American Sculpture

In the United States there was little sculpture of native origin, and virtually none of the slightest merit, before the 19th century. The following list of articles in rough chronological order will supplement the outline in the article Sculpture (Vol. 24, p. 516): Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, Thomas Crawford, Henry Kirke Brown, William Rimmer, E. D. Palmer, Thomas Ball, L. W. Volk, Harriet G. Hosmer, J. Q. A. Ward, Launt Thompson, Larkin G. Mead, G. E. Bissell, Olin L. Warner, W. R. O’Donovan, Jonathan S. Hartley, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, D. C. French, J. J. Boyle, C. H. Niehaus, Lorado Taft, W. O. Partridge, Cyrus E. Dallin, A. P. Proctor, Charles Grafly, F. W. MacMonnies, George Gray Barnard, P. W. Bartlett, Hermon A. MacNeil, Karl Bitter, Borglum.

Summary

This chapter, and the one before, outline courses on these arts in the Britannica, but there are many articles on these topics to which no reference has been made in these pages. It may, therefore, be interesting to the student of these forms of art to have before him a list, fairly complete, of articles in the Britannica dealing with painting and sculpture. The following is such a list in alphabetical arrangement. The student should remember that the absence from the list—or from any similar list in the Guide—of a topic on which he wishes information does not mean that there is no information on the subject in the Britannica, but merely that there may be no separate article on the subject. In such cases let him turn to the general index (Vol. 29).

LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL ARTICLES DEALING WITH THE FINE ARTS

CHAPTER XXXV
LANGUAGE AND WRITING

Evolution

One of the most interesting subjects of scientific study developed during the last century is that of primitive culture and the gradual advancement of primitive man from a state of savagery to comparative civilization. For this study there are no historical documents in the ordinary use of the words “historical” and “document.” The story must be arrived at by analysis, deduction, even by guess-work, supplementing the studies of travelers among tribes which now are in the lowest stages of development and farthest from civilization, and therefore most resemble our remotest human ancestors. Almost the very earliest of writers on evolution, the Roman poet Lucretius (Vol. 17, p. 107), who died in 55 B.C., sketched general outlines of the development of this primitive civilization in much the same way as do modern ethnologists. But his description was imaginary and was fashioned to fit his and Epicurus’s evolutionary theories.

The article Civilization (Vol. 6, p. 403) in the Britannica makes the development of speech the mark of the first period when mankind was in the lower stages of savagery. “Our ancestors of this epoch inhabited a necessarily restricted tropical territory and subsisted upon raw nuts and fruit.” The next higher period in the progress of civilization began with the knowledge of the use of fire (p. 404).