which archeological research has been able to embrace. Continuing
without interruption to the present times in Oriental countries, it was,
however, abandoned in the West. Yet the Greeks and Romans, the Gothic
artists, and those of the Italian Renaissance up to the sixteenth
century resorted to it freely. Then the practise, for some reason, fell
into disuse, and by degrees the strong prejudice against it resulted in
forgetfulness that it had ever existed among the greatest artists of
antiquity, and it was accepted as a matter of course that one of the
chief beauties of a marble statue was its whiteness, and that the
colouring of a statue was a habit only of barbarians. But in
comparatively recent times we have learned to appreciate the use of
colour by the Indians, Chinese and Japanese upon their statues and to
understand its motive, and have discovered, as I have said, that the
practice was at one time universal. Yet even now the prejudice against
it continues. Some artists object to it because the colour tends to make
less obvious to the eye their skilful nicety of technique, while among
laymen there exists a very general misunderstanding of the motive in
using colour.
They suppose that colour is added to a statue to increase its
resemblance to nature; as, indeed, would seem to be the motive in the
cheap images commercially produced for churches. But the motive of the
best artists has never been a realistic one. They have added colour,
either for decorative purposes or to enforce the idea of the statue, the
meaning that was uppermost in the artist’s mind as he fashioned it. Thus
the statue of the god and the _cella_ in which it stood were brought
into a unity of effect by colouring both, so that the divine presence
permeated the shrine. Or it might be that the latter was dimly lighted
and the greater part of the statue was plunged in mysterious obscurity,
when the artist would gild the lips and eyes that the benign smile and
the composure of the glance might shine with soft conspicuousness amid
the gloom. In both these examples artistic fitness would regulate the
use of colour both to unify the effect and to enforce the idea. So, too,
in the case of a bust, the artist may feel that there is an expression
in the eyes of the woman whose portrait he is modelling or latent in the
curve of the lips, which summarises the impression of her character as
he feels it. In his desire to emphasise the idea which he has in his
mind, he will resort to colour in the eyes or lips; he may then feel the
need of balancing notes of colour elsewhere, as in the shadows of the
hair or in the fillet which binds it or in some ornament of jewelry;
and, having gone so far, may find it desirable to complete by further
enrichments of colour the general decorative feeling that has been
produced. Very probably he will be influenced in his use of colour by
the larger decorative intention of making the bust more conformable to
its place in a room, so that instead of standing out in cold
distinctness it may merge into the warmth of surrounding colour.
[Illustration: MADONNA
By Herbert Adams
Tympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT BUST
By Herbert Adams]
Evidently actuated by such intentions, Adams has frequently resorted to
colour in portrait reliefs and busts, with so choice a feeling that they
have a quality of very rare distinction. In one case, while the form is
marble of a pinkish, creamy hue, the bodice of the dress and full-puffed
sleeves are carved in wood of a pale-cedar colour and an embroidered
band across the bosom is sprinkled with gems of lapis lazuli and green.
This last feature is handled with exquisite _finesse_, while the
character of the rest of the design is large and simple. Two of his
busts are illustrated here, and in one case there is colour treatment
and in the other the marble has been left in its purity. The former
suffers by reproduction, since the photographic process has altered the
relation between the coloured portions and the rest, giving a sharpness
of contrast to the eyes and mouth; and it is at a further disadvantage,
for the sake of comparison, because the other is an exceptionally fine
example of Adams’s work. A portrait of the artist’s wife reveals an
intimacy of sympathetic comprehension and a loving reverence of
expression that make it a quite unusual work. It is pervaded also with
an exquisite mystery of feeling, as of something beyond the artist’s and
the husband’s knowledge hidden behind the veil of the woman’s separate
existence, but a mystery the quality of which his knowledge comprehends.
For there is mystery also in the face of the other bust, but more
enigmatic; only a partial reading of the character and to the rest no
clue. While the one portrait reveals a character matured and
comprehensible, notwithstanding that its outlines merge into conjecture,
the other leaves one guessing, as do many of the old Florentine women’s
portraits.
The “Bust of the Artist’s Wife” in its melodious rendering of light and
shade illustrates very pointedly the predominance of the colour or
painter feeling over the sculptural, of expression over structure. It is
more or less felt in all Adams’s busts, and is very noticeable in low
reliefs, such as the “Hoyt Memorial” and the “Pratt Memorial” tablets,
where he followed his own promptings. But when he works in coöperation
with an architect, the latter’s influence disturbs the oneness of his
motive and draws him to considerations of the architectonic use of form,
which results in some impairment of the expression.
