Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records. But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind.
Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to Omaha.
His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon was independent and lived his own life.
The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.
During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India. She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar trick in painting and not hard to achieve.
Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont. His schoolmates there recalled that the margins of his books were covered with sketches and that he liked to draw maps and make caricatures of his teachers or of local men in public life.
His teachers at St. Mary’s had readily noticed his talent. They had set him to drawing saints and angels—subjects of which, at the time, he was not particularly fond. He refers to his Kansas experience in an article written in 1919:
My interest in the beautiful began before I came to St. Mary’s, but it was due to encouragement there, and to a definitely expressed desire on the part of two young men who were graduated the year I left that the determination was awakened in me to treat seriously what I had previously considered a delightful trick.
One of these men was named Murphy, and I shall never cease to remember with profoundest gratitude his earnest talk to me as we walked up and down during the evening recess. He talked to me of the great masters. He got books for me. I came to know the whole Italian school, painters and sculptors. And for years it seemed that I knew little else. As a result I have never gone to Italy. [Nor did he until 1931.] As I grew older I found I had a powerful bias toward Italian art and its melodrama. But I did not want to go there, even though I admire Italian and Grecian art more than all else.
Murphy went out of my life and I have never heard of him since. He may not—doubtless does not—remember what he did for me. But in those evenings at school he set me afire. And the goal he painted seems bigger, better, more wonderful and worthwhile now than it did, even then. So he served. He may never have known it, but I owe everything to his inspiring words.