consideration: What are the characteristics of the American school of
painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered
a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the
prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that has
certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work
at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the
schools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned. This characteristic has,
undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when the
madness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, when
anything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effort
of all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the
"shackles of tradition." Here is a new people in the blessed state of
having no traditions to shake off and from whom, therefore, some peppery
wildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold,
they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things the
others have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion of
thoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashion
of lovely color, and the old fashion of sound and beautiful workmanship.
This conservatism of American painting, however, is not of the kind that
still marks so much of the painting of England. Excepting exceptions,
English painting is somewhat stolidly staying where it was. America's
conservatism is ardent, determined, living. It is not standing still;
it is going somewhere as rapidly as possible--it might, perhaps, be more
truly called not conservatism but reaction. We have, of course, our
ultramodernists, but their audacities are mild compared to those of the
French or German models they imitate. We have, even more of course, the
followers of the easiest way--the practitioners of current and accepted
methods who are alike everywhere. But our most original and most
distinguished painters, those who give the tone to our exhibitions and
the national accent to our school, are almost all engaged in trying to
get back one or another of the qualities that marked the great art of
the past. They have gone back of the art of the day and are retying the
knots that should bind together the art of all ages.
This tendency shows itself strongly even in those whose work seems, at
first sight, most purely naturalistic or impressionistic. Among those
of our painters who have adopted and retained the impressionist technic,
with its hatching of broken colors, the two most notable are Mr. Hassam
and Mr. Weir. But Mr. Hassam, at his best, is a designer with a sense of
balance and of classic grace almost equal to that of Corot, and he often
uses the impressionist method to express otherwise the delicate shimmer
of thin foliage that Corot loved. Nay, so little is he a pure
naturalist, he cannot resist letting the white sides of naked nymphs
gleam among his tree trunks--he cannot refrain from the artist's
immemorial dream of Arcady. As for Mr. Weir, surely nothing could be
more unlike the instantaneousness of true impressionism than his
long-brooded-over, subtle-toned, infinitely sensitive art.
There is little dreaminess in the work of Mr. Tarbell and the growing
number of his followers. Theirs is almost a pure naturalism, a "making
it like." Yet, notably in the work of Mr. Tarbell himself, and to some
extent in that of the others, there is an elegance of arrangement, a
thoroughness in the notation of gradations of light, a beauty and a
charm that were learned of no modern. Their art is an effort to bring
back the artistic quality of the most artistic naturalism ever
practised, that of Vermeer of Delft.
Others of our artists are going still further back in the history of art
for a part of their inspiration. Mr. Brush has always been a linealist
and a student of form, but his earlier canvases, admirable as they were,
were those of a docile pupil of Gérôme applying the thoroughness of
Gérôme's method to a new range of subjects and painting the American
Indian as Gérôme had painted the modern Egyptian. In recent years each
new picture of his has shown more clearly the influence of the early
Italians--each has been more nearly a symphony of pure line.
Even in purely technical matters our painters have been experimenting
backward, trying to recover lost technical beauties. The last pictures
of Louis Loeb were underpainted throughout in monochrome, the final
colors being applied in glazes and rubbings, and to-day a number of
others, landscape and figure painters, are attempting to restore and
master this, the pure Venetian method, while still others, among them
Emil Carlsen, are reviving the use of tempera.
But it is in our mural painting even more than elsewhere that the
conservative or reactionary tendency of American painting is most
clearly marked. John La Farge was always himself, but when the general
movement in mural painting began in this country with the Chicago
World's Fair and the subsequent decoration of the Library of Congress,
the rest of us were much under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes. Even
then the design was not his, but was founded on earlier examples of
decorative composition, but his pale tones were everywhere. Little by
little the study of the past has taught us better. American mural
painting has grown steadily more monumental in design, and at the same
time it has grown richer and fuller in color. To-day, while it is not
less but more personal and original than it was, it has more kinship
with the noble achievements of Raphael and Veronese than has any other
modern work extant.
And this brings us to the second characteristic of the American school
of painting: it is rapidly becoming a school of color. We have still
plenty of painters who work in the blackish or chalky or muddy and
opaque tones of modern art, but I think we have more men who produce
rich and powerful color and more men who produce subtle and delicate
color than any other modern school. The experiments in reviving old
technical methods have been undertaken for the sake of purity and
luminosity of color and have largely succeeded. The pictures of Mr.
Tarbell are far more colored than those of the European painter whose
work is, in some ways, most analogous to his, M. Joseph Bail. Mr.
Hassam's color is always sparkling and brilliant, Mr. Dewing's delicate
and charming, Mr. Weir's subtle and harmonious and sometimes very full.
