Read Ebook: The spirit of American sculpture by Adams Adeline

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 176 lines and 36077 words, and 4 pages

II OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS 29

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD 57

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 67

DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH 76

V THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE 101

VI OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES 125

X THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY 191

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN SCULPTURE

MRS. PATIENCE WRIGHT SPEAKS THE

What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor, Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,--Quaker, wax-image-maker, traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and the movements of British troops! Had his mind's eye but once seen her in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself. Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters, had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole's concerning the "artistess," he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as "inexplicable, grand, preposterous" as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible eye-witness and letter-writer.

Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the "hearty buss" with which the sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that "there was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room, and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life, I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was finally told that it was only wax." And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs. Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist and patriot, notes that "the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped originality on all her acts and language." He tells us that the British king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.

The intrepid if somewhat incongruous figure of this Quaker artist abroad will serve very well as herald or prologue to the drama of American sculpture. Nor can I think that either Mr. Greenough or Mr. Powers, Mr. Ward or Mr. Saint-Gaudens, Mr. French or the very youngest sculptor newly laureled by our American Academy in Rome would object to that assignment of r?le. Surely in any play, it is allowed that the herald may seem somewhat more fantastic and legendary than the kings and counselors that come after. Mrs. Wright and her wax-works are important to us, but not because anyone now accounts her the "Promethean modeller" her enthusiastic contemporaries charged her with being. She is important because her vogue reveals the artless taste of her time, its awe in the presence of perfect imitations of nature. Not that such awe is unknown to-day in the world of art. Indeed, our herald brings vigorously upon the scene one of the major problems that still perplex the American sculptor in his work. I mean the problem of likenesses, those "strong representations of real life," as Abigail Adams would say.

"We shall regulate the article of expense as oeconomically as we can with justice to the wishes of the world," writes Jefferson to Governor Harrison, concerning the standing statue. "We are agreed in one circumstance, that the size shall be precisely that of life." Jefferson gives patriotic reasons for that decision as to size; he adds with excellent artistic judgment, "We are sensible that the eye alone considered will not be quite as well satisfied." A generation later, writing from Monticello in regard to the statue of Washington that the legislature of North Carolina desires to order, he declares that this work should be somewhat larger than life. A strict realism no longer delights him. With true Jeffersonian divination of popular currents, he leans now toward the pseudo-classic ideal already dominant in European studios. As to the costume chosen, he finds that "every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman.... Our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect." In short, "Old Canova of Rome" is the artist North Carolina should employ. It is pleasant to note that just as Houdon, having "solemnly and feelingly protested against the inadequacy of the price, evidently undertook the work from motives of reputation alone," so too Canova is "animated with ardent zeal to prove himself worthy of so great a subject." Thus happily are begun those steadfastly continued artistic relations between the United States and the two European countries in which art prospers as the light and livelihood of the people.

Washington himself, when the Houdon portrait statue is projected, plays an admirably discreet part in the art criticism of the moment. He writes to Jefferson, on August 1, 1786:

"In answer to your obliging enquiries respecting the dress, attitude, etc., which I would wish to have given to the statue in question, I have only to observe that, not having sufficient knowledge in the art of sculpture to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs, I do not desire to dictate in the matter."

How unlike the home life of William Hohenzollern! And how often the thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington's simple dignity in admitting an insufficiency of "knowledge in the art of sculpture" might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are not qualified "to dictate in the matter"! In this our free country of the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded by those who cheerily announce that "they do not know much," but who nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first President.

All the Jefferson correspondence respecting these two statues of Washington is of vital interest to the student of our art history. Our young Republic, in its early strivings toward art, was fortunate in having an adviser as well-advised as the master of Monticello. It was Thomas Jefferson who guided inquiring state legislatures, now toward Houdon, the powerful French realist, and again toward Canova, the distinguished Italian idealist. Through Jefferson's hands, our American sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each after the other, will continue to shape the artist's interpretation of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. Gilbert Murray, in his notes on the Hippolytus, writes that its matchless closing scene "proves the ultimate falseness of the distinction between classical and romantic. The highest poetry has the beauty of both."

