With the exception of Rodin’s Balzac of fifty years later, no statue of the nineteenth century has ever been so famous as the Greek Slave. It is one of the paradoxes of art that this strangely ill-assorted pair go down the corridors of that great age together, united solely by the bond of greatest fame. It is worth while to examine the two, placed side by side in the museum of our minds. Both are so well known through prints and photographs that many persons who have never really seen either one face to face, now fancy that they have studied both at close range. Both are sculptural anecdotes; one is told with a leisurely abundance of detail, the other with a swift dash for the climax. The Vermonter’s statue is surely meant to be a conscientious rendering “from the Nudo,” as our grandparents phrased it, but the Frenchman, in his passion to translate into sculpture a force of literature, has gone far beyond what was to him a daily commonplace, the study of flesh. As for the mere apparel of the subject, one man has scheduled it to the last stitch, while the other has piled it up vehemently into a shapeless monolith from which emerges the triumphant head. Each sculptor doubtless threw his whole soul into revealing the spirit of the matter in hand. Which of the two has succeeded? If the parallel becomes deadly here, Mr. Powers has brought it on himself by his extraordinary fame in three countries. Everything conspired for the celebrity of the Slave,—her creation in Italy, her fortunate début in England, her travels to America, and, best of all, that body of clergymen deputed to pass upon her moral status. One can but wonder whether every last one of these took the matter seriously, or whether some one of them winked at some other during the deliberations. The sculptor made a modest number of copies of his masterpiece. But other sculptors reproduced their marble visions by the baker’s dozen, by the score. In fact, only yesterday a venerable eye-witness of those times reported that a certain American sculptor disposed of no less than two hundred marble copies of a life-sized ideal figure. Appalling iteration! One asks where all the marble came from, and whither it all went. And that sculptor apparently had no idea that in this business of the two hundred copies he was showing himself two hundred times as much salesman as artist. Fashions alter, in ethics as in art. To-day, such a practitioner would hardly be persona grata in the National Sculpture Society.
IV
Meanwhile a young modern sculptor at my elbow very civilly inquires, “But why the devil didn’t those old boys do their home stuff?” The obvious answer would be, that if the home is where the heart is, then in a very real sense they did do their home stuff. They were not at home among the Vermont mountains, or by the Great Lakes. They felt that their birthright in art called them away from their first birthplace to their second. Very soon, too, the all-absorbing topic of slavery will be presented by our sculptors, in a different way and under a more timely aspect. Long before Thomas Ball places his Emancipation groups in Washington and in Boston, Ward has produced his Freedman, and John Rogers the Slave Auction that in 1860 heralds his long series of popular groups. Choosing subjects both classic and realistic, Miss Hosmer, Miss Ream and other women sculptors have a considerable vogue. From that earlier period remain beautiful classic works by Rinehart, founder of the Rinehart scholarship which much later send abroad Hermon MacNeil, one of the most distinguished of our modern sculptors, and now President of our National Sculpture Society. Rinehart’s Clytie, coming but a few years after the Greek Slave, shows a marked advance over her more famous sister. And Erastus Palmer’s winning White Captive, although not new in theme, has a great freshness, a delicate realism of treatment. To quote from my article on the exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, “No less interesting to the student of sculpture is the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of Palmer and Manship, two artists of two different generations. Only the width of a room parts the White Captive from the Girl with Gazelles, from which we note that in aim these men are not so different as we once had dreamed.... As to manner, much might be said besides these two obvious truths; first, that the newest manner is often the oldest, or at least the longest forgotten at the time of its resuscitation, it being a thing which for some obscure human reason or other ‘men want dug up again’; and next, that the best manner is that which scarcely shows as a manner at all, but is taken for granted as accompaniment of something more important, the matter and the spirit.” It would appear that the young men of to-day are doing much the same thing as “those old boys” my sculptor friend speaks of: they are seeking modern inspiration from ancient models, but they are doing it with more knowledge, more grace, more humor, more assurance, more style. Style? Perhaps the right word is stylization.
CLYTIE
BY WILLIAM H. RINEHART
WHITE CAPTIVE
BY ERASTUS D. PALMER