American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

A fellow student with Ward in Henry Kirke Brown's studio was Larkin G. Meade, the first indication of whose talent was a unique one. One winter morning, about the middle of the century, the good people of Brattleboro, Vermont, were astonished to find set up in one of the public squares of the town a colossal snow image, in the form of a majestic angel—crude, no doubt, in execution, but singularly effective. Inquiry developed that it was the work of young Meade, then only fifteen years of age. The incident got into the newspapers, magnified considerably, and attracted the attention of old Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, who, on more than one occasion, had himself appeared as angel to struggling artists.

It was so in this case. Mr. Longworth wrote to Brattleboro, making some inquiries as to the essential truth of the story, and having satisfied himself on that point, offered to help the boy to get an artistic education. The offer was accepted, and young Meade was placed in Brown's studio, going afterwards to Italy. While there, he heard of the assassination of President Lincoln, and prepared an elaborate design in plaster for a national monument to the martyred President's memory. As soon as this was completed, he started for home with it, arriving at precisely the right moment. The rage for monument building was sweeping up and down the land. Councils, legislatures, all sorts of public and private bodies, were making appropriations to commemorate some particular hero of the Civil War, which was just ended; Meade's design appealed to the popular imagination, and the commission was awarded him.

The monument, which was destined to cost a quarter of a million dollars, was by far the most important that had ever been erected in this country, and the inexperienced young sculptor sailed back to Italy to begin work. Not until 1874 was it sufficiently completed to dedicate, and the last group of statuary was not put in place until ten years later. All this time, the sculptor had spent quietly in his studio at Florence, quite apart from the world of progress or of new ideas in art, and long before his work was finished, public taste had outgrown it and found it uninspired and commonplace.

Much more important to American art is the work of Olin Levi Warner, the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher, whose wanderings prevented the boy getting any regular schooling. During his childhood, he had shown considerable talent for carving statuettes in chalk, and he finally decided to immortalize his father by carving a portrait bust of him. For a stone, he "set" a barrel of plaster in one solid mass and then, breaking off the staves, began hacking away at it with such poor implements as he could command. It was a well-nigh endless task, but "it's dogged that does it," and the boy worked doggedly away until the bust was completed. It was considered such a success that young Warner, convinced of his vocation, set to work to earn enough money to go abroad. For six years he worked as a telegrapher, and it was not until 1869, when he was twenty-five years old, that he had saved the money needed.

Three years later he returned to New York, and opened a studio, but met with a reception so dismal and indifferent that, after a four years' desperate struggle, he was forced to abandon the fight and return to his father's farm. Anxious for any employment, he applied to Henry Plant, President of the Southern Express Company, for work. Mr. Plant was interested, and instead of offering him a job as messenger or teamster, gave him a commission for two portrait busts.

It was the turning point in Warner's career, for the busts he produced were of a craftsmanship so delicate and beautiful that they at once established his position among his fellow-sculptors, though years elapsed before he received any wide public recognition. The truth is that he was too great and sincere an artist to cater to a public taste which he had himself outgrown; so that, until quite recently, he has remained a sculptor's sculptor. His untimely death, in 1896, from the effects of a fall while riding in Central Park, brought forth a notable tribute from his fellow-craftsmen, and students of sculpture have come to recognize in him one of the most delicate and truly inspired artists in our history.

But the most powerful influence in the recent development of American sculpture has been that great artist, Augustus Saint Gaudens. Born in 1848, at Dublin, Ireland, of a French father and an Irish mother, he was brought to this country while still an infant. Perhaps this mixed ancestry explains to some degree Saint Gaudens's peculiar genius. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter in New York City, and worked for six years at this employment, which demands the utmost keenness of vision, delicacy of touch, and refinement of manner. His evenings he spent in studying drawing, first at Cooper Union and then, outgrowing that, at the National Academy of Design. So it happened that, at the age of twenty, when most men were just beginning their special studies, Saint Gaudens was thoroughly grounded in drawing and an expert in low relief.

Another thing he had learned; and let us pause here to lay stress upon it, for it is the thing which must be learned before any great life-work can be done. He had learned the value of systematic industry, of putting in so many hours every day at faithful work. The weak artist, whether in stone or paint or ink, always contends that he must wait for inspiration, and so excuses long periods of unproductive idleness, during which he grows weaker and weaker for lack of exercise. The great artist compels inspiration by whipping himself to his work and setting grimly about it, knowing that the "inspiration," so-called, will come. For inspiration is only seeing a thing clearly, and the one way to see it clearly is to keep the eyes and mind fixed upon it.

At the age of twenty, then, Saint Gaudens was not only a trained artist, but an industrious one. Three years in the inspiring atmosphere of Paris, and three years in Italy, followed; and finally, in 1874, he landed again at New York with such an equipment as few sculptors ever had. And seven years later he proved his mastery when his statue of Admiral Farragut was unveiled in Union Square, New York. That superb work of art made its author a national figure, and Saint Gaudens took definitely that place at the head of American sculpture which was his until his death.

Six years later Saint Gaudens's "Lincoln" was unveiled in Lincoln Park, Chicago, and was at once recognized as the greatest portrait statue in the United States. It has remained so—a masterpiece of exalted conception and dignified execution. Other statues followed, each memorable in its way; but Saint Gaudens proved himself not only the greatest but the most versatile of our sculptors by his work in other fields—by portraits in high and low relief, by ideal figures, and notably by the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, a work distinctively American and without a counterpart in the annals of art. It is the spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a lofty pinnacle—the largeness of the man behind it, the artist mind and the poet heart.