Even Mr. Brush's linear arrangements are clothed in sombre but often
richly harmonious tones, and the decorative use of powerful color is the
main reliance of such painters as Hugo Ballin. But the note of color
runs through the school and one hardly needs to name individual men.
Whether our landscapists glaze and scumble with the tonalists, or use
some modification of the impressionist hatching, it is for the sake of
color; and even our most forthright and dashing wielders of the big
brush often achieve a surprising power of resonant coloring.
Power, fulness, and beauty of coloring are hardly modern qualities. Much
as impressionism has been praised for restoring color to a colorless
art, its result has been, too often, to substitute whitishness for
blackishness. Color has characterized no modern painting since that of
Delacroix and Millet as it characterizes much of the best American
painting. The love for and the success in color of our school is, after
all, a part of its conservatism.
It may seem an odd way of praising a modern school to call it the least
modern of any. It _would_ be an odd way of praising that school if its
lack of modernness were a mere matter of lagging behind or of standing
still and marking time. But if the "march of progress" has been
down-hill--if the path that is trod leads into a swamp or over a
precipice--then there may be most hopefulness for those who can 'bout
face and march the other way. I have, elsewhere in this volume, given at
some length some of my reasons for thinking that modern art has been
following a false route and is in danger of perishing in the bog or
falling over the cliff. If it is so we may congratulate ourselves that
those of our painters who are still following the rest of the world have
not so nearly reached the end of the road, and that those who are more
independent have discovered in time what that end is and have turned
back.
It is because it is least that of to-day that I believe our art may be
that of to-morrow--it is because it is, of all art now going, that which
has most connection with the past that I hope the art of America may
prove to be the art of the future.
VII
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS[C]
[C] Address delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on
February 22, 1908. Now revised and enlarged.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of
March, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. His
childhood and youth were passed in the city of New York, as was a great
part of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelong
associations had stamped him indelibly an American. The greater part of
his work was done in America; almost all of it was done for America; and
I do not think it is fancy that sees in his art the expression of a
distinctively American spirit. Yet from his mixed French and Irish
blood he may well have derived that mingling of the Latin sense of form
with a Celtic depth of sentiment which was so markedly characteristic of
his genius.
His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from the
little town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town of
Saint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and its
name. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin. Augustus
Saint-Gaudens was one of several children born to this couple and not
the only artist among them, for his younger brother Louis also attained
some reputation as a sculptor, though his entire lack of ambition
prevented his achieving all that was expected of him by those who knew
his delicate talent. The boy Augustus attended the public schools of New
York and received there all the formal education he ever had; but at
thirteen it was necessary for him to face the problem of earning his
living. His artistic proclivities were probably already well marked, and
to give them some scope, while assuring him a regular trade at which
money could be earned, he was apprenticed in the good old way to a cameo
cutter named Louis Avet, said to be the first man to cut stone cameos in
the United States. Thus it came about that the greatest of American
sculptors had much such a practical apprenticeship as a Florentine of
the fifteenth century might have had. He himself always spoke of it as
"one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him" and
attributed much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquired
at this time. Probably, also, the habit of thinking in terms of relief,
fostered by years of work at this ancient art, was not without influence
in the moulding of his talent.
His relations with Avet lasted from 1861 to 1864, when his master
quarrelled with him and abruptly dismissed him from his shop. The boy
was already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered an
injustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce them
to send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for him
in the person of a shell-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and with
him Saint-Gaudens remained three years. During his six years'
apprenticeship under his two masters the youth showed already that
energy and power of will that made him what he was. He meant to be
something more than an artisan, and he spent his evenings in the
classes, first of the Cooper Union, afterward of the National Academy of
Design, in the hard study of drawing, the true foundation of all the
fine arts. It was one of the elements of his superiority in his
profession that he could draw as few sculptors can, and he always felt
that he owed an especial debt to the Cooper Union, which he was glad to
repay when he modelled the statue of its venerable founder. Of the other
institution by whose freely given instruction he had profited, the
National Academy of Design, he became one of the most honored members.
By 1867, when he was nineteen years old, he had saved a little money and
was master of a trade that could be relied on to bring in more, and he
determined to go to Paris and begin the serious study of sculpture. He
worked, for a time, at the Petite École, and entered the studio of
Jouffroy in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1868, remaining until 1870.
During this time, and afterward, he was self-supporting, working half
his time at cameo cutting until his efforts at sculpture on a larger
scale began to bring in an income.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place for
the carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went to
Rome, where his associates were the French prizemen of the day, of whom
Mercié was one. He remained there until 1874, except for a visit to New
York in the winter of 1872-3 for the purpose of modelling a bust of
Senator Evarts, and one or two other busts, which were put into marble
upon his return to Rome. In those Roman days he executed his first
statue, a "Hiawatha," one of his few studies of the nude, and a
"Silence," a not very characteristic draped figure which yet fills with
some impressiveness her niche at the head of the grand stairway of the
Masonic Temple on Twenty-fourth Street.
