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AMERICAN MASTERS OF SCULPTURE
By the same author:
AMERICAN MASTERS OF PAINTING
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A FINE ART
[Illustration: THE SHERMAN MONUMENT
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens]
AMERICAN MASTERS OF
SCULPTURE
BEING
BRIEF APPRECIATIONS OF SOME AMERICAN
SCULPTORS AND OF SOME PHASES
OF SCULPTURE IN AMERICA
BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
Author of “American Masters of Painting”
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1903, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
INTRODUCTION
The year 1876, the date of the Centennial Exhibition, is a landmark in
the progress of American sculpture as it is in that of American
painting. Not to be fixed too definitely, and yet serving approximately
as a starting-point of new conditions which have transformed what had
been a sporadic and largely exotic product into a lusty, homogeneous and
thoroughly acclimatised growth. I speak of the gradual improvement and
spread of taste in the community; the steady trend of students to Paris
and the habit of American sculptors to make their own country the scene
and inspiration of their labours.
The earlier tendency had been toward Italy; to Rome and Florence,
especially, where American colonies existed. Here the student adopted
the Canova tradition of sweetened classicism, or the infusion of
naturalism into the classic vein, represented in the work of a few
romanticists; and, having learned his craft, remained in Italy to
practise it. His sources of instruction had not been of the best and he
worked in an atmosphere tainted with artistic and political decadence.
It is not surprising that much of the sculpture of this period, though
considerably admired in its day, strikes us now as coldly and
pedantically null, unconvincing and grandiloquent or, at best,
innocuously sentimental. Only once in a while is there a statue of such
moment as “The Greek Slave,” by Hiram Powers, which very closely follows
and attains to the purity of Canova’s style. The more memorable works of
this period came chiefly from those sculptors who, although living
abroad, kept in touch with home. Of these the most distinguished was
William Henry Rinehart; yet his classical pieces will not compare in
force and dignity with his sitting statue of Chief Justice Taney at
Annapolis, reproduced in Mount Vernon Square, Baltimore, which still
remains one of the most impressive monuments in this country. In like
manner Thomas Crawford’s best works were the bronze doors for the
Capitol, illustrating events in the Revolution, the colossal “Liberty”
which crowns the dome and an equestrian statue of Washington at
Richmond. Equally it was in another equestrian statue of Washington, the
one which stands in the Boston Public Gardens, that Thomas Ball reached
his best achievement. But it is inferior in ease and dignity to the same
subject executed by Henry Kirke Brown, whose equestrian statue of
General Scott at Washington also stands out conspicuously among the
best we have. Brown, too, studied in Italy, but with the conviction that
Americans should occupy themselves upon American subjects returned home
and established his studio in New York. It would be going too far to
attribute the excellence of these two statues to the fact of their
having been conceived and executed in the American environment, the more
so as Brown’s work was uneven in quality and did not in other subjects
reach the dignity of these. Yet his deviation from the custom of the
time was the outcome of a very individual force of character, and the
influence of the latter upon his work may very well have been reënforced
by the environment. At any rate, his action was considered notable in
his own day and has always been remembered since, and undoubtedly marks
the beginning of the reaction against self-expatriation.
It will not, however, escape the thoughtful student of this period how
natural such self-expatriation was. A stout heart, indeed, was needed to
bear up against the dearth of artistic incentive at home. Necessarily
the time was devoted mainly to material expansion and building up,
especially calling for the heroic qualities of brain and muscle, and
accompanied inevitably by a spirit of materialism. It was not until the
conscience and soul of the nation had been re-awakened by a great moral
question and chastened by the stern discipline of a tremendous struggle
that it began to return to the higher enthusiasms of its youth.
Hero-worship was reborn--or, rather, took a nobler, more spiritualised
form--for a nation will always have its heroes. But now, instead of the
hero of the market or the stump, whose service to the public is
subordinate to self-aggrandisement, there had sprung up in every
State--indeed, from every village and most firesides--heroes of
sacrifice. The hero-worship which ensued was bound up with a fuller,
deeper sense of national life, eager to express itself. It found vent in
the spoken and written word, it sought to free itself in visible,
tangible expression. As the birth of the Republic had been identified
with the erection of noble buildings, so the rebirth of national
conscience and soul found in a revived architecture the means of
expressing its national state and civic pride, and in sculpture its
worship of heroes. And it is a remarkable coincidence that the beginning
of this esthetic demand fitted in with the appearance in America of a
band of trained artists, returning from their studies abroad. The
Centennial Exhibition opened the eyes of the country to the wonders of
foreign art, and here were Americans on the spot trained in those
foreign schools.
With only a few exceptions all our sculptors of the present generation
have acquired their training, either wholly or in part, in Paris; that
is to say, in the best school in the world. For France, ever since the
Middle Ages, has never been without a succession of great sculptors.
