINGTON
BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON]
“We shall regulate the article of expense as œconomically as we can
with justice to the wishes of the world,” writes Jefferson to Governor
Harrison, concerning the standing statue. “We are agreed in one
circumstance, that the size shall be precisely that of life.” Jefferson
gives patriotic reasons for that decision as to size; he adds with
excellent artistic judgment, “We are sensible that the eye alone
considered will not be quite as well satisfied.” A generation later,
writing from Monticello in regard to the statue of Washington that the
legislature of North Carolina desires to order, he declares that this
work should be somewhat larger than life. A strict realism no longer
delights him. With true Jeffersonian divination of popular currents, he
leans now toward the pseudo-classic ideal already dominant in European
studios. As to the costume chosen, he finds that “every person of taste
in Europe would be for the Roman.... Our boots and regimentals have a
very puny effect.” In short, “Old Canova of Rome” is the artist North
Carolina should employ. It is pleasant to note that just as Houdon,
having “solemnly and feelingly protested against the inadequacy of the
price, evidently undertook the work from motives of reputation alone,”
so too Canova is “animated with ardent zeal to prove himself worthy of
so great a subject.” Thus happily are begun those steadfastly continued
artistic relations between the United States and the two European
countries in which art prospers as the light and livelihood of the
people.
Washington himself, when the Houdon portrait statue is projected, plays
an admirably discreet part in the art criticism of the moment. He
writes to Jefferson, on August 1, 1786:
“In answer to your obliging enquiries respecting the dress, attitude,
etc., which I would wish to have given to the statue in question, I
have only to observe that, not having sufficient knowledge in the art
of sculpture to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs, I do
not desire to dictate in the matter.”
How unlike the home life of William Hohenzollern! And how often the
thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington’s simple
dignity in admitting an insufficiency of “knowledge in the art of
sculpture” might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are
not qualified “to dictate in the matter”! In this our free country of
the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded
by those who cheerily announce that “they do not know much,” but who
nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first
President.
All the Jefferson correspondence respecting these two statues of
Washington is of vital interest to the student of our art history. Our
young Republic, in its early strivings toward art, was fortunate in
having an adviser as well-advised as the master of Monticello. It was
Thomas Jefferson who guided inquiring state legislatures, now toward
Houdon, the powerful French realist, and again toward Canova, the
distinguished Italian idealist. Through Jefferson’s hands, our American
sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and
idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and
idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each
after the other, will continue to shape the artist’s interpretation
of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as
fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race
side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either
classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. Gilbert Murray, in
his notes on the Hippolytus, writes that its matchless closing scene
“proves the ultimate falseness of the distinction between classical and
romantic. The highest poetry has the beauty of both.”
III
Returning to the Quaker lady who speaks our prologue, and conning
once more the tale of her works in all their brisk naïveté, the
sympathetic student will easily evoke the difficult conditions under
which sculpture first reared its head in our country. Sculpture,
though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs
of primitive man, (and indeed the very first of all the arts to fall
under the ban of the censor) is an art much hindered and abridged
during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly
accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster’s chest or
some fair Priscilla’s spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a
statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered
quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early
seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back,
so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The
drawings and inherited traditions of cabinet-makers, carpenters, and
architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture,
for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not
slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and
skill, sometimes with creative genius.
The colonists’ sense of form gratified itself in these directions,
since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both
foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our
forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes,
and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture.
Statues, unlike chocolate-pots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when
all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a
sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent
artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a
background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial
side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up
over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow
time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was
not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was
accomplished in our country. The statue was of the Boston astronomer,
Dr. Bowditch, and by the English sculptor, Ball Hughes. The original
bronze cast was not a wholly successful piece of work; it was long ago
replaced by a bronze from a French foundry. But those familiar with the
difficulties of the situation will recall Dr. Johnson’s observation
about the dog walking on his hind legs. “It is not done well, but you
are surprised to find it done at all.”
IV
However, we need not harp too long and too mournfully on the physical
impediments in our sculptural start. Enormous as these were, they were
less mighty than the spiritual obstacles set up by time and place.
First of all, it is to be remembered that the European world of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was moving on in a mild, manifest,
not necessarily permanent decline in creative power as shown through
the graphic arts. The waves of that decline reached even our own
stern coast. It is safe to say that had the American colonists’ hour
coincided with an hour of large renascence in art throughout Europe,
our forefathers, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, would earlier have
found room for art as a need and a natural expression of the freer life
they sought. As for the distinctively Puritan view, that view too often
(though perhaps not as often as we now think) denied and persecuted
beauty in the fierce Puritan concentration upon holiness. It is true
that art, in its blither and more genial guise, slips away from the
society of the sour-visaged. But it is also true that a great tragic
expression in art sometimes bursts uncontrollably from peoples or
persons with minds exacerbated by long fortitudes. We learn this from
the Belgian sculptor Meunier brooding over his brothers of the Black
Country, from the Serbian sculptor Mestrovic immortalizing in stone
his country’s stern legends, from the poet Dante treading his Inferno.
But the Florentine and the Serbian and the Belgian produced their art
under their native skies. They were not torn up by the roots to live in
a strange land.
Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather
than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten
New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built
meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill
of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an
example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to
erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would
have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their
path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our
early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and
material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had
no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the
passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant
during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national
consciousness.
