OF GARDEN SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENT[A]
I
Visitors were standing by the fountain in the garden of a sculptor;
and some one was asking him what in his opinion was the most beautiful
material to model in. The questioner probably had in mind clay, wax,
stone, metal and other solid substances; but the sculptor answered
quickly: “Water. There is nothing in the whole world so marvelous to
manipulate as water.” A gleam of creative rapture lit his face. “Shall
I show you my ‘Veil of Mist?’ or would you rather see my ‘Jeweled
Elm-Tree?’”
[A] This chapter is largely a reprint, permitted through the
courtesy of the _American Magazine of Art_.
There are few sculptors who have not been fascinated at one time or
another by the designing of fountains, with their primary interest
of sculpture and their secondary mystery and magic of water; whether
of still water, with its mirrored pictures of blue sky, dark trees,
many-colored flowers and sun-flecked walls; or of gently dropping
water, suggestive of leisure and repose; or of leaping, flashing,
dancing water, hypnotic even without copper or silver balls tossed
up and down; or of water brought from afar in grandiose cascades or
canals, as in the garden art of the Villa d’Este, the Villa Lante,
Versailles, and Saint Cloud; or even of water turned at great cost
to wondrous baroque inventions for drenching the unwary bystander,
as in the Villa Aldobrandini. Fortunately, at the present hour, the
practical joke in fountains is out of date; and there is a growing use
of fountains as memorials, either stately or intimate, either in public
squares or in private gardens.
Setting aside the innumerable pots, urns, sarcophagi and other
“containers” for trees, shrubs and flowering plants, the larger part
of our garden sculpture centres about water and its works. Besides the
more or less imposing figure fountain, with its bronze boys, dolphins,
fauns, nymphs, Nereids, Tritons, turtles and other hardy perennials of
the aquatic imagination, there are tanks, reservoirs, bathing pools,
all no less practical if touched with some suggestion of the sculptor’s
art; there is the basin of the well-known _pozzo_ type, flowering
out into _putti_, corpulent or lean, bending under their swags of
foliage and fruit; there is the little wall-fountain, borrowed from
the lavabo of Renaissance churches, and dear to the careful gardener,
replenishing from it the green-painted, fine-snouted watering-pot kept
sacred to his tiny seedlings. Then there is the water-spout, ready with
its witty word of grotesque, and the rainwater pipe-head, in which
English lead-work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed
a vigorous and interesting art. There is even the bird-bath, that
modern invention of the nature-lover, since today, though we profit
by many of the garden ideas of the Renaissance, we do not imitate
those Siennese gallants who tied blinded thrushes to the dwarf ilex
and cypress, to decoy winged creatures for convenient garden shooting.
The twentieth-century bird-bath lures birds to life rather than to
death, as is shown in a decorative bronze by Annette Saint-Gaudens,
who has represented upon it characters in Percy MacKaye’s bird-masque,
Sanctuary. The masquing spirit is afoot these days with new
opportunities for sculpture; the outdoor stage, now no very uncommon
feature in private gardens and groves, shows a retaining wall and other
boundaries ready for suitable sculptural accent by means of statues,
Hermæ, vases, mascarons or garlands.
[Illustration: BACCHANTE
BY F. W. MACMONNIES]
As not every day is fit for verse, so not every artist is gifted with
the happy hand for designing garden forms. It is a temperamental
matter; generally the note should be that of joy, or at least of
serenity. Mr. MacMonnies’s Bacchante and his Boy with Heron long ago
set the perfect pace of gayety for American gardens. And today, what
gladder creature this side of Arcady can you find than the MacMonnies
Duck Baby? Unless it is Edith Barretto Parsons’s laughing Child with
Turtle, or else one of Miss Scudder’s engaging imps of Frogland. Some
of our most accomplished sculptors have delighted us with their
garden art. How exquisite is the graciousness of John Gregory’s
kneeling Philomela, a statue lately designed for the bird-garden of
Mrs. Payne Whitney! No figure in recent years has seemed more original
and alluring than this “blithe spirit” considering the wonder of her
pinions.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN FIGURE
BY JANET SCUDDER]
The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct
for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble--a fine
relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design.
You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law
nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its
silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and
tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely
the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical
modeling. Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once
launched out on the simple joy of “copying a _morceau_.”
Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all
the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for
most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not
a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative
flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The
school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides,
but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create
his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated
analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment;
to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of
artistic training, that offered by our American Academy in Rome, does
not begin and end with Houdon’s “_Copiez toujours_,” but allows for
contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for
the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so
that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all
the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative
and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and
groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here
to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to
crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its
incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a
scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the
mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward
influences in art to some Gryphon of an Academy, of which little is
known, and everything suspected.
II
Meanwhile, Mr. Manship from Rome and Mr. McCartan in New York have
both proved in their work that they not only know how to model the
nude and compose a statue, but, what is far more rare, that they can
“handle ornament.” Now ornament is often regarded as beneath the notice
of the new-fledged sculptor, while as a matter of sad fact, it is
more likely to be quite beyond his powers; and this is partly because
he lacks invention, and partly because he is without knowledge of
the rhythms of design; not hearing the music, his mind cannot march.
