They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them. For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,” the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still extant.
The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in 1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it.
The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.
The eleven paintings that accompanied Lancelot and Guenevere back to England were scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Queen Titania asleep with Oberon’s love potion in her eyes; Titania’s encounter with Bottom, the weaver; her adventures with Quince, the carpenter, Starveling, the tailor, Snout, the tinker and Flute, the bellows-mender—all in a fine, fantastic humor. Gutzon was still at work on this group on June 30, 1903, which was the day before he started for England to make delivery and supervise installation. He was very ill with typhoid fever that year, and his cash had disappeared. Friends about the studio took up a collection to pay his steamship fare to Liverpool.
Borglum’s last years in England were marked by a tremendous emotional depression. His journal, in places, becomes almost incoherent as he attempts to analyze mental suffering. He found relief in work, and he worked incessantly.
He painted murals for private homes and made the illustrations for at least two books, The Spanish Main, with pictures of old war galleys, and King Arthur, with especially fine drawings of oak trees a thousand years old. He had some success as a portrait artist. He painted the likenesses of a large number of the aristocracy at whose country houses he was entertained. One of these was the portrait of Lord Mowbray, which was exhibited at Liverpool with the Lord Mayor taking part in the ceremonies. He mentions in his diary the painting of the composer, Clarence Lucas, who thought it a good portrait “that possibly might also be a work of art.”
There is also some evidence that during the late nineties he was doing more and more work with sculpture. In his journal he mentions a lost piece, “The Return of the Boer,” which brought considerable attention to his carving. It showed a man on horseback returning to his ruined home. He was a figure of complete dejection, his shoulders drooping, his head bent down. His rifle was before him across the saddle. The horse was sniffing at the burned bits that remained of a house. The statue brought plenty of criticism and discussion but no money. The Parisian who cast the group said it was trop personnel to be a financial success. Gutzon’s only copy of it was borrowed by the dancer Loie Fuller for an exhibition and later left by her in a New York bank as security for a loan. Presumably it lies forgotten in some vault.
Another bronze group, “Apaches Pursued,” had greater public appeal and was exhibited in several shows in Europe. It was decidedly popular in Turin, and a copy was bought for Kaiser Wilhelm II. It shows two horses in full gallop, one of the riders holding to a third man whom he has lifted off the ground in his flight. The critics were pleased by its composition, which was as striking as its animation.
Oddly enough, this group came back into public view in 1946 in an art dealer’s window in Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. It was found to have been purchased by a Philadelphian at an auction sale of the effects of “Diamond Jim Brady.” A copy made from this is now in the Witte Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
All in all, in 1900 Gutzon Borglum was one of the most popular artists in England. He lived in a comfortable villa, he had plentiful work, and what he did was enthusiastically received. And mental dejection did not keep him from having a rather full and varied social life.