In the “Hoyt Memorial” two angels, floating in the air, support a tablet
with inscription. Emphasis is given to the heads and arms and, in a less
degree, to the wings; but the rest of the form is indicated little more
than is necessary to explain the arrangement of the streaming folds of
light drapery. The result is a delicate pattern of light and shade, a
decoration of sweetly refined imagination, corresponding with the
gracious refinement of the expression in the faces. A similar
appreciation fits the “Pratt Memorial Angel” which he modelled for the
Baptist Emmanuel Church in Brooklyn, although the figure is in the
round. In the “Pratt Memorial” tablet, executed some years later, Adams
reveals how exquisitely he can use flower forms as motive for
decoration. The design forms the border of a long, narrow panel. At the
top is a winged head, symbolising the Angel of the Resurrection, and at
the foot a head without wings, representing the Sleep of Death. The
latter is enfolded with poppy-flowers and leaves, these forms being
carried up the sides of the panel, until at the middle distance they
become interspersed with lily-forms which finally assert themselves at
the top. The modelling is in very low relief with the exception of the
heads, to the lower of which a modest emphasis is given, while to the
upper a much stronger one. Both these faces are very beautiful, the
expression being chiefly centred in the eyes. The lids in the one case
are half-raised, as in the act of awakening before consciousness has
fully dawned; in the other lying as softly over the eyeballs as folded
petals. The exquisite chastity and serenity of these ripe, rounded faces
are echoed in the floral borders; so richly patterned, yet with such
reserve and tender piquancy. And, in contrast with the usual tedious
reiteration of time-wearied ornamental motives, how refreshing the
novelty and imagination in these borders! The artist has gone to nature
for his models, and, while reproducing the character of Renaissance
ornaments, has used the natural forms with so delicate an exuberance of
fancy that no motive is repeated, the whole being quick with fragrant
and fresh appeal. Indeed, so far as my knowledge goes, no plastic
decoration has been produced in this country which can approach it in
beauty; perhaps not even in the actual beauty of the ornamental forms,
certainly not in the sentiment of pure and holy calm which it exhales.
Nor even in other decorations by Adams shall we find, I think, such
perfect harmony between the form and feeling, for in his other examples
he was working with divided mind. While the floral borders upon the pair
of bronze doors which he executed for the Library of Congress are
intrinsically as beautiful as these, displaying the same freshness of
invention and loving insight into the decorative suggestion of flowers,
they have not the same perfectly balanced relation to the character and
feeling of the whole design. The artist was dragged from his own poise
by two outside influences. The doors had been commenced by Olin Warner,
and before his death the figures in the panels had been planned and
partly executed. Adams was called upon to complete the work and strove
loyally to preserve as much as possible of the dead artist’s intention.
Consequently, the figures are neither his nor Warner’s. Moreover, the
planning of the doors had been originally the architect’s, and he, too,
made his influence felt in the direction of a predilection for the
profuse exuberance of Roman ornament. With this Adams has absolutely no
sympathy, his own tendency being toward an ardent nature-study purified
by the influence of the antique which prevailed among Florentines of the
fifteenth century. Therefore, again he was twisted from what he would
have done instinctively. Compared with his independent work in the
“Pratt Memorial” tablet, these doors are overloaded and lacking in
singleness and unity of motive. Yet with what devotion Adams worked! The
process of casting in the bronze could only reproduce the front surface
of his decoration; the undercutting of the leaves and tendrils had to
be executed afterward with a graving tool, and for weeks he
superintended the work. Viewed in detail, the borders in these doors are
unusually alive with beauty, but, as I have said, the _ensemble_ is
lacking in the crowning beauty of harmony of form and feeling.
He has recently completed a tympanum in marble and two bronze doors for
the Vanderbilt Memorial Entrance, which has been added to St.
Bartholomew’s Church in New York. Here, again, he coöperated with the
architect. Such coöperation necessarily imposes certain conditions upon
the sculptor’s imagination; I had almost written limitations or
restrictions, except that the necessity of having to conform to an
architectonic plan need be no bar to the freedom of imagination, but
merely directs it into a certain channel. It permits, indeed, a liberty
within the law; but this is not the sort of coöperation that has existed
between the sculptor and architect on the present occasion. The latter
has not only established the architectural plan of the design--a
geometrical arrangement of bands and spaces which presents a very
agreeable _ensemble_ and nice apportionment of graduated emphasis--but
has also imposed upon the sculptor the character of his decoration. The
church is a modern rendering of the Romanesque style;
[Illustration: BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE
By Herbert Adams]
therefore, the architect has sought the models for the decoration in
medieval sculpture of the eleventh or early twelfth century. It is a
characteristic example of the way in which the American architectural
mind frequently works. Such a course is so obvious and reasonable, yet
what a meagerness of imagination it displays! It has mastered the
“styles” and lives up to its tables of laws and formulas as rigidly, as
literally and with as little regard for their spirit as the Jews of old
clung to their Decalogue. It dare not, or cannot, rekindle the spirit of
the past with an infusion of the present, as has been done in all living
periods of architecture, but to commemorate a New Yorker of the
nineteenth century, reproduces the ungainly types of figures, fashioned
at a time when architecture was better understood than sculpture. So in
the principal panels of the doors the architect has arranged four
apostles--rude, formalistic figures, too short in the leg--and filled
the subordinate ovals with dry little rigid groups; succeeding in his
desire to remind us of the past and failing utterly to affect us in the
present. For what possible appeal, religious, emotional or esthetic, can
these groups make to the modern imagination? Yet, from the point of view
of the subject we are discussing, the saddest thing is that a sculptor
of “delicately imagined sensations” should be so distorted from the
true bent of his genius and compelled to exert ingenuity in lieu of
imagination. It is an incredible waste, for only in the borders can we
discover Adams’s real self; yet, if he had been permitted to work in a
reasonable liberty of imagination, he might have made the groups
conformable to the style of the building and possessed also of some
vital elements of beauty and of beautiful appeal.
