sent to him there, before he went abroad, young Philip Rollins, who
became his lifelong friend. Rollins was much interested in horses and in
pictures. He had seen a painting of Gutzon’s in Mrs. Frémont’s
possession which he said was worth a thousand Corots. “I have never
looked so far into the sky in any painting,” he said. And he brought
that admiration into his friendship.
In San Francisco Gutzon had a little trouble with the estate of Leland
Stanford. Mr. Stanford, during his lifetime, had ordered three pictures
from Gutzon, who was then in Paris. One of these was a small canvas
priced at $500, accepted and paid for. The others were larger. Stanford
accepted them but died before any payment had been made.
Rollins brought suit against the estate for Borglum, but the claim was
rejected. The widow declared that there was no written contract. Mrs.
Frémont was much incensed and wrote Gutzon a very gossipy letter about
the worth of widows who needed written contracts.
In 1896 Borglum left California again, expecting to settle in England.
His last act before leaving was to model a bust of his dear friend and
patron Mrs. Frémont. A photograph of the bust is the frontispiece of
Mrs. Phillip’s biography of Mrs. Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon
Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from
Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.”
What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a
permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be
quite certain of where he was going.
CHAPTER SIX
_ENGLAND_
There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember
“the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the
histories point out briefly that they were with us. Depression had begun
to spread in 1890. The banking house of Baring, badly entangled with
Argentine investments, closed its doors. The British began to dump
American securities. The gold reserve began to disappear. And, in
general, that is how things went for five or six years.
Nowhere in Gutzon’s record of the times is there much mention of panic
or money shortage. This may be a good place to record that in London he
did show some concern about dollars--what they were and how they were
kept. One gathers, indirectly, that he liked to be working. That he
really enjoyed the pleasure of others in the things that he painted or
carved was fairly obvious. Against that, he knew all that was to be
known about hunger. His movement to England at a time when living in
California was beginning to look difficult may indicate that somebody
was taking thought.
Life in England appears to have been no complete idyll. Gutzon himself
was quite happy. There was work for him to do and he had plenty of
English friends, but one gathers that Mrs. Borglum found the exile a bit
painful.
In 1897 Jessie Frémont wrote this to him:
If you come away or go away from London, I shall be sorry and
disappointed in you. English people _demand_ stability. And there
is to be no talk even of preference for any other place. The time
will surely come when you can put your preferences into execution,
but it does chill and turn away interest to have a vanishing
prospect.
Mrs. Borglum has too much sense and far too much affection for you
not to see that this is for your true interest. You cannot re-cast
a national mold and England is set to its “slow-and-sure,” sure
being its complement to slow. I do not blame Mrs. Borglum’s
American impatience, but “stay where the money is.”
The artist’s prevailing mood during 1897 seems to have been one of
profound melancholy and disillusionment regarding Europe. He kept a
diary at this time which, with his letters from Mrs. Frémont, is the
chief source of information concerning his life in England.
Mrs. Frémont’s letters gave him great cheer and comfort. General Frémont
had an artistic and sensitive nature with frequent ups and downs of
mood. Circumstances beyond his control had ruined his dreams for
developments in California. The United States government itself had
taken land from him for war purposes in 1861, and he had never been paid
for it. His widow was still hoping to have her claim settled thirty-six
years later. She knew the value of money, the need for patience and
diplomacy; and she could sympathize with a struggling artist in language
that he could understand.
Gutzon’s diary opens with an indication that he needed the sympathy. He
begins:
Now, at last! I feel some--enough--desire to make notes of steps
and landings in this, this curious life that we are doomed for a
certain time to bear. I must be honest with myself--else why
record? Lies, trivialities and the daily doings of the body are not
worth thinking of much less making memoranda of. But it’s not
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of E. K. Edwards_
“GENERAL SHERIDAN”
This statue is in Washington, D.C.]
[Illustration: “WARS OF AMERICA” MODEL]
for the public--not for one single soul. For I am alone and who
would understand?
Six years ago I said to myself, “I’ll be great at thirty, or
never.” I am thirty. I have had the disturbing pleasure of being
called “master” by the French critics and some Americans, yet at
the moment I cannot spend sixpence without wondering where the next
one will come from. Art is not self-sustaining until it becomes
commercially valuable, and a man is not to be counted until he is
in popular demand.
Gutzon’s reach was far beyond his grasp, and his Heaven was far away.
Undoubtedly he was extravagant. He loved beauty and costly things, rare
books, rich stuff and tapestries. But the problem of where the next
dollar was coming from began to worry him less and less. He got big
commissions in America, in England and all through his life. His trouble
was not that he failed to make money but that he never learned how to
keep it.
