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

by Charles H. Caffin

PUMA

By A. Phimister Proctor

Prospect Park, Brooklyn

in less exuberant designs. Indeed, his most impressive work, within my knowledge, I should take to be the recumbent portrait-statue of Father Brown in the Church of Saint Mary-the-Virgin in New York. It is very truly monumental, with an exquisite placidity and tender gravity of feeling; the lines of the figure severely simple, the vestments, notwithstanding some elaboration of delicate detail, subordinated so completely to the form, and the latter in its supple fixity expressive of the eternal calm of the head. It is a figure from which emanates a very unusual atmosphere of spirituality.

I wonder if there is not more incentive to revere the memory of a man in a memorial like this, representing him folded in the sleep of death, than in one which figures him as he lived! Yet the latter is the more usual method in this country, possibly because of the lack of space in city churches. Saint-Gaudens has done some memorable work in this direction, notably in the portrait-panels of James McCosh at Princeton, and of Doctor Bellows in the Church of All Souls, New York; so too have French and Herbert Adams. Again in mural tablets, bearing instead of a portrait some ideal figure, work of technical merit and of very beautiful spirit has been done by Clement J. Barnhorn of Cincinnati. Especially would I mention an angel design of his for the Poland Memorial and a “Madonna of the Lilies.” In both these low reliefs he displays a quite exquisite appreciation of the beauty of simplicity of design, of the expression of tender differences of plane, and of the mingling of firm and vanishing lines. Nor in the refinement of treatment is the structural character of the figure and drapery lost.

DOMESTIC DESIGN

Among the various decorative designs by Barnhorn is one for a cottage piano, carved in wood. Conventionalised tree-forms compose the legs, extend a bough from each side along the lower part of the keyboard and then mount up the sides and spread their foliage in a canopy along the top, a draped figure occupying the centre of the front. The design has one good feature, that it grows out of and expresses the character of the material. Yet it deviates from what experience suggests to be worth regarding as an axiom: that in such objects as are actually a part of the structure of a room, for instance a mantelpiece, or in those which by their size and importance emphasise their structural character, the contours should conform to the straight and curved lines, which experience has found necessary in architecture. In a word, that the structure of the object should be first attained and the decoration then subordinated to it, instead of the latter being allowed to encroach upon the structural lines. An ivy-mantled tower takes its place suitably in an open-air setting; and, on the other hand, a small object indoors, such as a clock on a shelf, may assume any variety of outline; but with the larger, formal ones, whether built into, or detached within, the room, you cannot indulge in irregular contours without making them amorphous, more or less clumsy or else trivial. And this piano seems open to the charge of cumbersomeness, which again offends the instinct of the musician, who would feel in the instrument a suggestion of yielding to the vibrations of the music—a feeling so prominent in the delicate simplicity of the violin and to be desired in the form of all instruments. Yet one welcomes in this piano the inventiveness of fancy displayed, and the skill and individuality of the craftsmanship, delighted to find an American sculptor applying his art to the intimacies of domestic design.

Among the few sculptors who have used the figure decoratively in the arts of minor design none has displayed a livelier imagination or a more charming facility than Henry Linder. His little conceptions for candlesticks, inkwells, electric-light stands and other objects of domestic use are full of grace and spirit. Another decorative sculptor of rare feeling and unusual technical resources is M. M. Schwarzott. I remember well a panel of his representing fishes sporting in the waves, which, as Mr. Hartmann fitly observes, is worthy of a Japanese coppersmith.