One effect, however, of this unequal coöperation with the architect
which may bring some compensating benefit to Adams’s art has been that
his mind has been directed more than previously to the architectonics of
decoration and to the sculptural value of form. For, while the figures
in these doors have no individual interest, the sum total of the whole
decoration has a very marked structural dignity, which arouses one’s
respect, if it does not warm one to enthusiasm. And this enforcement of
the structural quality reappears even more conspicuously in the
tympanum, both in the increased sense of force which the figures convey,
and in the organic relation of the forms to the shape of the space and
to its architectural function.
For, as I have said before, Adams’s work does not usually impress one
by its qualities of form, but rather by its sentiment and expression.
Even in the portrait-statue of Joseph Henry in the Library of Congress
and the “Channing,” recently unveiled at Boston, one does not feel the
form and character of the bodies. Both figures are represented in gowns
and count mainly as decorative masses. In the statue of Richard Smith,
however, which is one of his latest, he has shown the professor in his
laboratory, clad in shirt and trousers, with no accessory except an
apron caught up on one side; and in the treatment of the head and body
and more especially in the carriage of the hands, as one holds a
specimen and the other a magnifying glass, has obtained a considerable
measure of structural character.
Nor do I forget the tympanum, executed in 1896, for the Senate
Reading-Room in the Library of Congress, a design of two mermaids
supporting a cartouche. The nude forms display a thorough knowledge of
the figure and a truly sculptural appreciation of the charm of muscular
movement rippling over firmly constructed bodies. It seems to prove, if
it were necessary, that the preference which Adams has shown for the
pictorial possibilities of sculpture is due only to his particular
temperament; to a reticence of feeling that shrinks from too exact an
expression of the idea, around which in his own imagination also he
preserves a certain zone of vagueness.
So, in the tympanum for Saint Bartholomew’s Church, illustrated on an
accompanying page, he is divided between the motives of expressing a
sentiment of tender adoration and of giving the figures at the same time
an architectonic force. In the latter direction we may feel that he has
been the more successful; for in the attention paid to form he seems to
have become preoccupied in the model. The same face appears in each of
the three figures and with a self-consciousness in the eyes that
contradicts the devotional expression of the mouth; a self-consciousness
that I find myself connecting with the little niceties of arrangement
with which the hair is prinked. I conclude by wondering if this tympanum
will prove a turning-point in the artist’s career!
For when one studies the beauty of form, so strongly realised beneath
the draperies, its fine expression and functional propriety, it is to
feel that this work, despite a certain lack of Adams’s usual
spirituality of sentiment, is the most important in a sculptural sense
that he has yet done. For, regarded from the point of view of an
architectural decoration it is unusually distinguished with admirable
appropriateness of lines and masses to the space, a truly architectural
feeling, and a distribution of light and shade, characterised alike by
richness and by delicacy. It has the choiceness of style of his best
portraits, reënforced by virility. And, if this latter quality, called
into play by his coöperation with the architect, is maintained in future
work, the result can scarcely fail to be a betterment of his art. For he
will find a way of bringing it into complete harmony with the expression
of his sentiment, since there is no necessary incompatibility between
virility of style and delicacy of feeling. Indeed, the offspring of
their union is a very special poignancy.
VIII
CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS
Charles Henry Niehaus is a conspicuous exception to the general rule
that our sculptors are Paris-trained. After working as a youth at
wood-engraving, stone-cutting and carving in marble, he became a student
in the McMicken School of Design, in his native city, Cincinnati, Ohio,
and thence proceeded to Munich. His German training was supplemented by
extensive travel and later by a prolonged visit to Rome, during which he
devoted himself to the study of the nude under the influence of the
antique.
