As a boy he had been devoted to fashioning with his fingers, and, at the age of nineteen, entered the studio of Henry Kirke Brown. The latter, after practising as a sculptor at Albany, had spent some five years in Europe, chiefly in Italy; but, feeling strongly that an American should occupy himself with American subjects, and to that end should work in his own country, resisted the tendency among sculptors of that day to join the American colony in Rome or Florence. He therefore returned and engaged upon the equestrian statue of Washington, now in Union Square, New York. Ward assisted him in the work and gained thereby a fine experience of what makes for nobility in design. He must have profited also by companionship with a man of such large and generous mind. But his stay in the studio was short, and for the rest he has been the architect of his own career.
A fragment remains of his student work, a study for a high-relief in which an Indian is represented breaking and burning his arrows—an episode of the voyage of Hendrik Hudson. One cannot help noticing the naïveté of the composition, the simple intention of representing the action just as it might have happened; the apparent unconsciousness that any academic considerations were involved. It, no doubt, represents the attitude of his mind at that time, and to a very considerable extent prefigures the lines along which his development was to proceed. Thus a year or two later, while he was working in Washington and executing busts of many leading men of the time, and the whole country began to seethe with passion over the slave question, Ward’s contribution to it is “The Freedman.” It shows simply a Negro, in an entirely natural pose, who has put forth his strength and is looking very quietly at the broken fetters. The whole gist of the matter is thus embodied in a most terse and direct fashion, without rodomontade or sentimentality, but solely as an objective fact into which there is no intrusion of the sculptor’s personal feeling. But of his personal point of view toward his art there is abundant testimony. This figure, which was never reproduced larger than statuette size, but in that form had a wide popularity, proves how keen and true was Ward’s instinct for the sculpturesque qualities of sculpture and for the limit to which it is safe to go in the interpretation of sentiment. The latter is simply enforced by the action of the figure.
In order that he might have opportunities of studying form in the freedom of movement, he visited the western frontier and lived for a while among the Indians. A statue of this period is “The Indian Hunter,” which now stands in bronze in Central Park, New York. Again it is a strikingly vivid realisation of actual facts; of the racial characteristics of both the man and his dog, and of their respective kinds of movement: the man’s, stealthy and powerfully controlled; the dog’s, more keen and alert and needing to be checked. Again, too, one feels, I think, the absence of any preconceived theories of technique, so that the group has something of a primitive, almost barbarous feeling; which, however, seems strangely appropriate to the subject.
Yet it is easy to understand that for a young sculptor, so resolutely facing natural facts and untrained in academic teaching of what is right and what is wrong, a table of doctrines which may easily lead to dry formalism, but which yet holds many directions and warnings of value, there will be shoals ahead. The actual may readily drift into the commonplace; and that some of Ward’s portrait-statues should be of small account was to be expected from the circumstances of his self-wrought development and peculiar personal point of view. They were the stepping-stones by which he gradually rose to higher things. For the thing to be noticed is that he eventually reached the power that is exhibited in such works as the “Greeley,” “Washington,” “Lafayette,” “General Thomas,” and in that masterpiece, the “Beecher” statue, by following with undeviating persistence the promptings of his youth; only that with matured experience came a clearer discrimination of the salient facts, and a deeper understanding of what they truly signified. In a word, he reached beyond the fact to its significance.
It may be mainly the significance of clothes, as in that remarkable statue of “Lafayette” at Burlington, Vermont, in which he represents the hero of two revolutions as a middle-aged dandy. I cannot say whether he saw behind Lafayette’s support of liberty, as Carlyle did, but at any rate the figure has simply the easy dignity of a well-bred man, whose embonpoint has modified but
THE GREELEY STATUE
By John Quincy Adams Ward