STATUE OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
Too often versatility connotes a superficiality of mind, an easily satisfied outlook. Not so with Saint-Gaudens. He was if anything over-critical of his work; for instance, he never forgot that the snare of the picturesque was in his path, as it is in the path of every sculptor trying to infuse a genial human warmth into the sculptural order. His knowledge in the lesser art of cameo-cutting, a knowledge which in some sculptors would have been swept aside as detrimental to a spacious style, helped rather than hindered him in his advance toward his ultimate mastery over relief of all kinds,—the coin, the intimate portrait medallion, the heroic monumental relief. He may be truly said to have invented that charming form of bas-relief likeness shown in the portraits of the Schiff children, the Butler children, Bastien-Lepage, Violet Sargent, and many others. Nothing quite like these works had ever before been produced, either in the French medalists’ fertile art of the nineteenth century or in that still richer period of the Italian Renaissance medal, heralded by Pisano. And yet, since little in the field of art is utterly original, we are reminded here of that old saying about the power of the man meeting the power of the moment. In beautiful angel-figures such as the Amor-Caritas in high relief, Saint-Gaudens realized and expressed the spiritual meanings of other artists of his time, both sculptors and painters; this we see when we study French’s noble Angel of Death, and the Burne-Jones figures on their golden stair.
Critics are divided, not as to the greatness of Saint-Gaudens, but as to the work which best stores up within itself the true elements of his greatness. Those who have seen tears start from the eyelids of gray veterans standing before the Shaw Memorial will perhaps say the Shaw, while those who perceive with delight all that the sculptor has attained in the Sherman equestrian group, with its thrilling harmony of spiritual and realistic presentation, will perhaps say the Sherman. Londoners and Chicagoans will rest content in their great possession of the standing Lincoln. Others again will find their truest vision of this artist’s power in the enfolded mystery of the Rock Creek figure, sometimes called Nirvana, but better named the Peace of God. And if (as I think) this is indeed his consummate, his culminating work, how strange that it is, in a sense, a somewhat unexpected, uncharacteristic work! In its profound other-worldliness, it seems as withdrawn from the Sherman and the Puritan and the Farragut as from those happy portrait-reliefs of living beings in their loveliness or strength. How often artists have mused on the beauty of the head of this figure! Every trace of artistic knowingness is eliminated here; nothing so vain and petty as any suggestion of accomplished technique intrudes. The beholder’s attention is directed solely toward whatever inner meaning he finds in those shadowed lineaments.
Saint-Gaudens had the power of attracting to his service young men and women of true artistic ability. MacMonnies, Flanagan, Fraser, Weinman, Martiny, Proctor, Hering, Miss Grimes, Miss Ward,—all of these have won distinction in their own personal work in sculpture; some among them are now past masters. But a higher power than that of winning the enthusiastic loyalty of youth belonged to Saint-Gaudens. He had also the gift of drawing from each worker something finer and more precious than anything that this worker had ever before possessed. He compelled his assistants to build better than they knew. It is part of this sculptor’s glory that no one can ever mistake the subsequent work of his “arrived” pupils, even the most famous of these, for the work of Saint-Gaudens. In anonymous service to him, they best perfected themselves as individual artists.
How I wish I might make myself clear when touching this vexed subject of apprenticeship! The romantic part of the world dwelling far from the realities of studio life loves to picture a pathetic situation of gifted youth silently wasting its genius in saving the day for the commonplace performances of a middle-aged employer. But this poetic view squares with cinema ideals rather than with the facts. At a recent exhibition of weird works by the immature young sculptor X, (such shows at times add to the gayety of New York) I heard an ardent lady worshipper of something she called “the new spirit of expressionism,” denounce the greed and vanity of the middle-aged sculptor Y, basely employing the bright unrecognized wings of X, to give fire and movement to the pedestrian Y inventions. Ah, if that lady only knew the truth about X and Y! But it was closing-time, and I made no attempt to tell her the truth; it would have seemed rather gray and commonplace compared with her own glamorous moving-picturization of studio life. All her thought was of heroism and oppression, not of work and wages. Yet I might at least have given her this one helpful fact; that almost without exception, the successful sculptors of to-day look back with gratitude toward the multitudinous activities of their young apprenticeships; sometimes they even feel a secret amazement that their former masters should have put up with them so long.
VI
DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH
Last summer, revisiting Concord after many years, I crossed “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” and found Mr. French’s Minute Man, embattled still, though embowered in quietness, and made safe from the ruder motor traffic of the day. It seemed incredible that a youth of twenty-three, with no models except the Apollo Belvidere and himself, and with no instruction beyond that derived from a month in Ward’s studio and from Dr. Rimmer’s anatomy lectures, could have produced a statue so competent and so sculptural as this. Then I remembered that in 1919 the most proudly acclaimed work of American art for the year was Mr. French’s marble figure of Memory; and it was interesting to note that the Minute Man, however immediately convincing in general appeal, appeared in a sense as the work of an artist older than the sculptor of the Memory. For the Minute Man has here and there a lean gravity of modeling that we rightly or wrongly associate with passing maturity, while the forms of the Memory are rich and commanding, yet enveloped with that serenity for which we have no better word than classic. And what is the true meaning of classic, except as it describes that which is fresh and vivid to-day, yet has the underlying force of permanence, the very tide of immortality flowing in its veins? Many of our artists acquire the classic spirit, many have it thrust upon them, some reject it utterly. But Mr. French is the classic spirit personified among us; born so, not made so; and what he creates is illumined by his understanding of the dignity of the human soul, and by his belief that beauty and truth are acceptable to the human mind. This gracious seated figure of Memory, gazing calmly into the glass that reflects, not her own person but the shapes of the past, is admirably composed from every point of view and within the natural limits of the marble. A critic has written of it as “showing at its best Mr. French’s idealism, and being at the same time a masterly study of the nude, true to the nobler forms of nature, yet with a skillful avoidance of what is commonly known as realism.” That phrase “true to the nobler forms of nature” well describes this sculptor’s great ideal figures. Mr. French is to-day the dean of American sculpture, the honorary President of the National Sculpture Society; a presence with all the gracious authority conferred by deanship, and with nothing whatever of the dry ancientry at times associated with that honor.
There is something of the unexpected in the course of every great artist. With Ward it is one thing, with Saint-Gaudens another. With Daniel Chester French, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850, the unexpected thing is that in his art education he seems somehow to have skipped the slow Preamble and the voluminous Whereas, and to have reached almost at a bound the precincts of the Resolved. Concord has never lacked favorite sons, and young Daniel among the lions of that town of his later boyhood felt only their appreciation and encouragement. But with one year in Florence, spent largely under the genial influence of Thomas Ball, sculptor of the first equestrian monument placed in New England, his so-called study-period ends. A pediment for the St. Louis Custom House awaits him in 1877; within the next few years he executes similar architectural sculpture for Philadelphia and Boston. In 1879 he models from life his beautiful portrait bust of Emerson.
