Me,” which, perhaps, more than any other of his works breaks away from
the usual canons of composition. I can remember that when I first saw it
the abruptness of the composition startled me unpleasantly; but this
feeling has worn off and I recognize an inherent reasonableness in the
arrangement, a harmony of fitness in the conception. It illustrates, in
fact, the liberty of the western spirit, which dares to free itself from
formula; it is not to be taken as a subversion of old principles, but as
a justification of the right of freedom of will, where the originality
of thought demands some freer method of expression. For, as a matter of
fact, the salient feature of this group is the expression of character;
and by the time that you fall under the spell of its intention, you are
reconciled to the abruptness of the composition. It may interest those
who are distrustful of “literary” expression in a work of art to know
that the metaphysical title of this group was an afterthought. It had
its inception in the chance grouping, afterward slightly modified, of
two models, and the idea was to reproduce the character of pose and
gesture. Then the standing figure suggested the notion of a conqueror;
not one of the theatrical sort with action of defiance, but one who
through defeat has reached an ultimate victory; and so by degrees the
group began to partake of the fulness of the sculptor’s own thinkings
and conclusions, until it finished by presenting in generalized form the
conflict of the two natures of man.
The evolution of this group very fairly illustrates the balance of
impulses in Barnard’s work. He is by natural instinct a sculptor; one
whose imaginings inevitably shape themselves in form. On the other hand
he is a thinker of thoughts and a dreamer of dreams that press for
utterance, and he finds the utterance in plastic expression; but there
is no confusion in his own mind between the mode of expression and the
thought expressed. He recognizes both the possibilities and the
limitations of his art, and in the working out of his thought confines
himself to those aspects of it which lend themselves to plastic
interpretation. At the same time his nature is so earnest and intense
that it would seem impossible and horrible to him not to use his art to
some serious end. But, be sure, it is less the bigness of his purpose
than his power as a sculptor, or, shall we say, the happy adjustment of
the two, that gives ultimate importance to his work.
In further proof of this let me refer to two more of his statues, one of
which had its origin in chance, the other in deliberation: The former is
“Maidenhood” which was primarily suggested by the pose of a model,
spontaneously assumed. It had character and was evidently characteristic
of this individual type of girlhood. He studied the figure, first in its
_ensemble_ and then in the correlation of its parts, and as he worked
the floodgates of sentiment were gradually lifted, until there poured
into the work his pent-up feeling and convictions concerning female
beauty, his personal ones as a man and the abstract devotion that he
felt for it as an artist. The result is a statue, lovely as a piece of
technique, lovely also in its inspired interpretation of beauty of form
and soul; a figure that has the allurement of individual personality, as
well as that higher quality of abstract loveliness which belongs to an
ideal conception, rendered with exquisite reverence and a spirit of
purest poetry.
The other statue, “The Hewer,” was begun with the deliberate purpose of
embodying in a series of figures the gradual evolution of mankind and, I
fancy also, of the human soul toward higher possibilities. There is
nothing unusual in the theme, but much in the way in which Barnard has
comprehended and expressed it. He has felt it in its elemental
significance and set it forth with monumental simplicity. The background
of his imagination, and he makes it part of ours, is the nebulous
immensity out of which primitive man emerges toward the light. The step
is won by putting forth of strength; but tentatively, gropingly, with
only partial consciousness of strength; there is an exertion of power,
but a
[Illustration: TWO FRIENDS
By George Grey Barnard
A Memorial Monument]
reserve far greater of unexpended power. In correspondence with the
controlled bigness of this conception is the generalized method of the
actual modelling, so that the eye is not deflected to this or that part,
but compelled to embrace the figure as a whole. It is in this respect
that Barnard’s work differs from that of Rodin, to which at a first
glance we might feel disposed to liken it, in consequence of the
expression of character in both and the freedom from conventional
restraint. But each has his separate method of attack; for while Rodin
reaches his _ensemble_ through an elaboration of the parts, Barnard is
possessed first and foremost of the conception in its entirety and keeps
the parts subordinate. The one entices you to follow the play of subtle
expression that winds through the figure, while the other arrests your
eye to its structural significance as a unity.