In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved
slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust
wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West’s legendary
adventure with his cat’s-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his
baby sister’s likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the
creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure
dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were
not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art’s helper. Referring to
more important matters, we do not forget William Rush’s full-length
statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait,
carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey,
in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young
stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled
in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the
Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as
historic data.
Interesting and emphatic as are the personalities of all these early
workers, that of William Rush is by far the most significant. In
literal truth, Patience Wright was merely our first _sculptress_,
whose work must bear the implications of frailty lent by that name.
But William Rush was our first _sculptor_. In his youth he was a
soldier of the Revolution, and in later life he was long a member of
the Council of Philadelphia; his career as artist and as citizen won
respect for the early art life of our country. Born in Philadelphia
in 1756, he was twenty-nine when Houdon sojourned in that town.
Having been apprenticed when very young, Rush was already well-known
as a carver of ships’ figure-heads, work in which he continued to be
successful throughout his long and busy life. His theory and practice
in wood-carving conformed to Michelangelo’s Gothic creed, somewhat
outworn among sculptors, but of late restored to respect. William Rush
earnestly believed that the carver should see his vision in the block,
and realize its image by hewing away the superfluous shell. He was
modern enough at times to stand by while directing a workman to chop
here and cut there and slice somewhere else, so that he himself could
save his own energy for keeping his vision clear. Of his Spirit of the
Schuylkill, originally in wood but since translated into bronze and
still standing over its basin in Fairmount Park, the chronicles of its
day declared that “no greater piece of art was to be found in all the
world.” The present age will hardly consider this draped figure the
equal, say, of the Maidens of the Erechtheum. Yet the work, with its
companion pieces, the Schuylkill in Chains and the Schuylkill Released,
has its own vigorous archaic classicism which modern students may well
ponder. Rush was one of the planners and founders of the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts. After this was finally established in 1805, our
first American art organization, he was one of its directors until his
death. As a many-sided man of action and of counsel, of intelligence
and of culture, he sums up the best to be found in the varied
characters of our pioneer artists, personages worthy of our deepest
respect.
We shall be too quick despairers if we brood over the fact that most
of their works show Yankee ingenuity rather than Promethean fire. The
inventive spirit is part of our pioneer heritage; it reappears rather
often in our art history. Robert Fulton, as Mr. Isham reminds us in
his story of American painting, was a promising pupil in Benjamin
West’s London studio. “From there he went to Paris, where he remained
seven years, painting easel pictures, and also the first panorama seen
there, whose memory is still preserved in the name of the Passage des
Panoramas.” Morse is yet another classic example of American genius
serving both art and science. One of the later pupils of West, he had
not only painted vigorous and important pictures but had also played a
striking part in the founding of our National Academy of Design before
he finally “wreaked his genius” on his invention of the telegraph.
Hiram Powers, sculptor of the Greek Slave, in youth acquired merit
from the clock-work devices by which he enhanced the moving charms of
the wax figures he modeled for a museum in Cincinnati. Today, in our
journalistic canvassings of popular opinion as to contemporary American
greatness, we find that in the public mind, Edison’s name leads all
the rest. The prickly palm of greatness is awarded not to a teacher,
to a publicist, to a writer, to a political leader, or to an artist in
any guise whatever, but to an inventor. Inventive genius thus claims
our highest admiration; inventive genius may indeed be our highest
national characteristic. If so, it is worth while (and not in the
least “devastating”) to consider whether the same inventiveness that
animates the early art-forms of William Rush’s followers does not also
contribute something to the very sophisticated creations of our gifted
and fortunately well-trained young sculptors with the _dernier cri_
from Crete in their minds and at their finger-tips.
The story of American sculpture cannot be told under a parable of a
chain with equally strong links throughout. One thinks rather of a
slender thread, which may be fastened to a cord, which will draw up a
strong rope, which will in turn attach itself to a powerful cable. If
early Yankee ingenuity is that slender thread, let us thank God for it,
and hope for better things.
V
With the dawn of our national consciousness just after the dark hours
of the Revolution, a natural human love for the likeness, strengthened
by a generous surrender to hero-worship, is already arousing in us
a longing for an art that will express our patriotic emotions. If
achievement alone be considered, there is surely a great gulf fixed
between Patience Wright and Jean Antoine Houdon. But the same sincere
passion fires Quakeress and _citoyen_; their common aim is a strong
representation of real life, transfigured by the flame of the spirit
burning in the lamp of clay. It is recorded that an overpowering sense
of Washington’s greatness sometimes actually impeded those artists who
aspired to reveal him, body and soul, to posterity. Posterity then is
fortunate because our fathers received from Houdon’s genius not only
the Washington statue, but also seven noble portrait busts, those of
Franklin, Paul Jones, Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, Fulton, and
Joel Barlow, to mention them in the order of their creation, from 1778
to 1803. These virile interpretations of character were not lost in the
ins and outs of our Atlantic coast-line. Even to this day, some one
or other of them often reappears in public view, to excite interest,
admiration, and controversy. But in the early nineteenth century, as
is shown by Jefferson’s counsel to the North Carolina legislature,
Conova, rather than Houdon, has become the name to conjure with. Even
in portraiture, realism has given way to pseudo-classicism, long before
Greenough arrives on the stage with his Washington as the Olympian
Zeus, a colossal half-draped marble figure designed for a shrine within
the Capitol.
[Illustration: BUST OF WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON
BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON]