Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities: knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct—I mean that much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with actual form—a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of an object, it is the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to it—which must be added to it to make it art—it is the reproduction in another material of the actual forms of things. Something which shall answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It is the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most delicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is need in the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds. The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it deals only in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspect of objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, and its means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on the study of perspective and on the study of the way light falls upon objects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces by the varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in the round need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them, unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statue need not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form the foreshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in a disastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade, although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely upon it, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily have the true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture and drawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture—is really a kind of drawing—and this is why so few sculptors succeed in it.
It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind—the most delicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. As to the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any other material. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree and the same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. But for all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interior forms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmost subtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but the shadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface—they are produced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planes away from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle and tender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, and therefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of a sculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmanship. But as the light and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlike the true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can never imitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature. His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents—an art which can give neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth of aspect—an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. And success in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor's artistry—of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment of his material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact.
As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed, the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.
This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since the fifteenth century.
He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl. 25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"—a mastery which shows, in the result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it cost—is unsurpassed—I had almost said unequalled—in any work of any epoch.
Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this or that particular work in this long series. It can show no more than the composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship, the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of mystery and of suggestion—an art having affinities with that of painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the ancients understood it, the art of form per se, demands the nude figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike mediæval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness. A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing—no other who could have made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.
