American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Thomas Ball's father was a house and sign painter of Boston, with some artistic skill, which he passed on to his son. That was the boy's only inheritance, and when his father died, he undertook the support of the family, first as a boy-of-all-work in the New England Museum, and then as a cameo-cutter. From that he graduated naturally to engraving, miniature painting, and finally to portraiture.

His first attempt at modelling resulted in a bust of Jenny Lind, done entirely from photographs, which had a wide vogue, for the Swedish Nightingale was then at the height of her popularity. Other more ambitious work followed, and finally, at the age of thirty-five, he was able to realize his ambition to study in the studios of Florence. But he found the Italian environment less inspiring than he had hoped, and two years later he was back in Boston, working on an equestrian statue of Washington—the first equestrian group in New England and the fourth in the United States. He built his plaster model with his own hands, and was three years getting it ready. The result was a work which ranks among the first equestrian statues of the country. Other works of importance followed, among them the well-known emancipation group showing Lincoln blessing a kneeling slave, which was unveiled at Washington in 1875.

The years touched Ball lightly, and at seventy years of age, he undertook his greatest work, an elaborate Washington monument for the town of Methuan, Massachusetts. The principal figure, a gigantic Washington in bronze, was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and received the highest honors of the exposition—a distinction it richly merited by its nobility of a conception and execution. Thomas Ball, indeed, set a new standard in public statuary, and one which no successor has dared to disregard. The far-reaching effects of his influence and that of Erasmus Palmer can hardly be over-estimated.

One of the most engaging and versatile personalities in the whole range of American art was that of William Wetmore Story. Born at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1819, graduated at Harvard, admitted to the bar, the author of a volume of graceful verse and of a valuable life of his father, Chief Justice Story, he yet, in 1851, put all this work aside, adopted sculpture as a profession, and, proceeding to Rome, opened a studio there.

It was from the first an extraordinary studio, attracting the most brilliant people of Rome in literature as well as art; and if Story did not quite practise the perfection he was somewhat fond of preaching, it was because of his very versatility, which absorbed his talent in so many directions that it could not be concentrated in any. His imagination outran his achievement, and the most famous of his works, his statue of Cleopatra, owes its reputation not so much to its own merit, which is far from overwhelming, as to the ecstatic description of it which Nathaniel Hawthorne included in "The Marble Faun." A master of literature is not necessarily an inspired critic of art, and it is to be suspected that Hawthorne permitted some of the fire of his imagination to play about the cold and uninspired marble.

"Cleopatra" marked Story's culmination. He fell away from it year by year, producing a long line of figures whose only impressive features were the names he gave them—"The Libyan Sibyl," "Semiramis," "Salome," "Medea," and so on. However, he did much to increase the popularity of sculpture, for the stories he attempted to tell in stone by means of heavy-browed, frowning women in classic costume and with classic names, were exactly suited to the child-like intelligence of his public. He gave art, too—as William Penn gave the Quakers—a sort of social sanction because of his own social position. If the son of Chief Justice Story could turn sculptor, surely that profession was not so irregular, after all!

Another sculptor who shared with Story the admiration of the public was Randolph Rogers, born at Waterloo, New York, in 1825. Until the age of twenty-three such modelling as he did was done in the spare moments of a business life; but when he gave an exhibition of the results of this labor, his employers were so impressed that they provided the money needed to send him to Italy, where he was to spend the remainder of his life, with the exception of five years' residence in New York. Two of his earlier figures are his most famous, his "Nydia" and his "Lost Pleiad." Scores of replicas in marble of these two figures were made during their author's life time, and they still retain for many people a simple and pathetic charm. Nearly every one, of course, has made the acquaintance of Nydia, the blind girl, in Bulwer-Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii," and so gaze at Rogers's fleeing figure with eyes too sympathetic to see its faults.

Far more important is the work of William H. Rinehart, of the same age as Rogers, and resembling him somewhat in development. Born on a Maryland farm, his early years were those of the average farmer's boy, but at last some blind instinct led him to abandon farming for stonecutting, and he became assistant to a mason and stonecutter of the neighborhood. As soon as he had learned his trade, at the age of twenty-one, he went to Baltimore, where there was work in plenty, and where he could, at the same time, attend the night schools of the Maryland Institute. This sounds much easier than it really was. To devote the evenings to study, after ten and often twelve hours of the hardest of all manual labor, required grit and moral courage such as few possess.

He was soon trying his hand at modelling, and convinced, at last, that sculpture was his vocation, he managed, by the time he was thirty, to save enough money for a short period of study at Rome. Three years of work at Baltimore, after that, gave him some reputation, and he then returned to Rome, to spend the remainder of his life there.

If you have ever visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you have seen, in the hall of statuary, one of Rinehart's most characteristic groups, "Latona and Her Children." The mother half seated, half lying upon the ground, gazes tenderly down at the two sleeping children, sheltered in the folds of her mantle. The whole work possesses a serene poetic charm and dignity very noteworthy; and this and other groups are among the most beautiful that any American ever turned out of an Italian studio.