In a brief summary of this sculptor’s art the thing to be noted is that
it is distinguished as much by breadth of conception as by expression of
character, and always with an instinctive regard for the simplest form
of plastic interpretation. It is this which separates him from the
hypersensitive tendencies of the old world and proves him to be a
prophet of the new. His vision is less penetrating than embracing; his
methods more constructive than analytical; his emotions ample, sane. His
genius indeed has not grown with the sinuous convolutions of a sapling
that enforces its existence in a thicket, but like one that stands alone
in virgin soil with spaciousness around it.
III
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD
Born in Urbana, Ohio, in 1830, Ward is still an active force among
American sculptors. His career connects the past with the present,
spanning the long interval like a bridge: one pier, embedded in the old
condition of things when American sculptors first began to make America
the scene and inspiration of their art, its arch mounting above the
indifference to, and ignorance of, things artistic which prevailed
before the influence of European art began to be felt here, and its
other pier firmly incorporated into the new order. And there is
additional fitness in the simile, for Ward’s career has presented the
logical reasonableness of an architectural structure; built up of
character, stout as granite, shaped by experience and tempered by local
necessities; a structure modified by practical as well as by esthetic
considerations, which has been invaluable in its day and embodies some
features of permanent worth among others that time has superseded. For
the architect of his own life cannot proceed like the builder of a
material bridge--establish simultaneously his hither and nether pier,
and then by ingenious underpinning support the weight of the arch until
he reaches the keystone, which finally locks all into a compact whole.
He can but start with good, firm basis of intention, hew the stones as
faithfully as he knows and set them in cement of honest endeavour,
lifting his arch by personal force, while the force of gravity, acting
outside himself, gradually determines the direction of its curve. He
will be shrewder than most if he guesses when he has reached the
keystone--generally will only discern it after long years by looking
back; and when he gains the farther bank of the stream and once more has
the firm ground beneath his feet, if he turns round to view the work he
will be conscious of parts which disturb the symmetry of the whole: here
a bit of inferior craftsmanship which his later knowledge detects, there
some result of untoward circumstances. He is happy if his life presents
a constancy of purpose and has been of service to his fellows.
Such happiness may fairly be enjoyed by Ward. His share in establishing
the National Sculpture Society, of which he has been president since its
foundation, would alone entitle him to the permanent consideration of
his colleagues, while to the sum total of American sculpture he has made
some very notable contributions. That his work includes examples which
fall short in artistic conception and in technical skill, is undeniable.
They are the result partly of the circumstances of his development and
partly of his own determined, straightforward character; a combination
of meager artistic experiences at the start and of a predisposition to
the objective point of view.
One imagines that he has always been powerfully attracted to the facts
of things: the facts of American life and the facts of the subjects
which he has portrayed in his art. If there was any fiber of
transcendentalism in his mind--and few of us are altogether without some
vision of what is beyond the bounds of actual experience--it took the
form of speculating upon the future of American civilisation, which
facts have subsequently indorsed, or, if it entered into his feeling
toward his subject, made him realise something of the spirit embedded in
the fact, as in his early statue representing the Negro breaking loose
his fetters. But the various theories concerning art which study in
Paris might have taught him, and which in a measure are the shibboleth
of people whose faith in facts has dwindled, and, unless reallied to
actual facts, are but “vacant chaff well meant for grain,” he had no
means of learning in his youth, and throughout his manhood, I suspect,
has had little patience with. Still at the bottom of all theories is the
principle that it is not in the subject but in the manner of presenting
it that a work of art is proclaimed; that technique and motive should be
indissolubly wedded--to their mutual perfection if each is choice, and,
if either is inferior, to a mutual loss. This was not recognised in
America in Ward’s youth, nor until much later; and none of his work, it
is probably true to say, reveals that particular kind of craftsmanlike
facility which distinguishes the work of the sculptor who has been
trained abroad, and by the side of this more accomplished modelling
Ward’s statues often appear crude. But if they lack the stylistic
quality, the best of them have a force which more than compensates. It
results from a strong feeling for design, the general accumulative
effect of the whole composition, which itself results from a strong
antecedent feeling for form. The latter seems to characterise all
self-taught students, whether sculptors or painters; and, although, as
their experience broadens, there may be increased subtlety of
expression, the primary characteristic of their work will continue to
be a very strong sense and enjoyment of the structural facts of the
figure or landscape, and most frequently in their simplest and directest
manifestations. And in the case of sculpture this is an especially
valuable gift of vision, since the most sculptural quality in sculpture
is unquestionably that of form: its solidity, stability and natural
grace or dignity of movement. It is precisely in these particulars that
some of our foreign-taught sculptors, while easily excelling Ward in
refinements of detail, fall short of him.