He never seemed to know the value of a dollar, nor did he care. His real
extravagance was in putting into commissioned work added richness of
detail or extra figures that he thought would add to the effect. That
was why he rarely came out of an undertaking with any great profit to
himself and was hounded by debt all his life.
He rarely spent money on his person, except for small lovely things that
he could carry in his pocket. He often had holes in his shoes, and his
unpressed clothes were always a distress to his friends. To emphasize
the sacrifices of a struggling artist, he used to tell of buying baked
potatoes on the street corners of London to keep his hands warm. The
potato-buying story was undoubtedly true, but it was hardly a record of
a typical condition.
Building was his chief delight--always. In London, after he had lived
for months in a studio apartment in West Kensington, he rented a villa
in St. John’s Wood and proceeded to make repairs and additions to it,
regardless of cost. The villa had a rose garden, and he frequently
talked of how he mowed the lawn early in the morning before starting
the day’s work. All his life he enjoyed the work of beautifying his
surroundings. During the years he built at least six other studios and
houses for himself without ever being satisfied. His ideal home, which
he was always ready to describe in detail and with feeling, was a
fabulous sort of place that existed only in his restless mind.
In his diary he mentions having gone shopping with the painter Frank
Brangwyn to consider taking over Sir Edward Leighton’s studio. They
decided it was too pretentious. In Paris he rented a studio in the
Boulevard Arago. He still found some of his old friends and business
acquaintances in the neighborhood when he visited it in 1931, thirty
years after he had moved out of it. It was a place of rare memories. He
had fitted the little stove with a red isinglass front, and he had
burned a solitary candle in it in those freezing days to give the
illusion of rosy warmth.
In Gutzon’s reminiscences it seems always to have been cold in the
neighborhood of Boulevard Arago. A sculptor, living in one of the
garrets with which the region seems to have been plentifully supplied,
fashioned a masterpiece. It was still in the wet clay when the
thermometer dropped below freezing. The artist was frantic. In the
bitter cold of night he began to fear for his statue. He got up and
wrapped it in rags of clothing and finally in his only blanket to keep
the ice away. He died of the cold. But the statue for which he froze to
death now reposes in warm, serene quarters in the Luxembourg.
Frank Brangwyn, some of whose work may be seen in Rockefeller Plaza in
New York City, was the one artist who made a deep impression on Gutzon
in England. The Borglum diary is filled with notations such as this:
“November 19, 1897--Short half hour with Brangwyn.... He belongs to
_art_ and will do work that will live.” And the feeling was mutual. In
later years Brangwyn wrote, “I admire those strong virile things of
yours. It is like a strong sea breeze on a hot and listless day to see
your honest works....” Each foresaw for the other a greatness that he
could not hope for himself.
The sculptor met Ruskin briefly and was so impressed with his features
that he made a statuette of him. The figure is seated with a rug over
the knees and was one of Borglum’s most successful pieces. A copy of it
is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
He also met George Bernard Shaw, although little of art figured in their
association. In a letter years later he mentioned Shaw’s attendance at
meetings of what he called the “Kingsley Society.” “This,” wrote Gutzon,
“was a lively debating society and we visited once a week at one
another’s homes. I debated with Shaw on ‘The Ignorance of Educating Me.’
I forget which side. Shaw likes to play smart, but at heart he is a
serious, lovable, great man.”
Gutzon may have been right about most of these points, but he made an
error in naming the club. It was probably the Fabian Club. Shaw denied
that he had ever heard of the “Kingsley Society,” and mentioned that for
that matter he had hardly heard about Kingsley.
Gutzon remained in England until the turn of the century which,
considering the intensely modern impact of his life, seems like a long
time ago. The days of quick success had become fewer in 1897, and they
lessened rapidly thereafter. There was trouble on the horizon and the
people of England were uneasy and crotchety.
In the controversy preceding the Boer War, which broke out in 1899, he
was loudly critical of the British for their oppression of “the intrepid
band in the Transvaal,” and freely forecast that they would pay for it
dearly. And they did. General Baden-Powell, another of Borglum’s
friends, was besieged with his troops in Mafeking, a little town north
of Kimberley. There, holding what appeared to be a hopeless position,
they came closer to starvation daily while England prayed.
Years afterward, in an article about the Boy Scouts, which Baden-Powell
founded, Borglum recalled the turning point of that war:
I was in London. I was sitting in the New Globe theater. Duse, the
magnificent, was giving one of her superb performances. And during
one of the curtains the director came onto the stage with an
announcement.
