importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although
Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was
a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France.
The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formal
imitation of second-rate antiques and the substitution of the sculpture
of the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the direct
study of nature as a means of self-expression. There had always been
individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the
movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the
pseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by
Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris.
Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modern
sculpture were trained in the _atelier_ of Jouffroy. Falguière and
Saint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young American
entered it, and Mercié was his fellow student there. Dalou and Rodin
have since made these men seem old-fashioned and academic, but they
were then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school;
and of this new school, so different from anything he had known in
America, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part. His own pronounced
individuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years of
his greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlike
any other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter of
the nineteenth century he essentially belonged.
Of course, his style was not formed in a moment. His "Hiawatha" seems,
to-day, much such a piece of neo-classicism as was being produced by
other men in the Rome of that time, and the "Silence," though somewhat
more modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have been
expected from a docile pupil of his master. The relief of angels for the
reredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work which
shows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with John
La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently
picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger
French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character.
It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without
study from nature--a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a
sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal,
the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the
"Amor-Caritas." In each of these developments the work becomes less
picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of
decorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in the
caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo--works of his last days,
when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially
his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility of
style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.
The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not,
primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism
is justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or
not. It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we were
forbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find another
name for it, the important fact that it is art--art of the finest, the
most exquisite, at times the most powerful--would in no wise be altered.
Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introduced
perspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and clouds
and cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs.
Does any one care? Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures?
The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatest
sculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise. A
work of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thing
of beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it in
some ready-made category. After all, the critical pigeonholes are made
for the things, not the things for the pigeonholes. The work is there,
and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is as
likely to be in the definition as in the work itself.
And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest--free in an
extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the
scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and
technical brilliancy on the other. Never more than in our own day have
these been the great temptations of an able artist: that he should in
the absorption of study forget the end in the means and produce
demonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues or
pictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents,
seem to say, "See how well I can do it!" and invent difficulties for the
sake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than a
creator. Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism--the desire to
attract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unable
to secure it by truth and beauty--one need not speak. It is the
temptation of vulgar souls. But great and true artists have yielded,
occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens never
does. I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, in
which a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without the
moulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only one
which has any spice of bravura--the Logan statue--and the bravura is
there because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artist
wished it. The dash and glitter are those of "Black Jack Logan," not of
Saint-Gaudens. The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to render
higher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to his
nature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works. He
is essentially the artist--the artificer of beauty--ever bent on the
making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and
the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become
anything more.
If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural
means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for
composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested
him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation
is well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us,
before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a
profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for
Saint-Gaudens. The modelling of the _morceau_ was not particularly his
affair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and
integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly
drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from
it--these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in
which he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for the
inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care.
The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which have
occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems.
It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that,
after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the
"Diana" of the tower--a purely decorative figure, designed for distant
effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place
because invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figures
as the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath
the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of those
artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure
is all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the
movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In
such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own
ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath
the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and
of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the
figure.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 24.--Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas."]
First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer,
and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove
for--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending,
persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his principal
preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole,
its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces,
its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its
composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo
cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of
composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he
produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly
charming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on design
for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He
goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to
monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and
last--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--design
properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with
bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space--but still design. This
power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the
interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but
it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal
beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer,
constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall
be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its
proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement
while an experiment remains untried--this is what cost him years of
labor. His first important statue, the "Farragut," is a masterpiece of
restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design--a design, too,
that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures
in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. In
later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper
feeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of composition
as is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue of
Sherman.
Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this
power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities:
knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of
surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and
proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may
be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct--I mean that
much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only
of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round
is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with
actual form--a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of
an object, it _is_ the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for
the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to
it--which must be added to it to make it art--it is the reproduction in
another material of the actual forms of things. Something which shall
answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting
natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture
which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more
difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It is
the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid
the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most
delicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is need
in the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds.
