American masters of sculpture: being brief appreciations of some American sculptors and of some phases of sculpture in America

Front matter

jM MERICANEII P§& MASTERS OF ^13 SCULPTURE

AMERICAN MASTERS OF SCULPTURE

By the same author :

Contents

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Introduction v

I. Augustus Saint-Gaudens i II. George Grey Barnard 19

II

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 practicallyself -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 naturestudies sowed the seed from which these matured ideals were to spring.

He was born at Belief onte, 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 roundtopped 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 Society Nationale des Beaux Arts crowned his struggles with artistic recognition. During

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.

We shall find them in the group "I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within 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 re-

TWO FRIENDS By George Grey Barnard

A Memorial Monument serve 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.

N

Ill

"DORN 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 foreigntaught 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 naivete 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.