When the Gothic spirit had spent itself, that of the late Italian
Renaissance was imported; and the art, continually adjusting itself to
the changing conditions of national life, has been held in uninterrupted
honour to the present time. It is in this branch of the fine arts that
the French genius has found its most individual expression.
Corresponding with the maintenance of fine traditions is the excellence
of the system of teaching. The Institute and the École des Beaux Arts
perpetuate a standard, characterised by technical perfection and
elegance of style, while the tendency to academic narrowness is offset
by the influence of independent sculptors; for there is not a
thought-wave in modern art that does not emanate from or finally reach
Paris. It is the world’s clearing-house of artistic currency.
The attractions of a city so rich in artistic resources, so generous to
artists, have allured many to extend their sojourn there beyond the
years of studentship, and Paris has been in these days, only in a still
greater degree, what Florence and Rome were half a century ago--a resort
for self-expatriated Americans. But, with a few exceptions, the
sculptors have escaped this tendency; not so much perhaps from
inclination as from circumstances. For commissions have been plentiful
in America, and the need of being on the spot in order to secure them
drew the sculptors home--on the whole to the betterment of their art.
For it is the same with Paris, a university of the arts, as with
Harvard, Yale or any other university of letters and science. The
atmosphere is most congenial to the quick development of student years;
but, for the further, more gradual development that grows out of the
stuff which a man has in him, not to be compared to the rough-and-tumble
contact with the larger world.
For there are some elements of technique which can be imparted; others,
however, are of personal growth. It is a distinction largely of manners
and feeling. Manners can be imparted and acquired; feeling, at best,
mainly guided. Its finer manifestations are the outcome of
self-development. Thus in the matter of modelling, in which the Parisian
student usually excels, the hand can be trained to express with
exquisite precision and delicacy the surface of flesh and fabric, the
form and texture of each; and the feeling for the esthetic charm of
these things can be aroused and refined. So, too, can that larger
feeling for the construction of the form and the organic relation of its
parts, up to the point at least of securing accuracy and truth to
nature. But the still larger feeling, which finds in the structure and
organic arrangement an expression of emotion and manifests itself most
amply in composition, cannot be taught. To certain general principles
the student may be directed, just as any school of manners may lay down
rules of conduct, which will be admirable in securing propriety and
decorum. So far can feeling be instilled and regulated; but the freer,
deeper, really significant feeling has its origin in character, in the
moral and mental _ego_ of the individual, to be further deepened and
broadened by the experiences of life. In sculpture this significant
feeling manifests itself appropriately in the large field of the general
design; in the weight, stability and harmonious unity of the mass, which
make the composition monumental; and in the manifestation of character
and sentiment, sustained through every part of the whole, which renders
the composition expressional. For convenience one separates the
disposition of the form from the expression, but really they are one
and the same act, the sculptor composing his plastic material as the
musician does his chords and harmonies, to give expression to the
character or sentiment that supplies the theme of his work.
Now, given this natural gift, the reënforcement of it must come from the
theme itself, from the degree to which it has laid hold of and possessed
the sculptor’s imagination. And it is for this reason that, when he is
executing American themes, the true environment for him is America. It
ought to give him direct incentive, and, even if it does not, should at
least save him from being enticed into a more specious attitude of mind.
For I think one may note traces of this speciousness in the sculpture of
Americans working in Paris; a _parti pris_ for the smaller elegancies of
design as opposed to the salient and the large.
On the other hand, the working upon American themes in the American
environment can draw nothing out of the artist that is not in him; and
this higher mastery over form and composition, being a gift of the gods,
is necessarily rare. Perhaps only in a few American sculptors, as only
rarely in other countries, will you discover it; while skill in
modelling, elegance of design and a generally sensitive taste will be
found more diffused through American sculpture than through that of any
other country except France. The reason, unquestionably, is the peculiar
aptitude of the American to impressions and his study in the best of
modern schools.
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
Thanks are due to the Sculptors, to the Century Company and to Charles
Scribner’s Sons, whose assistance has made possible the inclusion of the
illustrations in this edition.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION V
I. AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 1
II. GEORGE GREY BARNARD 19
III. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD 37
IV. DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 53
V. FREDERICK MACMONNIES 71
VI. PAUL WEYLAND BARTLETT 87
VII. HERBERT ADAMS 97
VIII. CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS 117
IX. OLIN LEVI WARNER 129
X. SOLON HANNIBAL BORGLUM 147
XI. VICTOR DAVID BRENNER 163
XII. THE DECORATIVE MOTIVE 173
XIII. THE IDEAL MOTIVE 209
INDEX 233
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE SHERMAN MONUMENT. BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
GRIEF. BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 8
A Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington,
D. C.
THE LINCOLN STATUE. BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 9
RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 16
PAN. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 28
THE HEWER. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 29
TWO FRIENDS. BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 34
A Memorial Monument.