As a boy he had been devoted to fashioning with his fingers, and, at the
age of nineteen, entered the studio of Henry Kirke Brown. The latter,
after practising as a sculptor at Albany, had spent some five years in
Europe, chiefly in Italy; but, feeling strongly that an American should
occupy himself with American subjects, and to that end should work in
his own country, resisted the tendency among sculptors of that day to
join the American colony in Rome or Florence. He therefore returned and
engaged upon the equestrian statue of Washington, now in Union Square,
New York. Ward assisted him in the work and gained thereby a fine
experience of what makes for nobility in design. He must have profited
also by companionship with a man of such large and generous mind. But
his stay in the studio was short, and for the rest he has been the
architect of his own career.
A fragment remains of his student work, a study for a high-relief in
which an Indian is represented breaking and burning his arrows--an
episode of the voyage of Hendrik Hudson. One cannot help noticing the
_naïveté_ of the composition, the simple intention of representing the
action just as it might have happened; the apparent unconsciousness that
any academic considerations were involved. It, no doubt, represents the
attitude of his mind at that time, and to a very considerable extent
prefigures the lines along which his development was to proceed. Thus a
year or two later, while he was working in Washington and executing
busts of many leading men of the time, and the whole country began to
seethe with passion over the slave question, Ward’s contribution to it
is “The Freedman.” It shows simply a Negro, in an entirely natural pose,
who has put forth his strength and is looking very quietly at the broken
fetters. The whole gist of the matter is thus embodied in a most terse
and direct fashion, without rodomontade or sentimentality, but solely as
an objective fact into which there is no intrusion of the sculptor’s
personal feeling. But of his personal point of view toward his art there
is abundant testimony. This figure, which was never reproduced larger
than statuette size, but in that form had a wide popularity, proves how
keen and true was Ward’s instinct for the sculpturesque qualities of
sculpture and for the limit to which it is safe to go in the
interpretation of sentiment. The latter is simply enforced by the action
of the figure.
In order that he might have opportunities of studying form in the
freedom of movement, he visited the western frontier and lived for a
while among the Indians. A statue of this period is “The Indian Hunter,”
which now stands in bronze in Central Park, New York. Again it is a
strikingly vivid realisation of actual facts; of the racial
characteristics of both the man and his dog, and of their respective
kinds of movement: the man’s, stealthy and powerfully controlled; the
dog’s, more keen and alert and needing to be checked. Again, too, one
feels, I think, the absence of any preconceived theories of technique,
so that the group has something of a primitive, almost barbarous
feeling; which, however, seems strangely appropriate to the subject.
Yet it is easy to understand that for a young sculptor, so resolutely
facing natural facts and untrained in academic teaching of what is right
and what is wrong, a table of doctrines which may easily lead to dry
formalism, but which yet holds many directions and warnings of value,
there will be shoals ahead. The actual may readily drift into the
commonplace; and that some of Ward’s portrait-statues should be of small
account was to be expected from the circumstances of his self-wrought
development and peculiar personal point of view. They were the
stepping-stones by which he gradually rose to higher things. For the
thing to be noticed is that he eventually reached the power that is
exhibited in such works as the “Greeley,” “Washington,” “Lafayette,”
“General Thomas,” and in that masterpiece, the “Beecher” statue, by
following with undeviating persistence the promptings of his youth; only
that with matured experience came a clearer discrimination of the
salient facts, and a deeper understanding of what they truly signified.
