“It’s the image of a daughter of mine who went wrong two years ago.”
When my work was all finished except a little varnishing on one panel and I was feeling very proud of the effect, I was honored by a visit from Mark Hanna. He was showing some ladies around the building. Rushing in at the head of his party, he gave a cursory glance up and down, and then hurried out, saying:
“Come on; there’s nothing here.”
Just so much notice does politics give the fine arts.
“MELPOMENE”
Panel by Edward Simmons, Gallery Of the Muses, Congressional Library, Washington
Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print, Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Publishers, Boston
Chapter XI: Stanford White
The slow but steady progress in America toward a sense of beauty is due more to the architects than to any one class of people. The definition that an “architect is a business man with a slight artistic leaning,” is not such a bad one, and the combination of the two qualities has proved most happy in many cases. I think we must grant some of them more than a leaning toward the arts, though, and give them credit for a certain “taste” developed in our country during the last part of the last century. I have heard a prominent architect declare the Woolworth Building, built by Cass Gilbert, to be the most beautiful example of the Gothic ever done in America, and yet it is also a good business building. This shows that any type of architecture can be made practical. As to the interiors, we might still be in the Victorian Age, if it had not been for these men showing us how ugly it was.
As soon as I returned from Europe, I was put up at The Players, and after my two weeks’ card, given me by Alexander Harrison, expired, I was proposed for membership and duly elected. My sponsor, besides Harrison, was Stanford White, and during my time as a guest of the club, I got to know this very simple person (who was a child and an artist and never became an adult) as well as I did in later years. The three men of the architectural firm of McKim, Meade, and White fitted together perfectly. I once asked Meade what he was doing in that gallery, and he said that he was the water which makes the chemical reaction of acid and alkali lose its power for harm—he kept the other two from being crazy artists.
Stanny always looked to me like Vercingetorix. I used to say that his proper clothing was a wolfskin and a battle-ax, and that he should let his hair grow long. This hair, which was bright red, was accompanied by the usual white skin of that type of person, so that in swimming he looked (he was very tall) like a great white tallow candle. He was as strong as a prize fighter, but, like most men of that character, he never used his physical power. Unlike most big men, he was always in a hurry, dashing about here and there and with his body always slightly bent forward—he took very short steps—trotting along the sidewalk like a busy little girl.