THE GREELEY STATUE. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
WARD 46
THE BEECHER STATUE. BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
WARD 47
DEATH AND THE SCULPTOR. BY DANIEL
CHESTER FRENCH 60
The Milmore Monument in Forest Hills Cemetery
near Boston.
DETAIL OF THE CLARK MONUMENT. BY
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 61
Forest Hills Cemetery.
ALMA MATER. BY DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 68
Columbia University.
DIANA. BY FREDERICK MACMONNIES 76
BACCHANTE. BY FREDERICK MACMONNIES 77
MICHELANGELO. BY PAUL WEYLAND BARTLETT 92
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
MADONNA. BY HERBERT ADAMS 104
Tympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New
York.
PORTRAIT-BUST. BY HERBERT ADAMS 105
BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE. BY HERBERT
ADAMS 110
THE DRILLER. BY CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS 122
From the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania.
THE HAHNEMANN STATUE. BY CHARLES HENRY
NIEHAUS 123
From the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.
BUST OF DANIEL COTTIER. BY OLIN LEVI
WARNER 136
CUPID AND PSYCHE. BY OLIN LEVI WARNER 137
DIANA. BY OLIN LEVI WARNER 144
COWBOY MOUNTING. BY SOLON HANNIBAL
BORGLUM 152
LOST IN A BLIZZARD. (Marble.) BY SOLON HANNIBAL
BORGLUM 153
TAMED. BY SOLON HANNIBAL BORGLUM 160
PORTRAIT OF C. P. HUNTINGTON. BY VICTOR
DAVID BRENNER 168
RECUMBENT FIGURE. BY J. MASSEY RHIND 192
From the Tomb of Father Brown in the Church of
Saint Mary-the-Virgin, New York.
PUMA. BY A. PHIMISTER PROCTOR 193
From Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
CHARIOT RACE. BY F. G. R. ROTH 202
BUST OF A CHILD. BY BIRTLEY CANFIELD 214
THE STONE AGE. BY JOHN J. BOYLE 215
I
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
If we value the gift of imagination in an artist over that of technique
it is not because we undervalue the latter. Without technique a work of
art is not to be thought of; it is as essentially the visible expression
of the inward grace as the human form is the casket of the human spirit.
But the quality in man or woman of purest delight and most enduring
significance is less the body and its acts than the thought that
animates them. And is it not so with a work of art?
It is as an artist of superior imagination that we regard Saint-Gaudens;
as one who can give to the facts of our knowledge a fresh form and
significance, attracting us toward the idea contained within the actual,
the idealisation of character or of sentiment. And such imagination in
an artist must have a twofold working. It fills him with a fine idea and
it discovers to his hand a fine manner of embodying it; it penetrates
his technique.
To appreciate fully a sculptor’s worthiness in this respect one should
realise the peculiar relation in which he is placed with regard to
facts. While the painter has a wide range of resources for creating an
illusion the sculptor is limited to a comparatively strict and naïve
realism. Even if he introduces an ideal figure, such as that of an
angel, he is compelled to give it the clear-cut contours, substance and
actuality of a distinctly visible and tangible form. His only means of
idealising are the abstract beauty of line and form, the character of
expression in face and gesture and the general feeling of nobility and
sweetness that he can impart to his work through the degree to which the
thought that is in him inspires his hand. He may, indeed, attempt a more
obvious trick of idealising, as when Greenough represented Washington in
the rôle of Olympian Zeus by the device of baring the body and placing a
mimic thunderbolt in the hand. But to modern taste, at any rate, such a
procedure seems ridiculous. The truth is, that the highest form of
imagination--indeed, the only tolerable one to the modern mind--is that
which illumines the facts of our common knowledge and expression; in a
word, which bases itself on facts.
But this demands of the sculptor a very high degree of creative
imagination, in all probability a proportionately higher one than the
painter’s; for if the latter is confronted, for example, with a subject
of ill-made coat and trousers, he can by merging the costume in
atmosphere and by toning it with the background so gloss over its
inartistic appearance as to produce a handsome _ensemble_. But, compared
with the sculptor’s problems, this is an evasion of the difficulty. To
repeat, the sculptor is limited in his presentment to the actual facts.
But, though it may seem to be a paradox, it is almost a truism in art,
that the limitations of a medium are its most characteristic sources of
power--at least, when knowingly and courageously admitted. And, I
believe, it can scarcely be doubted that the quality in Saint-Gaudens’s
imagination which has most conduced to his greatness as an artist is
this: it is kindled by contemplation of the facts, and it finds in the
facts its keenest and truest impulse.
Moreover, it has been his good fortune to be confronted with large and
impressive facts. The panorama of American civilization, and especially
one episode of tremendous import--the Civil War--has spread itself
behind his work; and the latter, as in the case of one of his own
reliefs, has grown out of and in harmony with the background. Other
sculptors, also, have had the same high incentive, but many have failed
to respond to it. Saint-Gaudens has had the force of imagination which
could not only grasp the magnitude of his opportunity but interpret its
impressiveness.