From 1875 to 1877 he had a studio in New York, where he seems to have
executed some of his earliest portrait reliefs. During these years he
came into contact with La Farge, for whom he turned painter and aided
in the execution of the decorations of Trinity Church in Boston. It was
at this time, also, that he received his first commissions for important
public work, those for the Farragut statue in Madison Square, the
Randall at Sailors' Snug Harbor, and the angels for Saint Thomas's
Church. He had married Augusta F. Homer in 1877, and in that year,
taking his bride and his commissions with him, he returned to Paris,
feeling, as many another young Paris-bred artist has felt, that there
only could such important works be properly carried out. The "Farragut"
was completed and exhibited in the plaster at the Salon of 1880, and
from that time his success was assured. For the rest of his life he was
constantly busy, receiving almost more commissions for work of
importance than it was possible for him to carry out. He returned to New
York in 1880, and in 1881 he opened the studio in Thirty-sixth Street,
where he remained for sixteen years and where so many of his greatest
works were executed. From that studio came many of his exquisite
portraits in relief, his caryatids and angelic figures, such as those
for the Morgan tomb, so unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1882 (a fate
since shared by the earlier angels of Saint Thomas's), the great statues
of Lincoln and Chapin, the "Shaw Memorial," and the "Adams Memorial";
and in it was done all the preliminary work of the great equestrian
monument to General Sherman.
It is in these years of his prime that he will ever be most fondly
remembered by those--and they are many--who had the privilege of his
friendship. Admittedly our foremost sculptor, and one of the founders of
the Society of American Artists, he became at once a person of
importance in the world of art; and as his brilliant career developed
he established intimate relationships with an ever-widening circle of
men in every walk of life, while no one who ever knew him well can have
felt anything but an abiding affection for him. That long, white studio
became a familiar meeting-place for all who were interested in any form
of art; and the Sunday afternoon concerts that were held there for many
years will be looked back to with regret as long as any of their
auditors remain alive.
This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third
time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his
residence in New York. In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish,
N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt., and when he
returned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an ill
man, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode. He named
it Aspet, after his father's birthplace, and there he erected two
studios and finished his Sherman statue. In these studios were executed
the second "Lincoln," the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much other
work. The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lost
work re-begun and carried to a conclusion. What can never be quite
replaced were two portraits of himself. A study, of the head only, in
the collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H.
Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits of
him done from life in his best years. The Metropolitan Museum possesses
a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica,
painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.
From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never
recovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able
not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than
he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for
literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when
his own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strength
grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he
was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted
assistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinary
extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and
of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a
quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a
strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have
been involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 he
broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he
ceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat from
this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing
the work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried
from the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3,
1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure
and lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his
ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across
the river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in his
private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a
few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a
few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.
The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his
lifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding
Member of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies,
and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two,
one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued
most highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held
by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal
affection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in
1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts,
composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a
special diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all other
awards," an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of
American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of
the greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic and
literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish
celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fête and
open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of this
spectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columned
canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or
recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was
immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl.
23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned if
he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now
been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a
fitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he loved
as his chosen home.
Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who
ever came in contact with him--to any one, even, who ever saw his
portrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple
hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the
abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man. That
extraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small but
piercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jaw
and great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power--with power of
intellect no less than of will. His lack of early education gave him a
certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He was
apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate
himself in the comparison--indeed, a certain humility was strongly
marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident
also. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his
shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity
of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing
of talkers.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 23.--Saint-Gaudens. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque."]
Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated
Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the
service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of
his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was
twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the
"Sherman," and, though he did much other work while these were in
progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving
for perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of the
Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the
architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely
remodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness,
a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and
sympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will when
the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there
was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him to
inflict pain on any one. The conflict of these elements in his nature
sometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even to
those who knew him. He would be long-suffering, compromising,
disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would be
as staggering as it was unexpected. It was as if he struck the harder to
have done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again.
It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare acts
of self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his
natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who
showed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakable
suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give a
word of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to any
one who needed the one or had earned the other. The essential goodness
of the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most of
all, perhaps, by his actual coworkers. He could command, as few have
been able to do, the love and devotion of his assistants. To all who
knew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, and
the gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fill
than his place in American art.
But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for the
memory of his private friends. It is only as it colors his art that it
is of public interest. It is his art itself, his gift to the world, that
the world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, the
nature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear.
Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of the
manner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our country
has produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elements
of its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as its
qualities.