Returning to the Quaker lady who speaks our prologue, and conning once more the tale of her works in all their brisk na?vet?, the sympathetic student will easily evoke the difficult conditions under which sculpture first reared its head in our country. Sculpture, though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs of primitive man, is an art much hindered and abridged during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster's chest or some fair Priscilla's spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back, so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The drawings and inherited traditions of cabinet-makers, carpenters, and architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture, for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and skill, sometimes with creative genius.

The colonists' sense of form gratified itself in these directions, since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes, and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture. Statues, unlike chocolate-pots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was accomplished in our country. The statue was of the Boston astronomer, Dr. Bowditch, and by the English sculptor, Ball Hughes. The original bronze cast was not a wholly successful piece of work; it was long ago replaced by a bronze from a French foundry. But those familiar with the difficulties of the situation will recall Dr. Johnson's observation about the dog walking on his hind legs. "It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

However, we need not harp too long and too mournfully on the physical impediments in our sculptural start. Enormous as these were, they were less mighty than the spiritual obstacles set up by time and place. First of all, it is to be remembered that the European world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was moving on in a mild, manifest, not necessarily permanent decline in creative power as shown through the graphic arts. The waves of that decline reached even our own stern coast. It is safe to say that had the American colonists' hour coincided with an hour of large renascence in art throughout Europe, our forefathers, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, would earlier have found room for art as a need and a natural expression of the freer life they sought. As for the distinctively Puritan view, that view too often denied and persecuted beauty in the fierce Puritan concentration upon holiness. It is true that art, in its blither and more genial guise, slips away from the society of the sour-visaged. But it is also true that a great tragic expression in art sometimes bursts uncontrollably from peoples or persons with minds exacerbated by long fortitudes. We learn this from the Belgian sculptor Meunier brooding over his brothers of the Black Country, from the Serbian sculptor Mestrovic immortalizing in stone his country's stern legends, from the poet Dante treading his Inferno. But the Florentine and the Serbian and the Belgian produced their art under their native skies. They were not torn up by the roots to live in a strange land.

Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill of exceeding difficulty, we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national consciousness.

In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West's legendary adventure with his cat's-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his baby sister's likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art's helper. Referring to more important matters, we do not forget William Rush's full-length statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait, carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey, in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as historic data.

The story of American sculpture cannot be told under a parable of a chain with equally strong links throughout. One thinks rather of a slender thread, which may be fastened to a cord, which will draw up a strong rope, which will in turn attach itself to a powerful cable. If early Yankee ingenuity is that slender thread, let us thank God for it, and hope for better things.

OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS

Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston, Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T-squares for a journey to Washington, where he is to remain twelve years as Latrobe's successor as architect of the Capitol. In New York, morning-star young art-students are passionately performing their historic ritual of fighting the janitor and founding new movements; even Colonel Trumbull is defied; hence, in 1825, our National Academy of Design. In Philadelphia, harmony presides over the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But in Washington, what commotion! Restorations are to be made after the fires of the British; there are new excavations, new aspirations. There's sculptor's work here for many a year. Bronze doors must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom? Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington bustle.

Modern imagination fails to see those early craftsmen as they really were. Because they are dead to us now, we fall into the error of thinking that they always were dead, anyway; the stilly sort of sculpture they often made sustains us in that illusion. But when we look into their lives, and hear their sayings, we learn, almost with a shock, that these men felt deeply, even while they expressed themselves feebly in their art.

Living amidst heaped riches of opportunity, the art-student of to-day can scarcely imagine the bleak poverty of artistic resource that Greenough and Crawford and Powers left behind them when they sailed away to Rome or to Florence. Nowadays, art-schools flourish here: casts of good sculpture abound; photographs of masterpieces may be had at a small price. Museums freely show examples of the arts of all nations, and intelligently arrange these displays to serve the immediate needs of students; in short, they do a great work so well that they have already become a target for so-called criticism from self-styled intellectuals exposing their wits in the columns of would-be radical journals. Things were very different in Greenough's time. There were indeed a few collections of casts, probably with soiled noses; there were portfolios of steel engravings, that sometimes bore false witness against beauty.