Garden sculpture as well as severe monumental form calls constantly for
the light touch or the strong arm of ornament. Noting our American
lack in this direction, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, in
coöperation with the National Sculpture Society, has been at pains
to install in New York ateliers in which the ornament-modeler, as
distinct from the sculptor, may seriously study his art. And when an
artist like Mr. McCartan designs and models the exquisite ornament
seen upon his Barnett Prize Fountain, a new hope is breathed into the
efforts of those who would improve our American standards in artistic
craftsmanship, and break down the stupid barrier between artist and
artisan. Somewhere in the unknown lies a vast continent of design-forms
not yet touched by any Columbus--a wealth of fauna and flora not of the
Acropolis or the Roman Forum or the Gothic cathedral, but akin to Greek
and Gothic in beauty and power; and the world is waiting for these new
good things.
III
Given our garden fountain, with or without its ornament, what more
natural than a coign of vantage from which to enjoy it? The exedra, as
introduced to us long ago by McKim, White and other architects, has
been eagerly adopted by garden lovers. A beloved spot at Aspet, the
Saint-Gaudens estate, holds in the far distance a blue sky, a blue
mountain and a lordly crest of purple pines; in the middle distance is
a magic stretch of simple grass, while near at hand, and flanked by a
rosy tracery of oleander blossoms, a golden god Pan pipes to the seven
golden fishes spouting water into a green-veined white marble basin,
rectangular in form. Facing this, and shaded by pines, hemlocks and
silver birches, is a great white exedra, planned not on the usual curve
but on the three sides of an oblong, and showing in relief, on the end
of each wing, an ivy-crowned faun, by Louis Saint-Gaudens. Two giant
terra-cotta vases, made in this country from Italian originals, stand
at the entrance to the pergola that garlands the “old studio”; in an
upper garden, a bronze Narcissus leads the eye toward the house, with
its white balustrade accented by gracious heads of the Seasons.
Some years ago, I saw in the garden of a sculptor an exedra with
outlines pleasing to the eye, and comfortable to the anatomy. The
material was concrete, that first aid to the garden-mad and their
domestic sculpture. Inquiry brought out the fact that the contour had
been established by the sculptor’s actual sitting down, _in propria
persona_, in a roughly shaped mass of fresh concrete. To use the human
frame as a heroic modeling-tool, or templet, struck me at that time as
a delightfully unique idea in sculpture; today, with so many artists
keen for the queer, it would doubtless seem a mere commonplace; one
might even be glad that the human templet was not used upside down,
in the pursuit of novelty. But to speak justly, our garden sculpture
has not succumbed to the idea that queerness is higher than beauty,
and a shock to the spectator a richer artistic achievement than his
delight. Garden art in our country is no longer in its infancy, and not
yet in its decadence. Accepting the broad principles of Italian garden
design, (such as the treatment of the garden as a place to live in, the
harmonizing of the house with the garden, and the adaptation of both to
climate and landscape) it does not today admit the baroque puerilities
of the hydraulic practical joke, or the grotto of mechanical toys and
monsters. Fortunately, much of our landscape gardening is in the hands
of true artists, who employ the best resources of other days, and the
genius of modern sculptors.
Among the oldest inhabitants of gardens are the Hermæ, or boundary
gods, once used, it is said, to define limits of land, but now freed
from that dull task, to be set up (singly, or in pairs, or in rows)
wherever found desirable, as to accent a terrace, or to flank a flight
of steps. The variety of type is infinite; male and female, these
terminal deities are the chorus in the grand opera of garden sculpture,
the only rule laid upon them being that they must play the foursquare
post below the waist, and look pleasant above. Marble is their best
dress, but they may with good effect wear terra-cotta in the paler
tones; a material well adapted also for the legion of great decorative
pots, round or square, that “help so” in gardens either intimate or
imposing. Many garden owners collect “antiques,” delightful enough
even though some of them, like women and music, are perhaps better
left undated. Renaissance sarcophagi are put to the cheerful uses of
pink geraniums; capitals and fonts and well-heads bubble over with all
sorts of blooming things. In the sun-dial, little regarded by the Latin
temperament, but dear as the lawn itself to the Britannic imagination,
the American sculptor has a subject that cannot be accused of alien
origin. Associated chiefly with English landscape art, it nevertheless
may “mark only happy hours” in more formal surroundings. Harriet
Frishmuth and Brenda Putnam are our most lately laureled dialists; both
have been successful in adapting the well-modeled human figure to this
form of garden sculpture.
Alas, that in every human effort shown out-of-doors, the climate has
always the last word! Good old Horace, grumbling impressively about the
hard winters of Tibur, would find his sandaled toes shrewdly nipped in
a Cornish garden on the Ides of December, with Mercury’s winged heel
quite capable of hitting well below the zero mark. In Italy, the tooth
of time is not a bad sort of modeling-tool; it has carved a veil of
illusion for triviality, and has given a new grace to things already
beautiful. But in our northern latitudes, the tooth of time does not
model; it ravages and corrodes, often with incredible swiftness,
and due winter precautions must enshroud our garden sculpture. The
question of material is ever with us. Bronze endures, but turns dark;
marble is fair, but frail. In the dooryard of many an American artist,
home-grown miracles have been wrought from cement. I recall charming
tennis benches, with ornamented ends; a wall-fountain with reliefs of
satyrs; some great vases enriched with the owner’s coat-of-arms, and
cast in a three-piece mold; and numerous basins, posts, balustrades
and steps. But trowel-sculpture has its limitations, and the question
of durability has not yet been fully answered by the years. Perhaps,
at some future day, science will co-operate with art, and produce
for the garden sculptor a material as easily modeled as terra-cotta,
as exquisite as marble, as impressive as granite, and as durable as
bronze. Until then, we must manage as best we can with the materials
the ancients had, though under climatic conditions more favorable than
ours; and we may at least note with thankfulness that in garden art as
in all things annihilation has its uses.