The conditions in America have demanded that his work should be largely
of a memorial character--monuments to those that are honoured in public
or mourned in private, and in both directions his achievements have
placed him in the foremost ranks of modern sculptors. This was
demonstrated at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he was represented
among other works by the statue of General Sherman and the “Shaw
Memorial.” A comparison of these, respectively with Dubois’s “Joan of
Arc” and with Bartholomé’s “Monument to the Dead,” helped one to divine
the special qualities of Saint-Gaudens’s style.
He himself had a Paris training. Son of a French father and an Irish
mother, brought to this country when a child, he displayed early an
aptitude for art, and in course of time went through the usual regimen
of a student in Paris. Thus he came under the influence of the best
academic traditions and of the modern naturalistic movement, and imbibed
both to the degree that his own temperament and the conditions of his
inspiration demanded.
So in the direction of tradition--that is to say, of more or less
consecutive descent from an original classic type--we may compare his
“General Sherman” with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc”; both equestrian statues,
monumental in design, full of decorative dignity yet so different in
character. The latter, noble in every particular, has a choice propriety
of feeling that separates it by an ocean of motive from the freer spirit
of the other. It is at once mannered, more consciously correct and
studiously discreet and has an air of _hauteur_ and aloofness, as
becomes its aristocratic descent in the direct line from Verrocchio’s
“Colleoni.” The “Sherman,” however, is of only collateral descent,
modified by a larger environment and a fresher inspiration. The typal
form has yielded to the individual, abstract dignity to the force of
character, the fundamental suggestion to that of vivid, immediate
actuality.
In its naturalistic tendency and expression of profound emotion the
“Monument to the Dead,” by Bartholomé, is at one with Saint-Gaudens’s
work; but I found myself comparing it with the latter’s figure of
“Grief” in the Rock Creek Cemetery, near Washington. Then its degree of
naturalism is found to be less. It shows some influence of the classic
tradition in the use of nude figures and in their elaborate disposition
along the background of masonry; while the single figure by
Saint-Gaudens is draped and presented with an unaffectedness of
arrangement and with an intimacy of appeal that is at the same time more
naturalistic and more poignant.
So may we not deduce from these comparisons one quality inherent in
Saint-Gaudens: that of daring to be free from conventional restraint, or
rather the daring to adapt, with a freedom only limited by his sense of
artistic fitness, the academic traditions which his early life
experienced? For the means by which he has wrought out his freedom are
in no sense revolutionary. He does not, for example, go as far as Rodin
in the latter’s disregard of symmetry in composition. His own have
always a monumental character, studied for their effect in the mass, as
seen from various points of view. Moreover, they are always extremely
reserved: as far as possible removed from the floridness indulged in by
many students of the academic traditions. A similar reserve controls his
naturalistic tendencies. Evidently it is not naturalism of itself which
attracts him; indeed, all his leaning is primarily toward the
sculpturesque side of sculpture, as a self-contained mass,
proportionately impressive, equable in outline, decorative and
structural in _ensemble_. These principles of technique are at the
service
[Illustration: GRIEF
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens
A Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D. C.]
[Illustration: THE LINCOLN STATUE
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens]
of--perhaps it would be truer to say that they have been adapted to--an
imagination, which reverences the character in man and can picture and
suggest the individual in relation to the larger issues of his time;
with a capacity of emotional expression that has the added poignancy of
compression. It has been, indeed, continually reënforced by the grandeur
of the themes that have confronted him, and the result upon his
technique is a gravity of distinction which represents the finest kind
of style. In that smaller kind of style which is limited to the actual
technique of modelling it would be possible to mention sculptors who far
excel Saint-Gaudens; but in those qualities of broader and deeper
reference wherein brain and sensibility coöperate with hand for high
creative and poetic ends I doubt if he has any superior among modern
artists.
Let us trace the gift of idealising as it appears in several of his
works, selected because they represent a descending scale from the
purely ideal to the idealised fact. And first the statue of “Grief” in
the Rock Creek Cemetery. I made the pilgrimage from Washington one sunny
autumn afternoon with a companion. The gatekeeper directing us, we
threaded our way along the labyrinth of paths, among the chaos of
conflicting monuments, so many of which testify to impotence of taste.