To return to the Capitol pediment, Crawford's intention and attitude were quite uncomplicated. He had but to snatch the largest theme in sight, and to do his best with shaping its figures one by one inside his triangle of grandeur. The marvel is that he came so near to success. The thing has a kind of distinction from the man's singleness of aim. Since then, scores of our sculptors from coast to coast have solved the pediment problem with varying success. Many of them bring a highly personal and interesting solution. Ward, Bartlett, French, O'Connor, Bitter, Weinman, the Piccirillis,--these names but begin the list. The world calls us a wasteful nation, a nation that unbuilds as it builds. In the face of this, it is pleasant to know that only a few months ago, Mr. Bartlett's handsome Peace Protecting Genius has been set up in the House pediment, to match Crawford's Past and Present of the Republic at the Senate wing. Nearly a century has elapsed since the Capitol first busied itself with pedimental decorations. Our sculpture has had time to learn in these years.

Greenough came first in our line of scholarly sculptors, that class to which W. W. Story later lent great lustre. A Latin inscription of five lines, beginning "Simulacrum istud" and ending "Horatius Greenough faciebat" marks the huge Washington statue. Well, if I rightly understand this sculptor, I like his "faciebat." It seems more conscientious and less cocksure than the "fecit" with which our sculptors sometimes grace their signatures, and it is certainly not so gruff as the laconic "sc." Between its eight letters one reads the coming and going of those seven diligent Italian years; and we shall deceive ourselves if we count those years wholly lost for our American art. If only Greenough could have enjoyed some of the surplusage of admiration given to his contemporary Powers for his Greek Slave with her well-smoothed body, her manacled Medicean hand, and the accurately fringed mantle at her feet! Though expressly advertised as a nude figure, she is dressed from top to toe in a most unfleshly hard-soft technique which our time calls incompetent, but which 1847 styled "the spiritualization of the marble." The personality of the artist counted very largely in those days; while Greenough was scholarly and Crawford attractive, and while Randolph Rogers with his bronze doors and his Nydia was what would now be called a good "go-getter," Hiram Powers was easily the main spellbinder of the early group.

OF THREE LEADERS, AND OF MORAL EARNESTNESS IN ART

Moral earnestness? I use both words gladly, and without apology. Why should any one fear that two words so packed with meaning should breed ennui?

Over and over again, the critic will aim some well-considered attack upon a certain specified baseness that he perceives and abhors in literature or in art; and then, before he finishes his good work, he suddenly decamps, with the observation, "But this is not in the least a question of morals; it is a question of artistic taste." Sometimes his reader cannot help thinking, by contrast, of that quick word of the old Greek dramatist, protesting against some of the lewd myths of his religion,

"Say not there be adulterers in heaven, Nor prisoner gods and jailers:--long ago My heart hath named it vile and shall not alter!"

If someone nowadays should speak like that, might it not clear the air? I mean, some valued critic of our arts and letters. As it is, we of today leave such work to the censor. And our democracy, avid for class distinctions, accounts the censor considerably lower than the angels. The censor, poor soul, might as well slink at once into the society of the executioner, that most dejected, most rejected figure in history. When the censor says, in his own way, "My heart hath named it vile," nobody pays much attention. But the world might look up if some urbane and trusted critic would write with the moral earnestness of Euripides, dodging nothing. Kenyon Cox used to do so.

What I am driving at is this: Without moral earnestness, art cannot prosper in a strange country, under unnative sky. There would be no foundation for laying the cornerstones of art, let alone for building its high-erected arches. It is a solemn thought, is it not, that American sculptors are today placing their creations on soil that never before was moulded into forms of vivid art such as the Old World knew in the dawn of human culture? For with due regard to our ancient Aztec civilization from Zu?i to Cuzco, our pre-historic New World has nothing to show in any way comparable with those free forms sketched twenty thousand years ago on the walls of the paleolithic caverns in Southwestern Europe, in the very regions where the nineteenth century masters of sculpture were born. To this day, American artists have all the responsibility that comes with the beginnings and transplantings of culture. They are ancestors.