But before the latter interlude in a life otherwise filled with the
execution of commissions, he returned to America. For him the time was
auspicious. President Garfield had recently been assassinated, and the
State of Ohio had appropriated funds for a statue to be placed in the
Capitol at Washington, and by public subscription another was to be
erected in Race Street, Cincinnati. Both these commissions were awarded
to the young Ohio sculptor. Each statue commemorates Garfield’s gift of
oratory, but the one at Cincinnati in a more informal way, so that it
probably represents very fairly Niehaus’s particular tendency at this
time.
There is a dramatic touch in the pose of the figure; the weight firmly
on the left foot, the other energetically advanced; both arms extended;
one holding a sheaf of paper, the other raised slightly in a gesture of
maintaining the attention of the audience; the handsome head well
carried above the broad, arched chest. But this dramatic suggestion does
not pass beyond the limit of tolerably natural characterisation; the
balance between energy and controlling force, manifested in the studied
carriage of a speaker accustomed to move his hearers; and the naturalism
is completed by the absence of all affectations of arrangement in the
costume. It comprises simply a frock coat and trousers and an overcoat
unbuttoned and drawn clear of the chest. The figure, indeed, is
represented in the guise and attitude in which it might be familiar to
the greatest number of people. So, too, is that of William Allen, for
which Niehaus shortly afterward received the commission from the State
of Ohio; yet with even greater simplicity and naturalness, with an
absence of the heroic or dramatic which had been fitting enough in the
“Garfield,” considering the circumstances. The “Allen” is an intimate
portrait of an incisive speaker and clear, close reasoner, in an
attitude entirely unstudied, full of natural resolution.
From these two statues one may get a very fair impression of the
sculptor’s natural bent as influenced by Munich training. Its prime
feature is a vigorous realism that makes straight for character in the
subject, finding it as much in pose and gesture as in the head, and
giving expression to it in the simplest and directest fashion; if with
some dramatic play as we have seen, yet without any floridness. What we
do not yet observe is a feeling for the subtler expression of movement
in the figure, and, in consequence, of subtler feeling in the
disposition and texture of the draperies; qualities which entered into
his work after his protracted study in Italy.
For, having completed these commissions, Niehaus set out for Rome and
established himself in a studio just outside the Porta del Popolo, in
close proximity to the Villa Borghese, devoting himself, as I have said,
to the study of the nude. The only three statues which survive from this
period--an athlete scraping himself with a strigil, another binding on
the cestus, and a “Silenus,” pirouetting on one foot as he blows his
pipes--are quite remarkable examples of the modern interpretation of
the antique. Movement continuous through every part of the body and
absolutely adjusted to the action; a poise of balance in the disposition
of the torso and limbs, which combines the pleasure of repose with that
of movement; anatomical accuracy that includes the structure of the
figure and the varieties of tension according as the muscles are
separately employed; and throughout a salience of modelling which
imparts a dignity as well as naturalness to the whole--these are the
qualities so admirably attained. The knowledge of form and the feeling
for it thus perfected has naturally influenced all the sculptor’s
subsequent work. He exhibits them obviously in the colossal nude, “The
Driller,” executed for the Drake monument at Titusville, Pennsylvania;
but no less in numerous portrait-statues.
An American sculptor has unfortunately few opportunities for displaying
his ability in the treatment of the nude, the commissions which perforce
engage his time being almost exclusively problems of figures in modern
civilian garb or in the uniform of the army or navy. He may occasionally
introduce it into a piece of decorative sculpture, or fashion some ideal
subject for the pure love of doing it, since his chances of disposing
[Illustration: THE DRILLER
By Charles Henry Niehaus
From the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania]
[Illustration: THE HAHNEMANN STATUE
By Charles Henry Niehaus
From the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.]
of it are very limited. For while the old Puritan objection to the nude
may have almost died out in America, it has scarcely been succeeded by a
true appreciation of the abstract expression and beauty of the human
form when treated by an artist. An old-fashioned bluntness of vision
fails to see more in a nude than nakedness; may enjoy very thoroughly
the structural and muscular development, play of movement and texture of
skin in a horse, or the analogies of these qualities in a tree or plant,
and yet miss entirely their subtler manifestations when exhibited in the
freely exposed human form. Prejudice or lack of imagination obscures the
fact that it is the expression of these qualities in their highest
possible degree, that is the end and purpose of the artist; an
obscurity, however, which, it must be admitted, not a few nude paintings
and sculptures tend to perpetuate.
So Niehaus had to wait very many years before he could utilise frankly
the results of his studies at Rome. The opportunity came with the
erection of a monument to the memory of Colonel Edwin L. Drake, who sunk
the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. The donor, who preserved his
incognito, but who is supposed to have been one of the officials of the
Standard Oil Company, demanded an architectural structure with planes
on which the story of Drake’s life and achievements might be inscribed,
and instead of a representation of himself a figure typical of his work.
Thus arose occasion for “The Driller.”