Finally a glance behind a hedge of cypress--we are indeed on holy
ground! Within the little enclosure of solemn greenery a bench, marble
and of Greek design, invites to sit; the world is all outside, and here
before us, raised upon a slight pedestal, enough to lift it above the
level, but not too high for close and intimate communion, is the
Presence: a woman’s seated figure, wrapped about in coarse drapery that
shrouds her head and falls in long, loose, heavy folds at her feet. We
have heard the story: That a husband, robbed of his wife with shocking
suddenness, called upon the sculptor to express in plastic shape the
void in his life, enjoining him to ignore all symbols of hope and to
give utterance only to the consuming hopelessness of loss. And here
before us--in the isolation of the figure, in the uncompromising
sternness of the drapery, in the majestic agony of the face, the eyelids
lowered in pain, the lips full and set in the effort of endurance and
also in a protest as proud as it is despairing--there is expressed a
universality of grief that sums up the sorrow of the modern world, as
well as the eternal question of the why and to what end. Under the spell
of it a wife and husband sit on into the golden afternoon, chastened,
purified, elevated, drawn closer to each other by the realisation of the
mystery of grief, and with a renewed sense of the sanctity of happiness
ere the shadow falls. Here indeed is an idealisation, complete and
absolute; no helping out with wings and symbols, but the rendering of a
simple, natural fact--a woman in grief; yet with such deep and embracing
comprehension that the individual is magnified into a type. The
emotional appeal is universal.
In this statue the sculptor could give free rein to his imagination.
Observe how in the “Shaw Memorial” he meets the problem of an actual
fact of history; the youthful leader riding forth to war with his
marching regiment of Negroes. What a boundless zest he displays for the
realism of the scene! He portrays the humble soldiers with varying
characteristics of pathetic devotion, and from the halting uniformity of
their movement, even from the uncouthness of their ill-fitting uniforms,
from such details as the water-bottles and rifles, secures an
impressiveness of decorative composition, distinguished by virile
contrasts and repetitions of line and by vigorous handsomeness of light
and shade. Mingled with our enjoyment of these qualities is the emotion
aroused by the intent and steadfast onward movement of the troops, whose
doglike trustfulness is contrasted with the serene elevation of their
white leader.
Behind this group looms up the tremendous issues of the war; they were
present to the imagination of the sculptor and he has suggested them to
ours. Hence the work is big with fatefulness, with a reference reaching
beyond the fate of the personages represented to the fate of a nation
trembling in the balance. Ah! it is a great gift, this power to touch
upon the fundamental, the essentially and genetically vital aspect of a
matter, and by means so simple and of common knowledge. As he worked
upon the memorial it would seem as if Saint-Gaudens distrusted somewhat
his possession of this faculty, for to increase the idealisation he has
introduced a figure of Victory floating above the head of the leader. It
was not necessary and is scarcely in accord with the rest of the
composition, introducing into the energy and concentration of the whole
a somewhat quavering note. Yet, to judge by my own experience, the sense
of jar yields to indifference; one loses consciousness of this figure in
the grandeur and elevation of the whole. But, if this is the experience
also of others, it tends to prove how unnecessary was its introduction;
and, further, one is inclined to resent it as partaking of the
obviousness which would occur to a smaller sculptor.
A similar attempt to reënforce the ideal suggestion contained in the
realistic parts of the group with the direct introduction of a symbolic
figure reappears in the equestrian statue of General Sherman. But the
figure in this case is more intrinsically a part of the general design
in perfect harmony of character and feeling, and the group as it stands,
while almost the latest, is probably the most completely grand example
of Saint-Gaudens’s art. Sherman leans a little forward in the saddle
with a handling of the reins that keeps in control the impetuosity of
his big-boned, powerful charger, an action of the hands very
characteristic of an accomplished horseman. His head is bare and his
military cloak floats from his back in ample folds. Victory moves ahead
of his left stirrup, palm branch in hand, her drapery buoyed up with
air; the horse’s tail streams behind; throughout the whole composition
is a single impulse of irresistible advance. From every point of view
the mass is compact with dignity, ornamental in line and bulk, alive
with elevated and inspiring energy. At closer range one may discover the
big simplicity and pregnant generalisation of the modelling, also the
meaningfulness of the characterisation. The horse in build and gait is a
serviceable beast, bred for courage and endurance; the rider, a man of
iron purpose, indomitable in face and carriage; while the woman’s
figure in the grand spirit of the flowing lines and in the lofty sadness
of her mien touches a chord of triumph and pathos, of the glory and the
tragedy of victory.
I compared this statue with Dubois’s “Joan of Arc,” and found it so much
less mannered, so far more vital in the immediateness of its import; or,
shall we state it in this way: less consciously a work of art, more
spontaneously the expression of an overpowering sentiment. This, if I am
not mistaken, contains the gist of Saint-Gaudens’s art. While
traditional in its origin, it is a living art, rooted in the realities
of its environment, modified in its growth--that is to say, in its
technique--by the necessity of responding to its conditions.
