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Among appealing portraits in the Louvre is Ghirlandaio’s Priest and Boy. Whatever might be hideous in its realism is at once atoned for by something singularly lovely. The priest has the ugliest nose in the world; Cyrano is a Hermes to him; but the child looks up to him in intimate childlike trust. The most unflinching realism and the tenderest idealism meet in that portrait. And our American portraits in sculpture, taken one by one, run that gamut. From the day of William Rush’s rude self-portrait down to the present hour of an occasional polychrome marble bust of exquisite workmanship, our sculpture has advanced in the art of the portrait bust. The creator of the Greek Slave was happier, whether he knew it or not, in rugged masculine portrait heads such as his Jackson and his Calhoun, than in his famed ideal figures; those male likenesses have a living quality that is lacking in his series of idealized busts of classic heroines such as Proserpine and Psyche, all much the same in feature, and all appropriately corseted in a kind of marble corolla, springing up from a leafy marble base. The ending of a bust, that is to say its base or support, is always a question with the sculptor, unless, like Houdon, he chooses one type of base for all, or unless, as Rodin in his marble portraits of women, he counts upon the richly associative charm of the unachieved.
Since the time of Verocchio’s bust of a woman with flowers in her hands, many sculptors, for the sake of added interest, a more vivid characterization, or a more striking composition, have attempted to show the hands as well as the face of the person portrayed. In this difficult undertaking, no modern sculptor has succeeded better than Mr. Niehaus, well-known for his imposing monuments. His portrait bust of John Quincy Adams Ward is not only a work of distinguished realism, worthy of the artist it represents; it is also a perfect solution of an almost insolvable problem in arrangement.
PORTRAIT BUST OF J. Q. A. WARD
BY CHARLES H. NIEHAUS
Among the greatest virile portraits of our age are those of the “all around” American sculptor, Charles Grafly; for style and workmanship and seizing of character any half-dozen of his busts would proudly hold their own if placed beside Rodin’s male portraits in the Metropolitan Museum. Furthermore, they have the old-fashioned advantage of looking like the persons they represent, an advantage not always attained in the Rodin portrayals. Perhaps a fairer tribute to Mr. Grafly’s power would be to say that his busts need not fear comparison with the Saint-Gaudens Sherman, that most spirited portrait of a war-chief. One of our memorable sculptured portraits is Mrs. Burroughs’s bust of John La Farge, modeled at about the period of Mr. Lockwood’s painted portrait. Both artists have attained truth. Mr. Lockwood’s broadly enveloping technique shows La Farge as the cosmopolitan, the artist who is also the gracious citizen of the world; Mrs. Burroughs’s point of view emphasizes La Farge the individualist, the thinker habitually pursuing his own spiritual adventures in many realms, oriental and occidental. The painting tells wherein La Farge resembles his fellow-men, while the sculpture with equal force brings out his valuable points of difference. Twenty years ago, Jonathan Scott Hartley’s sturdy renderings of masculine character delighted his colleagues; and even today, his bust of John Gilbert as Sir Peter Teazle loses nothing of its rich whimsical earnestness when considered beside modern work of the highest order, such as Robert Aitken’s portrait of Augustus Thomas, or one of Fraser’s presentments of our great American citizens.
Naturally remote in intent and result from these virile modelings are the lovingly rendered portraits of women and children familiar in our sculpture. A well-known example is Manship’s realistically carved marble image of his baby daughter placed within a captivating shrine of blue and gold. Portraits in the round, carried out in a polychrome ensemble of beautifully cut marble combined with other materials, such as wood, gold, and semi-precious stones, offer a fascinating field for the American sculptor willing to devote to such experiments the time and thought they demand. The pure white marble bust looks ill at ease in the warm precincts of the modern home; it is a thing of the past. We can but wonder that our elders bore it so long, even when it was in a measure suppressed by placing it looking streetward, between the parted lace curtains.
MARBLE PORTRAIT OF BABY
BY PAUL MANSHIP
For the male portrait, modern taste generally prefers bronze to marble; and just as the dead whiteness of marble may be relieved by color, so the severe darkness of bronze in statue or bust may be altered by the use of a harmonious patina. Many of our sculptors have given long and patient study to this subject of “patine”; others again trust all to the bronze founder. But sculpture still has much to learn from chemistry; and there are still a few artists who keep enough of the weaker side of craftsmanship to believe in the advisability of secret processes. Is it not true that art is the last field where such secrecies should exist? Do we not look upon art as the liberator of great things, not as the locker-up of little things like craftsmen’s receipts? For receipts that are not exposed to the air get mouldy with hugger-mugger and abracadabra; this is as true today as in good Cennino Cennini’s time of “mordant with garlic,” and “tempera with the yolk of the egg of a city hen.”