VI
A survey of the spirit of American sculpture should include, as a cause for joy, a glimpse at the single ideal figures in which many of our modern sculptors express themselves, more or less untrammeled by the demands of the world. The subjects for such figures are rarely new, yet they must be treated with perennial freshness. Take Diana: Saint-Gaudens, Warner, MacMonnies, Miss Scudder, McCartan and I know not how many others have done Diana in her phases, and each new portrayal should prove a new joy. Take Maidenhood: Rudolph Evans has chosen this ancient theme for his Golden Hour, one of the most delightful pieces in all American sculpture; Barnard has rendered it in marble; Sherry Fry’s classic bronze Maidenhood, in the guise of Hygeia, and Mrs. Burroughs’s On the Threshold are sculptural expressions of the same subject. Take the Ephebos: John Donoghue’s Young Sophocles, dated 1885, a masterpiece coming just half way, in point of time, between the arrival of the Greek Slave in America and the unveiling of MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, is a gloriously conceived figure of youth in the abstract, rather than a full-length likeness of the Greek poet leading the chorus after Salamis. Surely in sculptural mastery, Donoghue is much nearer to MacMonnies than to Powers. Picking our way past the Slave and her kin, and coming at last upon a classic like this Young Sophocles, we may safely abandon the prefix pseudo. What a relief! It is as if one could at last leave off over-shoes, and walk abroad dry-shod, in fair weather. This example from the ’eighties points out once more the progress made between the Fairs of 1876 and 1893. Does it also, in its old-school seriousness of consecration to art, and in its reverence for “the nobler forms of nature” shame a little the easy slapdash of the battalions of sketchy figures now clamoring for space in print and in the galleries? Probably not. Other times, other ideals. “She certainly saved herself trouble,” was the comment of a sculptor, looking at a modernist figure whose drapery was made by strings.
THE GOLDEN HOUR
BY RUDOLPH EVANS
CHAPTER VI
OUR EQUESTRIAN STATUES
Our forefathers’ first fond national desire in sculpture was for an equestrian statue of Washington, by Houdon; a wish never to be fulfilled. The Congressional impulse of 1783 was sobered on counting up the cost. It came to nothing until two generations had passed; and it came to very little even then. Today, our country is sometimes called the paradise of the equestrian statue. If any such paradise exists among us, it has been created since 1853, when Clark Mills, “never having seen General Jackson or an equestrian statue,” at last succeeded, after heart-breaking difficulties, in casting in bronze the first equestrian statue ever made here. With what passionate dithyrambs Benvenuto Cellini would have told the world of such a feat, had it been his! How breathlessly he would have described the breaking of cranes and the bursting of furnaces and the six tragic failures in the body of the horse before the old cannon captured by Andrew Jackson were finally translated into the supposed immortality of the equestrian group in bronze! General Jackson and his horse are still balancing themselves at leisure in front of the White House; it is perhaps needless to report their aspect as a thing more strange than beautiful. No one thinks this work a triumph of art, but every serious student knows it as a much needed initial victory over the hard conditions of bronze casting. You may call the group bizarre and unsophisticated in effect, as well as wholly mechanistic by first intention; but you cannot take from it the honor of being first in our long procession of equestrian statues, some of them forms of the very highest distinction. And you will not fail to observe the amazing improvement in style that has somehow taken place by the time our second equestrian appears; Brown’s Washington, though coming but three years after the Mills Jackson, remains among our fine examples in sculpture. Not so number three, the Mills Washington, belated and inadequate response to the Congressional resolve in 1783; least said, soonest mended. Better fortune came with number four, the Ball Washington, long the pride of Boston.