But how does Saint-Gaudens fare when he confines himself to a factual
representation of his subject? Let his statue of Lincoln at Chicago
testify. No grace of line or grandeur of mass; only a chair behind the
standing figure to eke out the stringiness of the legs and in a measure
to build up the composition. Nor could the sculptor snatch an easy
triumph through any heroic rendering of the figure, spare and elongated,
in clothes uncompromisingly ordinary. But the man as he was, and just
because he chanced to be the man he was, was great, and in the fearless
acceptance of this fact the sculptor has seized his opportunity. The
statue is planted firmly on the right foot--not every statue really
stands upon its feet--the right arm held behind the back--these are the
characteristic gestures of stability, tenacity and reflection; while the
advance of the left leg and the grip of the left hand upon the lapel of
the coat bespeak the man of action. With such completeness are these
complex qualities suggested and then crowned with the solemn dignity of
the declined head, so aloof in impenetrable meditation, that the homely
figure has a grandeur and a power of appeal which are irresistible.
True, our imagination, reënforced by knowledge, goes out to reach the
artist half-way, thereby lessening the space he has to travel in his
idealisation of facts. Behind this isolated figure looms up the scene in
which he played so great a part. It was precisely because this scene was
present to the sculptor’s imagination, and he knew it would be to ours,
that he set himself to the most realistic rendering of his subject and
thereby triumphed.
But once more, turn to his statue of Peter Cooper. There is no
background here of heroism, or any environment of a nation roused to
highest sacrifice; only the background of a building, ugly in itself,
though we know it to be the habitation of a great educational movement.
Homely also is the general appearance of the founder and benefactor,
yet the figure in its loose, slovenly costume, seated in a chair,
presents in its solid mass a suggestion of fundamental force; the left
hand grasps a walking-cane with a gesture of fine decision, and the
head, with its long hair and fringe of beard, by sheer force of genial,
manly directness, so earnest and unsophisticated, compels us to realize
this man to be more than ordinary. He is the prophet of a cause, the
leader of a peaceful revolution. In a word, if one has the mind and
sympathy to note it, this old and yet alert man, of ungarnished
simplicity and indomitable confidence, is an embodiment of the same sure
uplifting of the people to which he contributed so largely.
I have chosen these examples to illustrate Saint-Gaudens’s ability to
idealise his subject, to reach through the fact to the soul within the
fact. But his sensibility to impressions is not only moved by the larger
aspects of life; it is also exquisitely sweet and subtle. Study his
numerous low-relief portraits--for example, the children of Prescott
Hall Butler, those of Jacob H. Schiff, and the single portraits of Miss
Violet Sargent and of Robert Louis Stevenson. In all these and in many
others his sensibility is exhibited, not only in the sympathetic
comprehension of character, but also in the extraordinary _finesse_ of
the execution.
[Illustration: RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens]
The figures are not merely set against the background; they grow out of
it, forming with it an enclosed parterre of beautiful design, of
delicately differing planes of elevation, of subtle tones of gray in
between the extremes of light and dark. The effect is not unlike that
revealed at early morning when the landscape is flattened in appearance
by the mist, and, as the latter is loosened and dispersed by the sun,
the patterned forms take on infinitesimal degrees of definition and
mysteriousness behind the intervening veils of lighted vapour. Through
such a simile one may, perhaps, suggest the essential quality of
loveliness in these low reliefs.
Yet they are qualities shared to-day by several sculptors in France,
sufficient to reveal an artist of rare sensibility, but not to measure
the grander characteristics of Saint-Gaudens’s art. In the conditions of
American civilization he has come within a range and depth of
inspiration denied to modern Frenchmen, and it is in the degree to which
he has responded to those opportunities that his preëminence consists.
His position is unique, for no other sculptor of our time has so attuned
the traditions of his art to the key of the modern spirit for the
expression of grand conceptions.
II
GEORGE GREY BARNARD
While Saint-Gaudens, an American of European descent and training, has
caught the outspoken voice of our national life, George Grey Barnard, of
American parentage and practically self-taught, expresses its underlying
force. To the former came a congenial opportunity in the demand for
memorial sculpture. He turned it to great account through his gift of
penetrating to the central fact of the subject and of illuminating it
with a generous imagination. Instead of facts, however, it is rather
with ideas that Barnard’s imagination has been concerned. They preceded
his study of sculpture, and he sought the latter as an expression for
them, influenced in his self-instruction by the work of Michelangelo.
He is from the West, that huge quarry out of which a new order of ideas
is being gradually dug and shaped. The echoes of the clang of tool upon
inchoate material, of sharp wits and keen purpose carving anew at the
problems of existence, reach us from time to time in this more
conventional East. We may smile at the crudeness of some of the results
achieved, but cannot disregard the import of the endeavour. The force
which animates it is the craving for larger, fuller liberty than mankind
has yet attained; a titanic force, often brutal in its material
manifestation, but with inherent mightiness of spirit. It is this spirit
which has enveloped Barnard’s imagination since his childhood, and
forms, as it were, the basis of his art. Its keynote is humanity, the
elemental relationship of man to man and of men to the universe; a
liberty of life and art, that would shake off the trammels devised for
narrower theories and conditions and adjust itself to the perspective of
a wider horizon. A boyhood nourished on literature and nature-studies
sowed the seed from which these matured ideals were to spring.
