From the sculptor’s diary, a sporadic and sketchy document, it is plain that he was passionately anxious to have a child. It is probable that the impossibility of this was the basis of whatever trouble he had with Lisa. Moreover, she was twenty years his senior and did not care much for his strenuous way of life.

Such was Gutzon’s fear of hurting her, and his almost abnormal dread of publicity in so personal a matter, that the legal tie was not broken for several years. Few of Gutzon’s friends of later years knew of this marriage, and his own children were in their teens before they heard of it.

A French servant, Jeanne, who had lived with the Borglums in Europe, accompanied Lisa to California to live with her until her death. In 1931 she wrote to the sculptor about certain of his paintings that he had given to Lisa and closed her letter with a significant and touching thought.

“You have two beautiful children,” she said, “and you are at last happy. You deserve it....”

Gutzon and Lisa bought a little house among the orange groves in Sierra Madre, near the base of the mountains back of Pasadena, not far from where the Santa Anita race track now stands. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had a horse ranch on land that included the site of the race track, was a great friend and allowed Gutzon to use his horses as models. Gutzon loved this place. His favorite subjects for sculpture were horses, and he never tired of looking at them. Mrs. Frémont, after seeing his equestrian casts and drawings at his studio in 1889, summed up his future with the gift of prophecy: “The boy is spirited. Here is one sculptor who will ride to fame on horseback!”

That wasn’t quite true, but it was near enough. Within the year he was moving. And never thereafter did he recognize the existence of anything that could hold him back.

CHAPTER FIVE
OVERSEAS ART

Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had learned something about art and he had a growing circle of friends in California. On the other hand, he gave little evidence that he might be something other than one more simple art student from the Pacific coast. That is what makes his progress remarkable.

He stopped in Omaha to visit with his father and, almost unaccountably, left a pile of his canvases with a Mr. Leininger, a dealer and patron of art. It is a little difficult now to identify or appraise these works. This is a pity, for, good or bad, expensive or cheap, they all seem to have found somebody who loved them. They never came back to haunt his garret, nor, for that matter, did the ones we are told he sold “at an exhibition in New York.”

There is little known about the “exhibition in New York” except that Mrs. Frémont, the general’s widow, had been informed of it. She wrote a note to the one person in New York who might be able to give a lift to the young artist. And that’s how Gutzon met Theodore Roosevelt, then Police Commissioner, who became a lasting friend.