Euripides was creator rather than critic. It may be that the moral earnestness we need must come to us in a thousand unseen ways through the reconciling hands of creation, rather than in one way through the tongue or pen of the critic.

I shall not say that this quality of moral earnestness is found everywhere in American sculpture. But I know that it is found in many places, and in nearly all the high places. Moral earnestness is the very foundation of the only sort of artistic conscience that amounts to much as a contribution toward the higher life in art. It was a strongly developed artistic conscience that often impelled Shrady, like Saint-Gaudens before him, to break the letter of some lesser clause of his contract, in order to keep faith with the spirit of the whole. Consider the moral earnestness of George Grey Barnard, one of the few modern masters of the imagination as it speaks in stone. You will find that in Barnard this earnestness is part and parcel of the artist he now is; just as it was once part and parcel of Barnard the young student, devoting intense study to the exacting yet large processes of the marble cutter; and by marble cutter I mean not the practitioner, the doomed copyist, but the sort of marble cutter that might call Michelangelo kinsman, and be at ease on the Acropolis with Pheidias and his men. And even if, like myself, you cannot make Barnard's bronze presentment of Lincoln square with your own thrice dear and clear image of this great man, this great symbol of American statesmanship, you will grant that only a high integrity of purpose in the matter could have kept the sculptor steadfast in the truth as he saw it. This fundamental earnestness of Barnard's adds a distinction to his most casual or even whimsical words concerning art. When he talks to you about "the cheekbones that make the pathos of a face," a dozen examples of what he means fill your memory.

It is a very happy thing for our sculpture that the three men who have most definitely guided its destinies through the past forty years,--Ward, Saint-Gaudens, French,--are hailed as men of moral force. And it is a special cause for congratulation that Mr. French, the youngest-born of the three, still remains with us, still vigorous in achievement. One expects moral earnestness from Mr. French, a New Englander of gracious ancestry, born and bred in the very happiest circumstances of New England life, and growing up gaily in the light-and-shade of Concord philosophy. One expects it from Mr. Ward, with his open-air Ohio boyhood of mingled zests and rigors, and his later conscientious acceptance of the public duties laid upon any artist who happens also to be an organizer, a "man's man." And whether one expects it or not, one finds it in rich measure in Saint-Gaudens. This child of France, born in Ireland, carries within him all the days of his life the light of an American conscience. Without a compelling moral earnestness, he could never have brought to completion, in face of unimaginable difficulties, some of the masterpieces on which his fame rests.

Every artist knows of the fourteen years during which the Shaw monument remained in his studio, never long absent from his thought. Many are familiar with the repeated trials through which his vision of General Sherman and the Angel of Victory-Peace finally emerged triumphant. A man once told his dentist of Saint-Gaudens, of the Shaw monument, of the fourteen years. "Well," said the dentist, twirling his little mahogany stand of bright tools, in complacent recollection of some of his own swifter victories, "he couldn't have been a very smart artist, to take all that time." No, indeed, Saint-Gaudens was not a very smart artist. The very smart artist, one concludes, can flourish for his day without a deep foundation of moral earnestness. Saint-Gaudens was simply the very great artist. With Mr. Ward and Mr. French, he made integrity and the artistic conscience the only natural choice for scores of young sculptors now influencing our lives. What these three leaders have thus contributed of moral beauty, of needed moral earnestness to our society, will never be measured. It is too far-reaching and too deep-seated. Most observers consider that a certain superficiality mars American life. Although we need not join those defeatists who believe that this defect in itself spells our ruin, we shall certainly admit that the defect exists. All honor, then, to the moral earnestness that today, largely because of these three leaders, is so much a part of the spirit of American sculpture.

