I
Visitors were standing by the fountain in the garden of a sculptor; and some one was asking him what in his opinion was the most beautiful material to model in. The questioner probably had in mind clay, wax, stone, metal and other solid substances; but the sculptor answered quickly: “Water. There is nothing in the whole world so marvelous to manipulate as water.” A gleam of creative rapture lit his face. “Shall I show you my ‘Veil of Mist?’ or would you rather see my ‘Jeweled Elm-Tree?’”
[A] This chapter is largely a reprint, permitted through the courtesy of the American Magazine of Art.
There are few sculptors who have not been fascinated at one time or another by the designing of fountains, with their primary interest of sculpture and their secondary mystery and magic of water; whether of still water, with its mirrored pictures of blue sky, dark trees, many-colored flowers and sun-flecked walls; or of gently dropping water, suggestive of leisure and repose; or of leaping, flashing, dancing water, hypnotic even without copper or silver balls tossed up and down; or of water brought from afar in grandiose cascades or canals, as in the garden art of the Villa d’Este, the Villa Lante, Versailles, and Saint Cloud; or even of water turned at great cost to wondrous baroque inventions for drenching the unwary bystander, as in the Villa Aldobrandini. Fortunately, at the present hour, the practical joke in fountains is out of date; and there is a growing use of fountains as memorials, either stately or intimate, either in public squares or in private gardens.
Setting aside the innumerable pots, urns, sarcophagi and other “containers” for trees, shrubs and flowering plants, the larger part of our garden sculpture centres about water and its works. Besides the more or less imposing figure fountain, with its bronze boys, dolphins, fauns, nymphs, Nereids, Tritons, turtles and other hardy perennials of the aquatic imagination, there are tanks, reservoirs, bathing pools, all no less practical if touched with some suggestion of the sculptor’s art; there is the basin of the well-known pozzo type, flowering out into putti, corpulent or lean, bending under their swags of foliage and fruit; there is the little wall-fountain, borrowed from the lavabo of Renaissance churches, and dear to the careful gardener, replenishing from it the green-painted, fine-snouted watering-pot kept sacred to his tiny seedlings. Then there is the water-spout, ready with its witty word of grotesque, and the rainwater pipe-head, in which English lead-work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed a vigorous and interesting art. There is even the bird-bath, that modern invention of the nature-lover, since today, though we profit by many of the garden ideas of the Renaissance, we do not imitate those Siennese gallants who tied blinded thrushes to the dwarf ilex and cypress, to decoy winged creatures for convenient garden shooting. The twentieth-century bird-bath lures birds to life rather than to death, as is shown in a decorative bronze by Annette Saint-Gaudens, who has represented upon it characters in Percy MacKaye’s bird-masque, Sanctuary. The masquing spirit is afoot these days with new opportunities for sculpture; the outdoor stage, now no very uncommon feature in private gardens and groves, shows a retaining wall and other boundaries ready for suitable sculptural accent by means of statues, Hermæ, vases, mascarons or garlands.
BACCHANTE
BY F. W. MacMONNIES
As not every day is fit for verse, so not every artist is gifted with the happy hand for designing garden forms. It is a temperamental matter; generally the note should be that of joy, or at least of serenity. Mr. MacMonnies’s Bacchante and his Boy with Heron long ago set the perfect pace of gayety for American gardens. And today, what gladder creature this side of Arcady can you find than the MacMonnies Duck Baby? Unless it is Edith Barretto Parsons’s laughing Child with Turtle, or else one of Miss Scudder’s engaging imps of Frogland. Some of our most accomplished sculptors have delighted us with their garden art. How exquisite is the graciousness of John Gregory’s kneeling Philomela, a statue lately designed for the bird-garden of Mrs. Payne Whitney! No figure in recent years has seemed more original and alluring than this “blithe spirit” considering the wonder of her pinions.
FOUNTAIN FIGURE
BY JANET SCUDDER
The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble—a fine relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design. You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical modeling. Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once launched out on the simple joy of “copying a morceau.”
Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides, but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment; to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of artistic training, that offered by our American Academy in Rome, does not begin and end with Houdon’s “Copiez toujours,” but allows for contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward influences in art to some Gryphon of an Academy, of which little is known, and everything suspected.