In a word, he reached beyond the fact to its significance.
It may be mainly the significance of clothes, as in that remarkable
statue of “Lafayette” at Burlington, Vermont, in which he represents the
hero of two revolutions as a middle-aged dandy. I cannot say whether he
saw behind Lafayette’s support of liberty, as Carlyle did, but at any
rate the figure has simply the easy dignity of a well-bred man, whose
_embonpoint_ has modified but
[Illustration: THE GREELEY STATUE
By John Quincy Adams Ward]
[Illustration: THE BEECHER STATUE
By John Quincy Adams Ward]
not effaced his debonair demeanour and whose clothes set gracefully to
his person. Yet the person is unmistakably enforced. The man is not lost
in the millinery, as one may have noticed in some costume statues; and
it is in this respect that Ward has shown his true appreciation of the
significance of clothes. They not only envelop the figure as naturally
as a skin, and with no hindrance to the imagining of the body inside
them, but they adapt themselves completely to the character of the man
as shown in the pose of the body and expression of the head. They have
been reduced, in fact, to an abstraction corresponding to the sculptor’s
conception of the man.
In the “Washington” statue, which stands upon the steps of the
Sub-Treasury Building in Wall Street, the sculptor had the advantage of
a picturesque costume, and he has treated it with the same masterful
ease. Yet on this occasion our attention is not divided between the
significance of the clothes and that of the figure. The latter
represents Washington in the ceremony of taking the oath of office in
1789, an event which happened near the spot now occupied by the statue.
The pose is entirely free from heroics: that of a noble, true-hearted
gentleman, conscious of the dignity and responsibility of the occasion.
One could have wished that the legs were planted more squarely on the
ground, as it would have increased the statuesque assertiveness of the
figure; but it is quite possible that the sculptor intentionally avoided
this, in the desire to suggest that it was at the call of duty and not
of personal ambition that Washington accepted office. So he has taken
the weight off the right foot and advanced it slightly, thus giving a
pliant, curving motion to the body, and with it a touch of hesitancy to
the pose. Backed by the classic façade of the Sub-Treasury Building the
statue is very happily placed, and amid the turmoil of the neighbourhood
strikes a note which is refreshingly true and noble.
No less turmoil surrounds the Greeley monument in Newspaper Row and,
outwardly at any rate, of a less savoury character. Moreover, its
pedestal abuts upon a narrow sidewalk, and the figure, seated in an
armchair, has the unhelpful background of a large plate-glass window. It
is itself, too, of shambling build, uncouthly costumed, the large, round
face, oddly fringed with a rim of whiskers. The legs are wide apart; one
arm rests on the back of the chair, the other lies upon the thigh, its
hand holding a sheet of paper; the round shoulders droop forward, and
the head is inclined so as to bring into view the flat, dome-like
skull. Yes, the whole composition is the very reverse of what we usually
understand by statuesque, and thousands pass and repass it daily without
any recognition, so occupied are they in threading their way through the
swarm of loud-lunged sellers of chronic “specials.” Yet if you will step
back into the roadway, at the risk of being demolished by trolley-cars
or wagons full of mile-long rolls of paper, you cannot fail to be
impressed by the very strangeness of the figure. How full of character
it is! Sitting back almost in a heap, pondering some point, the figure
yet suggests that it is about to rise and put its resolve into action,
so remarkable is the mixture of downrightedness and alacrity. It is
indeed a representation of character truly original and of a convincing
force, that bears the stamp of genius. Let us place it in our respect
alongside of Saint-Gaudens’s “Peter Cooper,” as equally a triumph of art
over uncompromising material, and, indeed, along similar lines of
unflinching acceptance of the actual facts of the problem, and of broad,
ample sympathy with nobility, though it does not lie upon the surface.