The sculptor's work means far more than staying in a studio and luring visions into clay or stone or bronze. His business isn't altogether a wrestling with angels. There's a certain amount of coping with committees; and his visions are often none the worse for the honest revisions that other men may suggest. The sculptor's masterpiece must be able to resist the spiritual wear-and-tear of the marketplace of the world's opinion. It is no masterpiece unless it can in the end do that. And if, as it stands, the work is a silent influence against superficiality and emptiness, something is gained for American life. Glad sculpture as well as grave sculpture can exert that influence.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD

No one is as disdainful of the early Victorians as the late Victorians used to be. In the strength of the 'eighties and 'nineties our studios often resounded with mutterings against the feebleness of the 'fifties. Perhaps some envy of certain primitive successes was mingled with this righteous wrath. But after all, our Powerses and Rogerses were not in the least the mere early worms their successors once said they were. A juster perspective invites the reflection that American sculpture in its development needed the influence of the Greek Slave and her thousand daughters as it has needed that of the Rock Creek figure, of the Lincoln Memorial, and of the fire-new work beautifully presented by our youngest group of sculptors. Those marble shapes now dwelling vaguely somewhere in the dark corridors of relegation had once a thrilling part to play. They were our ideals, to be seen, prized and possessed in the name of art. So, the old songs of blame have long been out of date. But they did good service in the days when John Quincy Adams Ward, a natural leader of men, turned a heroic back on Europe as a place for the American artist to live in. Go there to study, but not to stay, was his word.

Vision, veracity, virility are the three V's that stamped his life and work. Like his friend Howells, he was Ohio-born; both men had boyhood aspirations that carried them away from their Middle-Border pioneer activities into the more genial milieu to be found among our Eastern salt-water cities. Living from 1830 to 1910, and working sixty years in his art, Ward has rightly been called the Colossus that bestrides the two separate worlds of our former and latter periods in sculpture. Though he founded no school, his influence has been far-reaching. His Beecher statue, flanked by its two lyrical groups, his Garfield monument with its attendant epic groups of War and Peace, his noble equestrian figure of General Thomas are among a host of sterling works that prove him the "all round" sculptor. In his youth, he played a well-known and highly practical part in the making of Brown's equestrian statue of Washington, one of the best-praised and worst-placed monuments in the city of New York. Since the praise is deserved, the placing discredits us far more than it does the heroic artists who carried the work to completion. All sculptors who succeed in their equestrian statues are heroic; even if they are not heroes when they begin such enterprises they achieve heroism before they finish them. And if that is true to-day, with our more highly organized methods both of the sculptor's art and of the bronze-founder's science, what must it have been in 1856, when Brown's Washington, our second equestrian statue, first saw the light? In later life, Ward sometimes spoke in whimsical recollection of industrious apprentice days that he, a luckier type of Jonah, spent within the belly of the horse cast in bronze by French workmen assisting Brown.

Ward had in his nature and in his art the great elements of the precursor. He represents not only the pioneer in American sculpture, but in no small measure and sometimes in a singular way, the prophet. Witness the dog with scalloped mane in his admirable group of the Indian Hunter, a work that much impressed the youthful Saint-Gaudens, fresh from years of study among European masters and masterpieces. Here we have a fore-taste of that delightful treatment of animal form found in the bronzes of the young men from the American Academy in Rome. To be sure, Ward's dog does not seem to spring forward full-armed in a beautifully conventionalized linear panoply of bone and muscle resurrected from some newly revealed Klazomenian sarcophagus; he is not quite so Cretanly curled as some of the appealing animal figures of to-day, but 'tis enough, 't will serve. And the whole group, as seen happily placed in Central Park, reveals the naturalism in which Ward envelops his own peculiar kind of classicism. For a nobler instance of Ward's forward-looking quality, choose the bronze Washington standing on the steps of the Sub-Treasury in New York, in the very heart of all our heart-breaking yet inspiring financial traffic. That statue is not merely a portrait of Washington, but a symbolic expression of early American greatness in leadership.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet