American Masters of Sculpture / Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Sculptors and of Some Phases of Sculpture in America

by Charles H. Caffin

VII
HERBERT ADAMS

THE delicately refined sentiment of Herbert Adams, product of a naturally sweet and modest temperament, has discovered its fittest expression in flowers and in the flower-like forms of women and children, influenced in its manner by decorative feeling. For he seems to have the instinct that leads men to be naturalists; of the kind whose gentle mind draws them into intimacy with nature’s nurslings and frequently as well toward very tender sympathy with what is most fresh and fragrant in humanity. Such a one studies and loves form, but less for its organic and structural import than for its visible expression of the spirit with which his imagination invests it; a very sensitive kind of imagination, that must play freely or suffer some impairment of its delicate elasticity.

From his earliest years Adams had desired to be a sculptor. He came of an old family of good New England stock and was born at West Concord, Vermont, in 1858, but passed his boyhood in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. A general education at the local grammar and high school was supplemented by special studies at the Worcester Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Normal Art School. Then followed a period of five years in Paris, where he studied under Mercié, the pupil of Falguière. Among the many sculptors with whom he came in contact, he felt most strongly the influence of these two, both natives of Toulouse, in whose art the poetry of the south mingles with academic elegance and technical perfection. During these years, too, he studied in the galleries and frequented the Louvre, not only for the sculpture, but also for the paintings.

That the latter should have attracted him may seem at first sight hardly worth mentioning; since, indeed, no student of art, whatever his metier would be likely to escape the fascination of the paintings. But Adams seems to have been very conscious of it then, and to look back upon it now as one of the distinct influences of his student days. And that painting had an influence, and a very marked one, upon his technique and motives as a sculptor, one can scarcely doubt. His early work shows more feeling for the harmonic rendering of light and shade and for the decorative treatment of the surface than for the structure and character of the form. It reveals also, especially in his busts, that specialisation of sentiment, limited in range, very quietly intense in kind, tinctured frequently with enigmatic suggestion, which is so often found in Italian sculpture and painting of the fifteenth century. That he had felt that influence has occurred to many observers of Adams’s work; yet it was not until five years ago that he visited Italy. Accordingly, it must have been to his studies at the Louvre that he owed his acquaintance with Italian art; and the paintings as well as the sculpture, perhaps as much as it, must have shaped his impressions. And the work of the marble sculptors of the fifteenth century, of men like Mino da Fiesole and Maiano, is strongly pictorial in character, frequently with more of the painter quality than the sculptor, with great regard for highly finished surfaces and delicate richness of light and shade. They represented the higher tendencies of the thought of their time: subtle and refined and elegantly Platonic. To some corresponding partiality is apparently due the inclination of Adams’s mind toward this particular expression of sculpture. For, while sculpture responds to the most vigorous conceptions of the artist, it lends itself also to the most sensitive idealisation; more so in a measure than painting, since the absence of the realism of colour makes a greater demand upon the imagination and keeps the representation more nearly within the region of the abstract.

In order to increase the sensitiveness of the idealisation by merging it in the vague, the refuge of the modern world from the too exacting claims of the actual, Rodin often leaves part of his statues in the rough. So did Michelangelo. But the Italian mind of the fifteenth century, wedded to perfection and finish as an essential of its creed, carried to further sensitiveness the tactile suggestion of the marble by bringing its surface to a smoothness of polish akin to that of jade or ivory, materials which are of peculiarly caressing appeal to the sense of touch. The effect was also heightened by the use of colour.

The practice of colouring sculpture dates back to the earliest times which archeological research has been able to embrace. Continuing without interruption to the present times in Oriental countries, it was, however, abandoned in the West. Yet the Greeks and Romans, the Gothic artists, and those of the Italian Renaissance up to the sixteenth century resorted to it freely. Then the practise, for some reason, fell into disuse, and by degrees the strong prejudice against it resulted in forgetfulness that it had ever existed among the greatest artists of antiquity, and it was accepted as a matter of course that one of the chief beauties of a marble statue was its whiteness, and that the colouring of a statue was a habit only of barbarians. But in comparatively recent times we have learned to appreciate the use of colour by the Indians, Chinese and Japanese upon their statues and to understand its motive, and have discovered, as I have said, that the practice was at one time universal. Yet even now the prejudice against it continues. Some artists object to it because the colour tends to make less obvious to the eye their skilful nicety of technique, while among laymen there exists a very general misunderstanding of the motive in using colour.

They suppose that colour is added to a statue to increase its resemblance to nature; as, indeed, would seem to be the motive in the cheap images commercially produced for churches. But the motive of the best artists has never been a realistic one. They have added colour, either for decorative purposes or to enforce the idea of the statue, the meaning that was uppermost in the artist’s mind as he fashioned it. Thus the statue of the god and the cella in which it stood were brought into a unity of effect by colouring both, so that the divine presence permeated the shrine. Or it might be that the latter was dimly lighted and the greater part of the statue was plunged in mysterious obscurity, when the artist would gild the lips and eyes that the benign smile and the composure of the glance might shine with soft conspicuousness amid the gloom. In both these examples artistic fitness would regulate the use of colour both to unify the effect and to enforce the idea. So, too, in the case of a bust, the artist may feel that there is an expression in the eyes of the woman whose portrait he is modelling or latent in the curve of the lips, which summarises the impression of her character as he feels it. In his desire to emphasise the idea which he has in his mind, he will resort to colour in the eyes or lips; he may then feel the need of balancing notes of colour elsewhere, as in the shadows of the hair or in the fillet which binds it or in some ornament of jewelry; and, having gone so far, may find it desirable to complete by further enrichments of colour the general decorative feeling that has been produced. Very probably he will be influenced in his use of colour by the larger decorative intention of making the bust more conformable to its place in a room, so that instead of standing out in cold distinctness it may merge into the warmth of surrounding colour.