The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it deals
only in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspect
of objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, and
its means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on the
study of perspective and on the study of the way light falls upon
objects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces by
the varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in the
round need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them,
unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statue
need not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form the
foreshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in a
disastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade,
although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely upon
it, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily have
the true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture and
drawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture--is
really a kind of drawing--and this is why so few sculptors succeed in
it.
It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind--the most
delicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. As
to the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any other
material. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree and
the same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. But
for all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interior
forms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmost
subtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but the
shadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface--they are
produced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planes
away from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle and
tender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, and
therefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of a
sculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmanship. But as the
light and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlike
the true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can never
imitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature.
His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents--an art which can
give neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth of
aspect--an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. And
success in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor's
artistry--of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment of
his material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact.
As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that
highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the
problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new
compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and
illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there
may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in
different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes
one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed,
the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of
color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure
elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than
in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing
but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.
This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I
believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since
the fifteenth century.
He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of
the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief
is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather
than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged
statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away,
like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in
appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the
same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite
resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl.
25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name
but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of
spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness
of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine
Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems
of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"--a mastery which shows, in the
result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it
cost--is unsurpassed--I had almost said unequalled--in any work of any
epoch.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 25.--Saint-Gaudens. "The Butler Children."]
Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this
or that particular work in this long series. It can show no more than
the composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship,
the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only
before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of
workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance
on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to
sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with
the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from
the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of
mystery and of suggestion--an art having affinities with that of
painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are
softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are
eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and
significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It
is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising
material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern
costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the
ancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nude
figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume
of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike
mediæval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it
interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it
in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness.
A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve
the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the
skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist
whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War
should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I
know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently
succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could have
made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting
as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 26.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee."]
But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--if
it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he
said himself, he had "to fight against picturesqueness," his work was
never pictorial. He never indulged in perspective or composed his
reliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with the
traditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronze
or marble as more than one modern has done. His very feeling for
decoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight against
picturesqueness was nobly won. His design becomes ever cleaner and more
classic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger and
stronger in the more purely sculptural qualities--attains a grasp of
form and structure only second to his mastery of composition. He is
always a consummate artist--in his finest works he is a great sculptor
in the strictest sense of the word.
I have dwelt somewhat at length upon technical matters because technical
power is the first necessity for an artist; because technical mastery is
that for which he consciously endeavors; because the technical language
of his art is the necessary vehicle of expression for his thoughts and
emotions, and determines, even, the nature of the thoughts and emotions
he shall express. But while the technical accomplishment of an artist
is the most necessary part of his art, without which his imagination
would be mute, it is not the highest or the most significant part of it.
I have tried to show that Saint-Gaudens was a highly accomplished
artist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most.
What made him something much more than this--something infinitely more
important for us--was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination.
Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of great
distinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became a
great creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals and
the deepest feelings of a nation and of a time.
It is a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him his
unerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon the
significant elements of a personality, to divine the attitude and the
gesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to present
to us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and
Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and
memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed it
conclusively in so early a work as the "Farragut" (Pl. 27), a work that
remains one of the modern masterpieces of portrait statuary. The man
stands there forever, feet apart, upon his swaying deck, his glass in
one strong hand, cool, courageous, ready, full of determination but
absolutely without bluster or braggadocio, a sailor, a gentleman, and a
hero. He showed it again, and with ampler maturity, in that august
figure of "Lincoln" (Pl. 28), grandly dignified, austerely simple,
sorrowfully human, risen from the chair of state that marks his office,
but about to speak as a man to men, his bent head and worn face
filled with a sense of power, but even more with the sadness of
responsibility--filled, above all, with a yearning, tender passion of
sympathy and love. In imaginative presentation of character, in nobility
of feeling and breadth of treatment, no less than in perfection of
workmanship, these are among the world's few worthy monuments to its
great men.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 27.--Saint-Gaudens. "Farragut."]
And they are monuments to Americans by an American. Saint-Gaudens had
lived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir of
its great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become a
part of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature. The
feelings of the American people were his feelings, and his
representations of these and of other heroes of that great struggle are
among the most national as they are among the most vital things that our
country has produced in art.