For, as I have said before, Adams’s work does not usually impress one by its qualities of form, but rather by its sentiment and expression. Even in the portrait-statue of Joseph Henry in the Library of Congress and the “Channing,” recently unveiled at Boston, one does not feel the form and character of the bodies. Both figures are represented in gowns and count mainly as decorative masses. In the statue of Richard Smith, however, which is one of his latest, he has shown the professor in his laboratory, clad in shirt and trousers, with no accessory except an apron caught up on one side; and in the treatment of the head and body and more especially in the carriage of the hands, as one holds a specimen and the other a magnifying glass, has obtained a considerable measure of structural character.
Nor do I forget the tympanum, executed in 1896, for the Senate Reading-Room in the Library of Congress, a design of two mermaids supporting a cartouche. The nude forms display a thorough knowledge of the figure and a truly sculptural appreciation of the charm of muscular movement rippling over firmly constructed bodies. It seems to prove, if it were necessary, that the preference which Adams has shown for the pictorial possibilities of sculpture is due only to his particular temperament; to a reticence of feeling that shrinks from too exact an expression of the idea, around which in his own imagination also he preserves a certain zone of vagueness.
So, in the tympanum for Saint Bartholomew’s Church, illustrated on an accompanying page, he is divided between the motives of expressing a sentiment of tender adoration and of giving the figures at the same time an architectonic force. In the latter direction we may feel that he has been the more successful; for in the attention paid to form he seems to have become preoccupied in the model. The same face appears in each of the three figures and with a self-consciousness in the eyes that contradicts the devotional expression of the mouth; a self-consciousness that I find myself connecting with the little niceties of arrangement with which the hair is prinked. I conclude by wondering if this tympanum will prove a turning-point in the artist’s career!
For when one studies the beauty of form, so strongly realised beneath the draperies, its fine expression and functional propriety, it is to feel that this work, despite a certain lack of Adams’s usual spirituality of sentiment, is the most important in a sculptural sense that he has yet done. For, regarded from the point of view of an architectural decoration it is unusually distinguished with admirable appropriateness of lines and masses to the space, a truly architectural feeling, and a distribution of light and shade, characterised alike by richness and by delicacy. It has the choiceness of style of his best portraits, reënforced by virility. And, if this latter quality, called into play by his coöperation with the architect, is maintained in future work, the result can scarcely fail to be a betterment of his art. For he will find a way of bringing it into complete harmony with the expression of his sentiment, since there is no necessary incompatibility between virility of style and delicacy of feeling. Indeed, the offspring of their union is a very special poignancy.
VIII
CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS
CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS is a conspicuous exception to the general rule that our sculptors are Paris-trained. After working as a youth at wood-engraving, stone-cutting and carving in marble, he became a student in the McMicken School of Design, in his native city, Cincinnati, Ohio, and thence proceeded to Munich. His German training was supplemented by extensive travel and later by a prolonged visit to Rome, during which he devoted himself to the study of the nude under the influence of the antique.
But before the latter interlude in a life otherwise filled with the execution of commissions, he returned to America. For him the time was auspicious. President Garfield had recently been assassinated, and the State of Ohio had appropriated funds for a statue to be placed in the Capitol at Washington, and by public subscription another was to be erected in Race Street, Cincinnati. Both these commissions were awarded to the young Ohio sculptor. Each statue commemorates Garfield’s gift of oratory, but the one at Cincinnati in a more informal way, so that it probably represents very fairly Niehaus’s particular tendency at this time.
There is a dramatic touch in the pose of the figure; the weight firmly on the left foot, the other energetically advanced; both arms extended; one holding a sheaf of paper, the other raised slightly in a gesture of maintaining the attention of the audience; the handsome head well carried above the broad, arched chest. But this dramatic suggestion does not pass beyond the limit of tolerably natural characterisation; the balance between energy and controlling force, manifested in the studied carriage of a speaker accustomed to move his hearers; and the naturalism is completed by the absence of all affectations of arrangement in the costume. It comprises simply a frock coat and trousers and an overcoat unbuttoned and drawn clear of the chest. The figure, indeed, is represented in the guise and attitude in which it might be familiar to the greatest number of people. So, too, is that of William Allen, for which Niehaus shortly afterward received the commission from the State of Ohio; yet with even greater simplicity and naturalness, with an absence of the heroic or dramatic which had been fitting enough in the “Garfield,” considering the circumstances. The “Allen” is an intimate portrait of an incisive speaker and clear, close reasoner, in an attitude entirely unstudied, full of natural resolution.