I
What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor, Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,—Quaker, wax-image-maker, traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and the movements of British troops! Had his mind’s eye but once seen her in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself. Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters, had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole’s concerning the “artistess,” he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as “inexplicable, grand, preposterous” as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible eye-witness and letter-writer.
Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the “hearty buss” with which the sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that “there was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room, and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life, I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was finally told that it was only wax.” And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs. Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist and patriot, notes that “the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped originality on all her acts and language.” He tells us that the British king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.
The intrepid if somewhat incongruous figure of this Quaker artist abroad will serve very well as herald or prologue to the drama of American sculpture. Nor can I think that either Mr. Greenough or Mr. Powers, Mr. Ward or Mr. Saint-Gaudens, Mr. French or the very youngest sculptor newly laureled by our American Academy in Rome would object to that assignment of rôle. Surely in any play, it is allowed that the herald may seem somewhat more fantastic and legendary than the kings and counselors that come after. Mrs. Wright and her wax-works are important to us, but not because anyone now accounts her the “Promethean modeller” her enthusiastic contemporaries charged her with being. She is important because her vogue reveals the artless taste of her time, its awe in the presence of perfect imitations of nature. Not that such awe is unknown to-day in the world of art. Indeed, our herald brings vigorously upon the scene one of the major problems that still perplex the American sculptor in his work. I mean the problem of likenesses, those “strong representations of real life,” as Abigail Adams would say.
II
A strong representation of real life was exactly what Thomas Jefferson wanted for the State Capitol of Virginia when he induced the great French sculptor Houdon to “leave the statues of Kings unfinished,” and to cross the Atlantic to take casts, measurements, and artistic cognizance of the person of George Washington, in order to create that marble portrait statue still holding its own in the good top light of the Rotunda at Richmond. To cross the Atlantic, what an adventure for a home-keeping Frenchman in the eighteenth century! Yet in the year 1785, there must have been uneasiness at home as well as abroad for Monsieur Houdon, so soon to become le citoyen Houdon. In the midst of our early Republican simplicities, there had been talk of an equestrian statue also. Justified in the hope of obtaining the commission equestrian as well as the commission pedestrian, Houdon accordingly spends a fortnight at Mount Vernon, taking casts, and “forming the General’s bust in plaister.” Later, however, the project of the equestrian statue is dropped, to Houdon’s natural regret.
STATUE OF WASHINGTON
BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON
“We shall regulate the article of expense as œconomically as we can with justice to the wishes of the world,” writes Jefferson to Governor Harrison, concerning the standing statue. “We are agreed in one circumstance, that the size shall be precisely that of life.” Jefferson gives patriotic reasons for that decision as to size; he adds with excellent artistic judgment, “We are sensible that the eye alone considered will not be quite as well satisfied.” A generation later, writing from Monticello in regard to the statue of Washington that the legislature of North Carolina desires to order, he declares that this work should be somewhat larger than life. A strict realism no longer delights him. With true Jeffersonian divination of popular currents, he leans now toward the pseudo-classic ideal already dominant in European studios. As to the costume chosen, he finds that “every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman.... Our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect.” In short, “Old Canova of Rome” is the artist North Carolina should employ. It is pleasant to note that just as Houdon, having “solemnly and feelingly protested against the inadequacy of the price, evidently undertook the work from motives of reputation alone,” so too Canova is “animated with ardent zeal to prove himself worthy of so great a subject.” Thus happily are begun those steadfastly continued artistic relations between the United States and the two European countries in which art prospers as the light and livelihood of the people.