At first he said, “I hope that everyone will remain in his seat. I
hope that you will be quiet and let the play go on.” The audience
was dead still, trying to understand. And then the man said:
“Mafeking has been relieved.”
The play ended right there. I never saw a sedate audience so
completely surrender to joy. Believe it or not, every man
everywhere in the theater kissed the others, kissed the women,
shouted and cried. They poured into the streets and jumped up and
down. They crawled onto the tops of buses and danced. And then and
there Mafeking became historic.
Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great
Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had
lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen
thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England....
Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now
remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left
the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat
incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series
of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing
completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the
finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway
Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had
long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large
order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought
the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been
considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the
Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible
in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery.
The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum
had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another
property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon
admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them.
They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the
central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them.
For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and
background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,”
the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with
young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them
dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and
gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the
maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still
extant.
The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in
1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did
Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it.
The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot
escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of
knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of
the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a
leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.
The eleven paintings that accompanied Lancelot and Guenevere back to
England were scenes from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_--Queen Titania
asleep with Oberon’s love potion in her eyes; Titania’s encounter with
Bottom, the weaver; her adventures with Quince, the carpenter,
Starveling, the tailor, Snout, the tinker and Flute, the
bellows-mender--all in a fine, fantastic humor. Gutzon was still at work
on this group on June 30, 1903, which was the day before he started for
England to make delivery and supervise installation. He was very ill
with typhoid fever that year, and his cash had disappeared. Friends
about the studio took up a collection to pay his steamship fare to
Liverpool.
Borglum’s last years in England were marked by a tremendous emotional
depression. His journal, in places, becomes almost incoherent as he
attempts to analyze mental suffering. He found relief in work, and he
worked incessantly.
He painted murals for private homes and made the illustrations for at
least two books, _The Spanish Main_, with pictures of old war galleys,
and _King Arthur_, with especially fine drawings of oak trees a thousand
years old. He had some success as a portrait artist. He painted the
likenesses of a large number of the aristocracy at whose country houses
he was entertained. One of these was the portrait of Lord Mowbray, which
was exhibited at Liverpool with the Lord Mayor taking part in the
ceremonies. He mentions in his diary the painting of the composer,
Clarence Lucas, who thought it a good portrait “that possibly might also
be a work of art.”
There is also some evidence that during the late nineties he was doing
more and more work with sculpture. In his journal he mentions a lost
piece, “The Return of the Boer,” which brought considerable attention to
his carving. It showed a man on horseback returning to his ruined home.
He was a figure of complete dejection, his shoulders drooping, his head
bent down. His rifle was before him across the saddle. The horse was
sniffing at the burned bits that remained of a house. The statue brought
plenty of criticism and discussion but no money. The Parisian who cast
the group said it was _trop personnel_ to be a financial success.
Gutzon’s only copy of it was borrowed by the dancer Loie Fuller for an
exhibition and later left by her in a New York bank as security for a
loan. Presumably it lies forgotten in some vault.
Another bronze group, “Apaches Pursued,” had greater public appeal and
was exhibited in several shows in Europe. It was decidedly popular in
Turin, and a copy was bought for Kaiser Wilhelm II. It shows two horses
in full gallop, one of the riders holding to a third man whom he has
lifted off the ground in his flight. The critics were pleased by its
composition, which was as striking as its animation.
Oddly enough, this group came back into public view in 1946 in an art
dealer’s window in Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. It was found to
have been purchased by a Philadelphian at an auction sale of the effects
of “Diamond Jim Brady.” A copy made from this is now in the Witte Art
Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
All in all, in 1900 Gutzon Borglum was one of the most popular artists
in England. He lived in a comfortable villa, he had plentiful work, and
what he did was enthusiastically received. And mental dejection did not
keep him from having a rather full and varied social life.
In a letter to Mrs. Frémont he mentioned meeting a Madame Helen Bricka,
who brought his work to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of Teck of
whose household she was a member. Gutzon visited the Duke and Duchess
and so met, and threw into the air, a little boy who grew up to be the
Duke of Windsor and, for a time, the King of England.
Through Madame Bricka he was summoned by Queen Victoria to bring his
work, both painting and sculpture, to Windsor Castle for an exhibition.
But for a young man born on the shore of Bear Lake, Idaho, the
invitation was not clear enough. One may be permitted a bit of
speculation as to what might have happened if he had caught the
meaning--if he had paraded with his work under royal patronage before
the aristocracy of Great Britain. But it is futile thought. He sent his
art to Windsor for an exhibition, but he never met the queen. It never
occurred to him that a queen might want to see him.
