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

by Charles H. Caffin

THE HAHNEMANN STATUE

By Charles Henry Niehaus

From the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.

of it are very limited. For while the old Puritan objection to the nude may have almost died out in America, it has scarcely been succeeded by a true appreciation of the abstract expression and beauty of the human form when treated by an artist. An old-fashioned bluntness of vision fails to see more in a nude than nakedness; may enjoy very thoroughly the structural and muscular development, play of movement and texture of skin in a horse, or the analogies of these qualities in a tree or plant, and yet miss entirely their subtler manifestations when exhibited in the freely exposed human form. Prejudice or lack of imagination obscures the fact that it is the expression of these qualities in their highest possible degree, that is the end and purpose of the artist; an obscurity, however, which, it must be admitted, not a few nude paintings and sculptures tend to perpetuate.

So Niehaus had to wait very many years before he could utilise frankly the results of his studies at Rome. The opportunity came with the erection of a monument to the memory of Colonel Edwin L. Drake, who sunk the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. The donor, who preserved his incognito, but who is supposed to have been one of the officials of the Standard Oil Company, demanded an architectural structure with planes on which the story of Drake’s life and achievements might be inscribed, and instead of a representation of himself a figure typical of his work. Thus arose occasion for “The Driller.”

It would be well if public monuments were more frequently of this typical character. Our cities and parks are peopled in bronze, not as much as possible to their embellishment. By all means hand down the effigies of great and worthy men; but why not with more regard for the really salient thing, the head, introduced as bust or bas-relief, and with less for the frock coat and trousers, the cut of which can be taken on trust or, better still, forgotten? Instead of demanding such prosaic record, how much better it would be to call upon the sculptor to create out of his imagination some subject that may represent or symbolise the greatness of the hero and appeal to the imagination of succeeding generations, meanwhile gladdening all who pass and repass it daily with its essential beauties. Have you not seen a trousered, frock-coated statue against the pedestal of which are a row of seats and sitters with their back to the man that is to be remembered? Substitute, however, for example, a fountain to his memory; and in parched summer weather, at least, all eyes would be turned toward its refreshment, and possibly some hearts reminded of the man in whose honour it was placed; who, if he were fit to be remembered, must have brought in his lifetime some refreshment and stimulus of suggestion to his fellowmen. So with our battalions of generals, mounted and unmounted, scattered over the country. Great men they were, but there was greatness also in the volunteers of the rank and file; and I for one shall continue to find more incentive to enthusiasm in the recognition of this in the Shaw Memorial than in dozens of solitary individuals. Once more, it is imagination in which we are wont to be lacking; and the best that is in our artists is seldom called forth because of our insistence upon the obvious and trite.

“The Driller,” therefore, was an unusual opportunity for Niehaus, of which he has made characteristic use. That is to say, the realism of the figure as it kneels with hammer uplifted to drive the drill into the ground, is admirably true, while the figure has a classic dignity of composition; and its expression of control, as well as of the putting forth of force, brings it within the domain of ideal beauty. In some groups which were among the ephemeral sculpture of the Pan-American Exposition he also freely introduced the nude, in a number of figures symbolising various kinds of industry. Individually they were excellent, but the combined effect was unfortunate. The composition as a whole lacked cohesion and dignity, representing little more than an aggregation of figures, separately employed; so that one missed the idealising touch and found their realism of the crudely, story-telling kind.

And this last characteristic—I do not know whether it is a symptom of German genre feeling derived from Munich—reappears elsewhere in his work. While his statues are strongly sculptural, his bas-reliefs betray not only a very pictorial feeling, but that particular genre phase of it which is mainly occupied with enforcement of the facts. Not, however, in his earliest work of the kind, the historical doors of Trinity Church, New York, in which the representation of incidents was demanded. These he represented very realistically, but with a regard for the decorative charm of full and empty spaces and of receding planes of distance. Compared with the pictorial nuance displayed in these six panels, the treatment of the four which embellish the Hahnemann monument is very deficient in artistic imagination. They represent the founder of homeopathy in a series of scenes which are baldly illustrative and seem to have little interest of subject and still less of decorative value. Yet they are affixed to a monument setting off a portrait-statue which is Niehaus’s finest work, and equalled by few others in the country. The expression of benign dignity in the head flows through the whole length of the figure, which is disposed in lines that are as suave as they are noble. From every point of view it has the grandeur of monumental repose, softened, one might almost say humanised, by this exquisite winding movement. Among modern portrait-statues I can remember few that make so sweet and serious an impression. In the composition of this figure one can trace unmistakably the effect of the sculptor’s close study of the antique, not only in the suppleness of movement and statuesqueness of pose, but also in the abstract appeal to one’s esthetic enjoyment that the composition of the figure yields. Moreover, this freedom, force and sensitiveness extend to the handling of the drapery, in which every fold has a grace of naturalness and also a value of expression. These qualities are again happily united in the sitting statue of Lincoln at Muskegon, Michigan. While it is neither so forceful nor so persuasive as the “Hahnemann,” it yet has a liberal measure of graciousness and dignity and a finely monumental feeling.

In these statues and in some others, as in the Gibbon in the Library of Congress and, though perhaps by more apparently contrived means, in the standing statue of Stephen Girard, Niehaus obtains from the composition of the single figure a degree of decorative effect which seems to fail him in treating groups. Thus the pediment of the Appellate Court, New York, while good in detail, is without much unity or harmonious feeling. It is, indeed, in the portrayal of character—as in his fine, straightforward rendering of Farragut, or in those striking busts of Rabbi Gottheil and of Ward, the sculptor, and in the statues already noticed, wherein the pose and drapery, besides contributing to the character, yield an additional suggestion of monumental dignity—that he is at his best.