In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West’s legendary adventure with his cat’s-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his baby sister’s likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art’s helper. Referring to more important matters, we do not forget William Rush’s full-length statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait, carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey, in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as historic data.
Interesting and emphatic as are the personalities of all these early workers, that of William Rush is by far the most significant. In literal truth, Patience Wright was merely our first sculptress, whose work must bear the implications of frailty lent by that name. But William Rush was our first sculptor. In his youth he was a soldier of the Revolution, and in later life he was long a member of the Council of Philadelphia; his career as artist and as citizen won respect for the early art life of our country. Born in Philadelphia in 1756, he was twenty-nine when Houdon sojourned in that town. Having been apprenticed when very young, Rush was already well-known as a carver of ships’ figure-heads, work in which he continued to be successful throughout his long and busy life. His theory and practice in wood-carving conformed to Michelangelo’s Gothic creed, somewhat outworn among sculptors, but of late restored to respect. William Rush earnestly believed that the carver should see his vision in the block, and realize its image by hewing away the superfluous shell. He was modern enough at times to stand by while directing a workman to chop here and cut there and slice somewhere else, so that he himself could save his own energy for keeping his vision clear. Of his Spirit of the Schuylkill, originally in wood but since translated into bronze and still standing over its basin in Fairmount Park, the chronicles of its day declared that “no greater piece of art was to be found in all the world.” The present age will hardly consider this draped figure the equal, say, of the Maidens of the Erechtheum. Yet the work, with its companion pieces, the Schuylkill in Chains and the Schuylkill Released, has its own vigorous archaic classicism which modern students may well ponder. Rush was one of the planners and founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After this was finally established in 1805, our first American art organization, he was one of its directors until his death. As a many-sided man of action and of counsel, of intelligence and of culture, he sums up the best to be found in the varied characters of our pioneer artists, personages worthy of our deepest respect.
We shall be too quick despairers if we brood over the fact that most of their works show Yankee ingenuity rather than Promethean fire. The inventive spirit is part of our pioneer heritage; it reappears rather often in our art history. Robert Fulton, as Mr. Isham reminds us in his story of American painting, was a promising pupil in Benjamin West’s London studio. “From there he went to Paris, where he remained seven years, painting easel pictures, and also the first panorama seen there, whose memory is still preserved in the name of the Passage des Panoramas.” Morse is yet another classic example of American genius serving both art and science. One of the later pupils of West, he had not only painted vigorous and important pictures but had also played a striking part in the founding of our National Academy of Design before he finally “wreaked his genius” on his invention of the telegraph. Hiram Powers, sculptor of the Greek Slave, in youth acquired merit from the clock-work devices by which he enhanced the moving charms of the wax figures he modeled for a museum in Cincinnati. Today, in our journalistic canvassings of popular opinion as to contemporary American greatness, we find that in the public mind, Edison’s name leads all the rest. The prickly palm of greatness is awarded not to a teacher, to a publicist, to a writer, to a political leader, or to an artist in any guise whatever, but to an inventor. Inventive genius thus claims our highest admiration; inventive genius may indeed be our highest national characteristic. If so, it is worth while (and not in the least “devastating”) to consider whether the same inventiveness that animates the early art-forms of William Rush’s followers does not also contribute something to the very sophisticated creations of our gifted and fortunately well-trained young sculptors with the dernier cri from Crete in their minds and at their finger-tips.
The story of American sculpture cannot be told under a parable of a chain with equally strong links throughout. One thinks rather of a slender thread, which may be fastened to a cord, which will draw up a strong rope, which will in turn attach itself to a powerful cable. If early Yankee ingenuity is that slender thread, let us thank God for it, and hope for better things.
V
With the dawn of our national consciousness just after the dark hours of the Revolution, a natural human love for the likeness, strengthened by a generous surrender to hero-worship, is already arousing in us a longing for an art that will express our patriotic emotions. If achievement alone be considered, there is surely a great gulf fixed between Patience Wright and Jean Antoine Houdon. But the same sincere passion fires Quakeress and citoyen; their common aim is a strong representation of real life, transfigured by the flame of the spirit burning in the lamp of clay. It is recorded that an overpowering sense of Washington’s greatness sometimes actually impeded those artists who aspired to reveal him, body and soul, to posterity. Posterity then is fortunate because our fathers received from Houdon’s genius not only the Washington statue, but also seven noble portrait busts, those of Franklin, Paul Jones, Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, Fulton, and Joel Barlow, to mention them in the order of their creation, from 1778 to 1803. These virile interpretations of character were not lost in the ins and outs of our Atlantic coast-line. Even to this day, some one or other of them often reappears in public view, to excite interest, admiration, and controversy. But in the early nineteenth century, as is shown by Jefferson’s counsel to the North Carolina legislature, Conova, rather than Houdon, has become the name to conjure with. Even in portraiture, realism has given way to pseudo-classicism, long before Greenough arrives on the stage with his Washington as the Olympian Zeus, a colossal half-draped marble figure designed for a shrine within the Capitol.
BUST OF WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON
BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON