The spirit of American sculpture

by Adeline Adams

STATUE OF WASHINGTON

BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WARD

A comparison between the Ward Washington and the Houdon Washington is permitted here; Houdon’s position as a commanding figure among the sculptors of all time is too securely based on his incomparable busts and on his Voltaire at the Comédie-Française to be in the least disturbed by any of our observations. Remembering that Ward’s task was naturally less difficult than Houdon’s, we shall do no injustice to our earliest foreign master in sculpture when we remark that Ward’s Washington, rather than Houdon’s, bears away the palm for the larger monumental qualities of design. The great Frenchman’s work is cumbered from the waist down with naturalistic emblems from field and forum. Neither ploughshare nor fasces nor cane nor sword nor cloak are omitted. Their insistence is of course redeemed in general by Houdon’s general mastery, and in particular by his particular prowess in rendering the head; it is Houdon’s glory that in some inexplicable way his hand makes every face it touches come alive. Ward’s statue, appearing almost a century later, owes something to Houdon; every portrait statue of Washington, if worth much, will owe something to Houdon. But what we would especially note is, that in this virile presentment of Washington, Ward has chosen the better part of both realism and classicism; The work has something of the serenity of synthesis and elimination of detail that we love in the Parthenon masterpieces, yet it has enough of modern individualism and modern insistence upon expression and emotion to satisfy the longings of the everyday American spectator.

Our reference to the super-symbolism in Houdon’s Washington (a flaw partly explained, it may be, by the inexorable demands of our forefathers as well as of practical marble-cutting) leads us to the observation that to-day, taken by and large, French monumental art suffers enormously from emblematic excrescences. What scales of justice and of mermaids, what pinions of angels and eagles and doves, what garlands and garters and gaiters, what palettes and portfolios, what seines and scrolls and T-squares have been gathered together in the French marketplaces as candidates for immortality! And what complication of silhouette, what lack of massing in light and shade, have resulted thereby! This paradox of the over-explained wrongs the clear French mind, the intuitive French eye. How is it in our own country? But I studiously avoid breathing any word here of any lesson for our own sculptors. It is enough to point out that a healthy, if high-strung, revolt against all this easy offhand grab-bag naturalistic symbolism will not only bring in its train the sculpture of serious protest; it will also pick up on its fringes plenty of those tongue-in-cheek specimens of so-called sculpture familiar in our century. From Rodin’s candle-lit and blanketed Balzac of the previous generation down to the latest Greenwich Village absurdity, in which human portraiture once more achieves its apotheosis on the surface of an egg, such revolt is visible. It is of course a revolt against many things besides an overdone symbolism; but the symbolism may well serve as a symbol for the rest. All honor then to the austerity of Ward’s Washington.

As Ward in his youth worked for an older man, so he himself in his later years had the good fortune to meet the newer ideals in his art through collaboration with younger sculptors. Mr. Bartlett’s sympathetic assistance is apparent in the Stock Exchange pediment, and in the equestrian statue of General Hancock, for Fairmount Park. This last was the work that engaged Ward’s thought to the very day of his death. But nowhere shall we study Ward better than in the statue of Washington. Here we see this sculptor as he himself would wish to be seen; a sculptor of mankind at its most heroic, for mankind at its daily average. “Our work,” he often said, “must touch the ordinary human heart.” His rugged, straightforward genius was not suited for revealing the more exquisite aspects of beauty, the more whimsical secrets of the soul. Never fear; later sculptors, both men and women, will fully attend to those things. In the words of Ward’s historic observation to the Farragut statue committee, “Give the younger man the chance!”

V
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Born eighteen years after Ward, and dying while Ward still had three years of strenuous work before him, Augustus Saint-Gaudens lives in our annals as the most illustrious figure in American art. Both the Old World and the New see it so.

Brought to this country at the age of six months, the Dublin-born child of a French father and an Irish mother, he soon became more American than the Americans themselves. We see him first as the typical New York sidewalk boy, learning not much in school, but far more from eager contacts in the city boy’s world of home, parents, streets, policemen, processions; the atmosphere of the Civil War stirs his young blood, and will long afterward quicken his sculpture of our Civil War heroes. At fourteen he is by day a cameo-cutter’s apprentice, by night a rapt student of drawing at Cooper Institute. At nineteen, with a hundred dollars and his father’s blessing, he sails abroad for his first three years of foreign study and travel; in Paris and Rome he learns and earns; he has a stout heart, a lean purse, and an undying passion for his art. His return to New York with a few small commissions picked up, as the custom then was, from American travellers sojourning in Rome; his second stay abroad; his early struggles to obtain a footing; his marriage and subsequent three years in Paris while creating the Farragut; his ardent friendship with Stanford White, John La Farge, and other strong personalities of the day;—surely all this seems quite the usual story. But Saint-Gaudens had always his own innermost unusualness that somehow placed him above his fellows; and the victorious completion of the Farragut in 1881 was but the first of a long line of signal triumphs. And even his almost forgotten triumphs (for example, the great improvement in our coinage initiated by his endeavor) are signal triumphs. There was no branch of his art in which he did not excel; it was an art designed in general for the flowingness of bronze rather than for reproduction within the confines of the marble block.