He was born at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1863, the son of a
Presbyterian minister; but his early years up to the age of twelve were
spent in Chicago, after which the family moved to Iowa. When only nine
years old he began to learn something of shells and minerals from a
retired sea captain; later he studied birds and animals, taught himself
to draw them and by fifteen was an expert taxidermist with as many as
1,200 specimens in his collection. Then for nearly two years he earned
his living as an engraver and worker in gold and silver ornaments,
learning meanwhile to model, until, having saved a little sum of money,
he returned to Chicago, determined to become a sculptor. He was now
seventeen and had not yet seen a statue.
There is a hint in this of the instinct that draws would-be artists
toward sculpture rather than painting. It is an instinct for form, a
passion for its tangible bodiliness, a prepossession so strong that it
seems to transpose the senses of touch and sight; giving to the flat and
round-topped thumb of the sculptor’s strong, square hand a sense
equivalent to sight, keen and sensitive as is the touch of the blind,
and giving to his eye a touch-consciousness. He feels with his eye and
sees with his thumb. It is by the touch that in childhood we all assure
ourselves of the reality of things, and it is the stimulation of the
tactile imagination, as Mr. Bernard Berenson calls it, which is one of
the chief sources of pleasure in the illusion of a picture. But touch to
the sculptor is not an illusion. While a painter only imagines the form
of an arm through his sense of sight, the sculptor actually gets his
sensation through his hands, as he feels it growing in form and
character, substance and subtlety of surface under his manipulation.
With him the physical delight is added to the mental. I imagine,
indeed, that the degree to which he expresses this twofold delight is
largely the measure of his ability as a sculptor.
Barnard thus early had experienced it; but, we should notice, so far
only through an experience of minute work. Yet his communing with
himself and with nature along the shores of the great lake and of the
Father of Waters was only waiting to discover its effects in a larger
field of sensations.
This awakening did not come to him at once in Chicago. There was then no
Art Institute with its array of sculpture casts; no flourishing school
with its accompanying enthusiasms. Yet, possibly that was well for the
slow, silent development of this youth, a dreamer of dreams, already a
student of philosophy and occultism, fervently religious, with a
religion that felt after the mysteries of life and included such dawning
notions as he had of art.
He chanced upon a teacher whose stock in trade consisted of four casts
of the antique statues in reduced size, which he drew in every possible
position, until he had completely mastered the representation of an
object on the flat. This, it will be observed, was a temporary
suspension of his study of solid form, being indeed, a transposition
from actual depth and distance to the _illusion_ of a third dimension;
and the intense application in this direction, with the fascination of
it, affected his work for some time. I think a comparison of “The Boy”
with one of his later works will show this. The early work displays more
feeling for light and shade than for form, and is, in fact, rather a
study of planes of varying value than of bulk. While this may appear a
somewhat fine-drawn distinction, it does involve an important principle,
because it affects the way in which the subject has been considered, the
conception, indeed, which inspired the work. In his later work Barnard
is not oblivious to the charm of subtle modelling, but the larger motive
is present in his mind, that of the constructional, organic character of
the mass, and it becomes the distinctive direction in which his genius
expresses itself.
He grew to consciousness of this large aspect of sculpture through the
influence of Michelangelo. Hearing that there were some casts of the
master’s work stored away in a room under lock and key he sought
admission. It was at first denied; students by acts of vandalism had
abused their privileges; the exhibition had been closed to them, and no
exception could be made in his case. “But I must see them,” was his
simple answer. “Michelangelo lived and worked for me as much as Jesus
did; his works belong to me--I must see them.” In presence of such a
fervour of conviction the director yielded, and Barnard was allowed to
come and go as he pleased.
If one could really know the boy’s emotions, what a revelation it would
be! To most of us, if we can recall our youth, the impressions that
counted most came gradually, finding us often unprepared for them, and
through circumstances or our own levity of soul unable to receive due
profit at the time. But to the young Barnard, with a seriousness beyond
his years, peering into the mystery of life, feeling after expression in
form, the revelation of Michelangelo’s genius must have been like sudden
light to a blind man, who, hitherto, had had but vague imaginings of
light and form. There, in the quiet afternoons, until daylight faded
into twilight, alone with these sublime beings, the boy would sit and
sit. Tired on one occasion, he sat himself in the lap of the
“Moses”--for he was small and boyish-looking despite his seventeen
years--and resting his curly head against the statue’s beard fell fast
asleep, his young, eager spirit, wrapped around and absorbed by the
influence of the mighty dead. Do you not perceive in this little story
another proof of the boy’s physical joy in form, so that after drawing
from it sustenance to his spirit he nestled into contact with the feel
of it, as a baby, surfeited with nourishment, lies close to the mother’s
breast?
