For certainly the development has been attended with some results to which it is impossible to point with appreciation. Do we find an example of this in the Appellate Court in New York? Its exterior is profusely covered with sculpture; but can one truly feel that it is decorative? On the contrary, it may occur to some that the building would have had more dignity unadorned; that it is overloaded; its quiet lines disturbed by the flutter of forms against the sky; that the figures themselves lack the decorative quality, dryly formal in some instances and in others without sufficient reserve of line and mass; overpowering, in fact, the structure, while individually, at the distance from which they are seen, of not much moment.
Civic pride, doubtless not uninfluenced by the discovery that there is a commercial value in esthetics, has led to the embellishing of office buildings and hotels with sculpture. With the former continually increasing their vertical direction, it has been no easy matter to devise for them a suitable kind of plastic decoration. Perhaps the most appropriate has been the flat ornamentation, occasionally burgeoning into rounded forms, which Louis H. Sullivan, a Chicago architect, has used. He has the advantage of being his own designer for decoration as well as for structure; and having a very logical mind he designs both with a strict regard for organic propriety, while his fecund imagination enables him to create freely forms of inexhaustible variety and full of the charm of vital freshness.
In the case of many office buildings, especially those erected some years ago, the sculpture has the appearance of being added as an afterthought, so inadequate is the provision made for it. There is a conspicuous instance of this on lower Broadway, New York, four colossal figures in bronze by J. Massey Rhind being placed upon a projecting cornice some twenty feet above the level of the street. They have no structural relation to the building and thereby lose much of their effectiveness.
This sculptor, a native of Edinburgh, where his family, as architects and otherwise, have long been identified with the civic improvements that have gradually made the modern city so conspicuously handsome, is one of the most skilful of our architectural sculptors. He has not the play of fancy nor the graceful facility in decorative forms displayed by Martiny; but, instead, a strong instinct for big simplicity of design, and for the constructional value of the figure as an adjunct to the architecture. When, as in the spandrils for the Smith Memorial Arch at Philadelphia, he is elaborating a part of the structure, he works with as much of the feeling of an architect as of a sculptor, showing an unmistakable appreciation of the material. In the case of these spandrils it is granite, and the treatment of the drapery and wings has been admirably adapted to the quality and character of the material and to the exigencies of cutting. A similar recognition of the claims of the material is displayed in some granite lions, designed for the Ehret mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery, and again in the caryatides, executed in pink Tennessee marble for the Macy Building in New York. The latter, moreover, are particularly successful in suggesting their architectural function of carrying a superincumbent weight, rigidity of form and grace of line being fortunately mingled. Among the varied subjects which have occupied this sculptor is an elaborate fountain for “Georgian Court” at Lakewood, New Jersey. The design comprises a male figure, almost nude, standing in a chariot formed of a huge shell, these parts being in bronze, while the sea-horses that he drives and the attendant Nereids are of marble. The composition, enclosed within a circular basin and rising pyramidally toward the centre, is full of spirit, with especial force and freedom of movement in the marble portions. Yet it is probably true that J. Massey Rhind discovers his best qualities as a sculptor
RECUMBENT FIGURE
By J. Massey Rhind
From the Tomb of Father Brown in the Church of Saint Mary-the-Virgin, New York