He had a very successful one-man show at Macmillan’s in Bond Street,
and he made many friends in England and France, some of them American
artists. Some of these appeared later in his life and in his
correspondence in the United States. One of them was Carl Sobieski,
descendant of the famous Polish general. Another, who noted his
experience entertainingly, was the writer R. M. Eassie. He told Gutzon
of hearing of his connection with the Angels of St. John the Divine, in
the heart of Africa, thirty-five miles from the nearest whites.
One of Gutzon’s last entries in his London journal tells of a party in
1901 at his home, “Harlestone Villa,” in St. John’s Wood. It is worth
mentioning in that it honored Isadora Duncan and marked her debut as a
dancer.
Gutzon had known the Duncans in California. Isadora’s father had
recently been in London and was on his way back to America when his
ship, the _Mohegan_ foundered off the Irish coast. The sculptor had gone
from England to take charge of Duncan’s body and to see that he was
properly buried.
Isadora, her brother and sister had come from California after their
father’s death. August Borglum, Gutzon’s brother, was a guest at the
party and always recalled the impression Miss Duncan made as she danced
out from the studio onto the lawn, scattering red rose petals that she
had been gathering in the villa garden. Isadora, Gutzon observed,
brought an active revival of memories from home. “The fresh western
breeze that came with her,” he said, filled him with nostalgia.
Very likely it did. Shortly afterward he had gone over to Paris and was
standing idly on a street corner. It was a day like any other in his
life except that he had had a brief meeting with a casual American
tourist in a café, and that there was an unusual amount of cash in his
pocket.
Suddenly there came to him an irresistible urge to return to the United
States--to go home. All his pent-up irritation over spiritual
repressions and his grievance over decadent art conditions in Europe
surged over him at once. He leaped at a passing
[Illustration: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN”
This statue, in front of the Newark courthouse, was Borglum’s own
favorite.]
[Illustration: GUTZON AND MARY BORGLUM]
cab, offered double fare if he could get to the Gare du Nord in time for
the boat train ... and so, presently, he had passed through Cherbourg
and was on a ship headed for America.
This ended an era in his life and marked, definitely, the beginning of
another. He was never to return to Europe except for the placing of work
he had produced in the United States.
CHAPTER SEVEN
_QUIET IN NEW YORK_
The first thing Gutzon Borglum did in New York was to join--or, perhaps,
originate--a movement whose object was to make American art distinctive
and national. This was a bit out of the ordinary. Gutzon, so far as he
had expressed himself, hadn’t much concern about American art. What he
had seen of it annoyed him, and he didn’t intend to give much time to
its promotion. He was presently to return to England ... but somehow he
could never find time to book a passage.
In the early days of the twentieth century his journal mentions, and
many of us unfortunately remember, European and classic influences were
dominant in art. Our public buildings were often Greek or Roman temples
adorned with sculpture right out of Homer’s mythology. In New York the
extreme example of this tendency was a building erected by some art
society on Lexington Avenue which was decorated across the front with a
frieze from the Parthenon in Athens. The New York version of the frieze
was so exact as to include all the mutilations that the march of
hundreds of years had inflicted on the original.
Artists--painters, sculptors, musicians alike--had to have studied
abroad before they could get a hearing in America. But, unfortunately,
most of the people who patronized art learned about the subject from a
few simple home rules. They were breaking out of the awesome,
gewgaw-enveloped homes of the eighties and nineties and moving into
chateaus imported by the boatload from France. But there is no record
that any art dealer ever succeeded in selling an American house to some
customer in Paris.
It often happens that a convert to a religious sect is more fanatical in
his beliefs than one born into the fold. Gutzon’s father had come to the
United States from Denmark to escape the ancient fetters of thought, and
Gutzon himself had become thoroughly disillusioned by his years abroad.
He considered America to be the last stronghold of freedom for the
spirit. And he believed that the time had come for the country to
express itself culturally. He had a theory that many people are born
Americans though their physical birthplace might have been Denmark or
Poland or Timbuktu. He insisted that although America was comparatively
a young nation, the significance of her discovery, colonization and
development offered rich sources for the painter or sculptor seeking
decorative themes. He wanted architects to stop copying classic models.
He was a great admirer of Louis Sullivan’s individual art, and he
understood it. Once, driving through a small town in Ohio that he had
never seen before, he suddenly stopped the car and went back to look at
a red-brick building. “Built by Sullivan,” he said. And so it was.
The subject of the Prix de Rome scholarships, in his opinion, was
debatable. He thought it a mistake to send talented young artists to
Rome during their most formative period and expose them to the
overpowering influence of the great masters. He lived his theory, for he
did not see Italy until late in life, rather than lose his individuality
in the presence of those giants, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Donatello,
whom he deeply revered.