And it was with a good deal of a baby’s unconsciousness, I suspect, that
Barnard sucked in nourishment from the experiences of this time. He was
not as yet deliberately studying these statues, was still ignorant of
the technical problems which they offered; but, himself a dreamer of
dreams, he lost himself in the magnitude of the conception, and little
by little grew to realise how dreams may shape themselves into form. He
began to have an inkling of the majesty of form in the round, as
something not to be translated into the flat, but to be felt in the
bulk; a realisation of the wonder of palpable structure, when it has
become the plastic expression of noble thought. It was several years
later, and much discipline had to be undergone, before the impressions
of this lonely communing were to become part of his conscious equipment
as a sculptor.
But I wonder whether the scarcity of artists, as compared with the great
number of skilful practitioners of painting and sculpture, is not due,
in part at any rate, to the fact that few students enjoy a period of
subconscious reception of impressions. In place of it they are
surrounded by the clatter of the classroom, share in the smart little
theories of their fellow-students and for the influence of the great
masters substitute adulation for some teacher who professes to know a
short cut to success. Most modern education, indeed, is a bustling after
results, that allows no space for the slow, steady, silent growth, such
as prepares the sapling to take its place among the giants of the
forests. Yet in our study of the lives of all true artists we shall find
that the period of communing, either with nature or with the
masterpieces of art, has intervened. Happy for the student to whom it
comes early!
At the end of his eighteenth year he received a commission for the
portrait bust of a child, and discovered for himself the manner of
executing it in marble. With the sum received, he went to Paris,
studying for a time under the academician, Cavelier, and then
establishing himself in a humble studio. Twelve years he lived in Paris,
enduring the extreme of privations, until the patronage of an American,
Mr. Alfred Corning Clark, relieved the pressure of want; and the
acceptance of seven of his works at the Champ de Mars in 1894 and his
election as an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts crowned
his struggles with artistic recognition. During
[Illustration: PAN
By George Grey Barnard]
[Illustration: THE HEWER
By George Grey Barnard]
the intervening years he had shunned the influence of modern Paris,
drawing nutriment in the museums from Phidias and Michelangelo, from the
divine repose of the one and from the other’s conflict of soul,
conscious of great strivings within himself that craved utterance.
All his early works were so completely in response to an impulse from
within, that they seem to me to reveal themselves as confessions of his
soul, as manifestations not only of his artistic but of his spiritual
development.
The earliest was “The Boy”: a nude figure seated, asleep, with arched
back and with head drooping on the breast; a supple form, with that
mingling of firmness and languor which a child presents in sound,
healthy sleep; a composition, very fresh in conception and beautiful in
its rhythmical compactness; expressive, moreover, in every part, of the
character of profound slumber. This single theme of feeling flows
through the whole figure in measured bars of melodious movement. I like
to think of it as an artist’s expression, not of a boy, but of boyhood;
his own boyhood, in its unalloyed purity and freshness, which even in
his manhood is “not dead but sleepeth”; abiding with him in its
beautiful quiescence, perpetual testimony to the living on of the child
in the artist’s soul.
Then may we not see in “Pan” an embodiment of his experiences of
passionate youth? Truly it is also the reincarnation of the spirit of
the old golden legend of the world, before it was burdened with
seriousness, still irresponsible and sportive; when the woods and
streams were haunted by creatures close akin to the animals, but gifted
also with something of man’s higher opportunities: lazy, sensuous and
luxuriously content. But this is only to refer back to a mythological
type the perennial characteristics of the birth of passion in a youth.
It seems to me quite one with the philosophic bent of Barnard’s mind
that he should have comprehended both intentions in his “Pan.” It is as
if he had analysed himself and then exorcised his vagrant desires by
imprisoning them in bronze. As an artist he takes his opportunity in the
recumbent figure of enforcing the sensuous charm of the long, sinuous
limbs, and once more indulges in the luxuriousness of firm, soft
fleshiness; this time, however, with muscles not relaxed in sleep but
unstrung in the sweet lassitude of lazy ease. Then what a subtle
insinuation of contempt for the type as he conceives it! He sets one
long asinine ear acock, and lets the other droop ridiculously, while in
the slanting eye there is a leer of mischievous, foolish wantonness. I
do not forget that this is later work, executed after Barnard’s return
to America; yet his point of view is so subjective that he can scarcely
fail sooner or later to express the struggles of his own soul.
But apart from these psychological considerations the statue is one of
extraordinary artistic interest; the composition highly original and to
a grand degree sculpturesque. It has, that is to say, qualities peculiar
to sculpture; the impressiveness of bulk, of form in the round, with
vigorous appeal to our tactile sense in its bossy elevations and deep
hollows, and with that aptitude for changing effects of light and
shadow, bold in parts, in others mysteriously subtle. Moreover, it is
remarkable in its expression of character in pose and gesture; for
subtle expressiveness could scarcely be carried further in the line of
this conception and it is continuous throughout the figure and
harmoniously complete. These, moreover, are the traits conspicuous in
all Barnard’s work.