Saint Gaudens's death in 1907 deprived American art of one of its most commanding figures, but there are other American sculptors alive to-day whose work is noteworthy in a high degree. One of these is Daniel Chester French. Born of a substantial New England family, and showing no especial artistic talent in youth, one day, in his nineteenth year, he surprised his family by showing them the grotesque figure of a frog in clothes which he had carved from a turnip. Modelling tools were secured for him, and he went to work. The schooling which prepared him for his remarkable career was of the slightest. He studied for a month with J. Q. A. Ward, and for the rest, worked out his own salvation as best he could.
His first important commission came to him at the age of twenty-three—the figure of the "Minute Man" for the battle monument at Concord, Massachusetts. It was unveiled on April 19, 1875, and attracted wide attention. For here was a work of strength and originality produced by a young man without schooling or experience—produced, too, without a model, or, at least, from nothing but a large cast of the "Apollo Belvidere," which was the only model the sculptor had. But there was no hint of that famous figure under the clothes of the "Minute Man." It had been entirely concealed by the personality and vigor he had impressed upon his work.
After that Mr. French spent a year in Florence, but he returned to America at the end of that period to remain. He has grown steadily in power and certainty of touch, rising perhaps to his greatest height in his famous group, "The Angel of Death and the Young Sculptor," intended as a memorial to Martin Milmore, but touching the universal heart by its deep appeal, conveyed with a sure and admirable artistry. Mr. French's great distinction is to have created good sculpture which has touched the public heart, and to have done this with no concession to public taste.
Another sculptor who has gained a wide appreciation is Frederick MacMonnies, who for sheer audacity and dexterity of manipulation is almost without a rival. He was born in Brooklyn in 1863, his father a Scotchman who had come to New York at the age of eighteen, and his mother a niece of Benjamin West. The boy's talent revealed itself early, and was developed in the face of many difficulties. Obliged to leave school while still a child and to earn his living as a clerk in a jewelry store, he still found time to study drawing, and at the age of sixteen had the good fortune to attract the attention of Saint Gaudens, who received him as an apprentice in his studio.
No better fate could have befallen the lad, and the five years spent with Saint Gaudens gave him the best of all training in the fundamentals of his art. Some years in Paris followed, where he replenished his slender purse with such work as he could find to do, until, in 1889, his "Diana" emerged from his studio, radiant and superb. A year later came his statue of "Nathan Hale," and there was never any lack of commissions after that. "Nathan Hale" stands in City Hall Park, New York City, the very embodiment of that devoted young patriot. The artist has shown him at the supreme moment when, facing the scaffold, he uttered the memorable words which still thrill the American heart, and expression and sentiment were never more perfectly in accord. He struck the same high note with his famous fountain at Chicago Exposition, where hundreds of thousands of people suddenly discovered in this young man a national possession to be proud of.
A year later his name was again in every mouth, when the Boston Public Library refused a place to perhaps his greatest work, the dancing "Bacchante," which has since found refuge in the Metropolitan Museum at New York—a composition so original and daring that it astonishes while it delights.
Like MacMonnies, George Gray Barnard began life as a jeweller's apprentice, became an expert engraver and letterer, and finally, urged by a ceaseless longing, deserted that lucrative profession for the extremely uncertain one of sculpture. A year and a half of study in Chicago brought him an order for a portrait bust of a little girl, and with the $350 he received for this, he set off for Paris. That meagre sum supported him for three years and a half—with what privation and self-denial may be imagined; but he never complained. He lived, indeed, the life of a recluse, shutting himself up in his studio with his work, emerging only at night to walk the streets of Paris, lost in dreams of ambition. That from this period of ordeal came some of the deep emotion which marks his work cannot be doubted.
This quality, which sets Barnard apart, is well illustrated in his famous group, "The Two Natures," suggested by a line of Victor Hugo, "I feel two natures struggling within me." Two male figures are shown, heroic in size and powerfully modelled, a victor half erect bending over a prostrate foe.
Besides these men, who are, in a way, the giants of the American sculptors of to-day, there are, especially in New York, many others whose work is graceful and distinctive. Paul Wayland Bartlett, Herbert Adams, Charles Niehaus, John J. Boyle, Frank Elwell, Frederick Ruckstuhl, to mention only a few of them, are all men of originality and power, whose work is a pleasure and an inspiration, and to whose hands the future of American sculpture may safely be confided.