Sargent, John Singer. Born at Florence, Italy, 1856; studied under Carolus Duran; has made England his home; Royal Academician, 1891; National Academician, 1897.
CHAPTER V
SCULPTORS
If background and tradition are needed for painting, how much more are they needed for sculpture! America was settled by a people entirely without sculptural tradition, for, in the early seventeenth century, British sculpture did not exist. More than that, to most of the settlers, art, in whatever form, was an invention of the devil, to be avoided and discouraged. So it is not surprising that two centuries elapsed before the first American statue made its shy and awkward appearance.
In considering the achievements of American sculpture, we must remember that it is still an infant. That it is a lusty infant none will deny, though some may find it lacking in that grace and charm which come only with maturity.
The first man born in America who was foolhardy enough deliberately to choose sculpture as a profession was Horatio Greenough, born in 1805, of well-to-do parents, and carefully educated. It is difficult to say just what it was that turned the boy to this difficult and exacting art—an unknown art, too, so far as America was concerned. But he seems to have begun woodcarving at an early age, and to have progressed from that to chalk and on to plaster of Paris. The American national habit of whittling was perhaps responsible for the development of more than one sculptor.
At any rate, by the time he was twelve years old, Horatio Greenough had produced some portrait busts in chalk, and, after having tried unsuccessfully to learn clay-modelling from directions in an old encyclopedia, took some lessons from an artist who chanced to be in Boston, and from a maker of tombstones, got a little insight into the method of carving marble.
These lessons, elementary as they must have been, were very valuable to the boy, and his work showed such promise that his father finally consented to his adopting this strange profession, insisting only that he first graduate from Harvard, on the ground that a college education would be of value, whatever his vocation. So he entered college at the age of sixteen, devoting all his spare time to reading works of art, to drawing and modelling, and the study of anatomy. He had also the good fortune to meet and win the friendship of Washington Allston, who advised him as to plans of study.
Immediately upon graduation, he sailed for Italy, which was, sadly enough, to be the Mecca of American sculptors for many years to come. For Italian sculpture was bound hand and foot by the traditions of classicism, to which our early sculptors soon fell captive. Greenough was no exception, and some years of study in the Italian studios rivetted the chains.