For the convenience of analysing Ward’s methods I have ventured to
regard these three statues as examples of the significance,
respectively, of clothes, form and character. Not quite accurately, I
admit, because the three motives unite in all in various proportions;
but perhaps I am right in feeling a preponderance of the one in each.
However that may be, we shall find a completely balanced union of all
three in the Beecher monument. The sculptor had particularly in mind the
episode of Henry Ward Beecher’s visit to England in 1863, on a special
mission from President Lincoln, for the purpose of bringing to English
public notice the true position of the North. He was met by noisy
opposition, but bore it down by indomitable endurance and intellectual
force. In the strongly marked, mobile features; in the intellectuality
of the head, carried so resolutely above the broad chest; in the
striking simplicity of the quiet, stalwart pose, no less than in the
absence of all rhetorical gesture in the arms, which are suspended at
the sides; even to such a detail as the right hand, not clenched
aggressively or held in indecision, but with the fingers drawn up to the
thumb, a gesture that mingles alertness with poise, the figure expresses
character, rocklike will and mental preëminence. The Inverness cape
serves to give increased weight and breadth to the form; one arm being
restrained within its folds, the other free for a fling of action if the
occasion require it. The figure bears down upon its pedestal,
column-like, monumental in the highest degree. It is a portrait-statue
of most extraordinary impressiveness.
The equestrian statue of General Thomas at Washington, District of
Columbia, is a spirited and arresting composition. The rider presents a
portrait study of considerable power, but the sculptor in his zeal for
the actual has seized upon the fact that Thomas was not a practised
horseman. He does not move in his seat with the motion of the horse, his
bridle-hand lacks control, and the action of the horse’s head proclaims
it. One may enjoy a detail so minute as that of the hand in the Beecher
statue, because it is contributory to the total effect, and equally
regret this insistence upon a personal peculiarity of the General, since
the total effect is thereby diminished. Such a detail is local and
insignificant, only to be appreciated by a few of his comrades; but the
statue will endure and be judged for what it presents; a general and his
horse--do they move as one? is the personal supremacy of the rider
maintained?
The pedestal of the “Beecher” is embellished with figures. On one side a
woman and on the other a little girl is depositing a wreath, and a boy
is steadying the latter figure. They are well modelled in natural and
graceful movement, but they impart a touch of sentimentality, so alien
to Ward’s habit and, indeed, to the spirit of the statue, that I wonder
whether they were not a concession to the wish of the subscribers.
Figures again adorn the pedestal of the Garfield monument in Washington,
and among them is to be found a most successful treatment of the nude.
“The Student” is an admirable example of Ward’s knowledge of form and of
his discretion in rendering it. His ability as a decorative sculptor was
shown in the group of “Sea-horses and Victory” which crowned the
temporary Naval Arch in 1899, though executed many years before. Equally
pronounced were the joyous elevation of the forms against the sky and
the harmonious unity of the whole as a mass. It proved that Ward’s
management of composition was as thorough in a complicated group as in a
single figure. He is now engaged upon the pediment for the recently
erected Stock Exchange Building in New York. As I have seen only the
model--and that has been subjected to various modifications--it would be
premature to discuss it. But it bids fair to be a most memorable work,
fitly crowning by its magnitude and importance a long and honourable
career.
IV
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH
Among the earlier works of Daniel C. French is a bust of Emerson, a
truly admirable rendering of the mingled nobility and sweetness of the
well-known face, of the human kindliness which warmed the pure and
abstract elevation of his mind. It reminds us that in his youth French
enjoyed acquaintance with the philosopher of Concord and came under the
influence of other famous spirits who formed the little group of high
thinkers and plain livers, with whom it was also an axiom, of more than
incidental importance, that Americans should shake their minds free of
the European point of view and develop a culture for themselves out of
the genius of their own conditions.