American Men of Mind Part 8

Powers soon developed from this work a talent for catching likenesses, and, searching for a wider field, proceeded finally to Washington, where he modelled busts in wax of Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, John C.

Calhoun, John Marshall, and other celebrities of the period. From wax, he naturally wished to graduate into marble, and in 1837, left America for Italy, never to return. Greenough, then laboring away at his Washington, a.s.sisted him in various ways; and Hawthorne met him in Italy and was much impressed by him, as his "Italian Note-Book" shows.

In 1843, he completed the figure which was destined to make him famous, the "Greek Slave." The statue was supposed to represent a maiden captured by the Turks, "stripped and manacled and offered for sale in the market place," and so had a sentimental appeal which went straight to the heart of a sentimental people, and overcame any antagonism which her nudity might have produced. It inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to a not very noteworthy sonnet, clergymen gave it certificates of character, so to speak, and "it made a sensation wherever shown, and was fondly believed to be the greatest work of sculpture known to history."

Let us say at once that it is an engaging and creditable piece of work, and worthy, in the main, of the enthusiasm which it excited.

The "Greek Slave" was only the beginning. Powers turned out one statue after another with considerable rapidity, but his reputation rests mainly to-day on his portrait busts of men. It is characteristic of artists that the things they do best and easiest they value least, and this was so with Powers. His portrait busts were, in a sense, mere pot-boilers; he lavished himself upon his ideal figures. But these are now ranked as unimaginative and commonplace.

Third among our early sculptors of importance was Thomas Crawford, born eight years later than Greenough and Powers, and preceding the latter to the grave by many years, yet leaving behind him a ma.s.s of work which, if it shows no great imagination, displays considerable poetic refinement.

Driven to Italy because it was only there that marble work could be well and economically done, he lived there for some years, earning a bare subsistence by the production of second-rate portrait busts and copies of antique statuary. Then he attracted the attention of Charles Sumner, and with his help, was enabled, in 1839, to produce his first important work, the "Orpheus," now in the Boston Museum. Many others followed, but they were of that ideal and sentimental type, very foreign to modern taste.

Crawford was an indefatigable workman, and few American museums are without one or more examples of his product. In the public square at Richmond, Virginia, stands one of his most important monuments, crowned by an astonishing equestrian figure of Washington, which he himself executed. Two of the subordinate statues are also his--those of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson--and represent the best work he ever did.

Another of his productions is the great figure of Freedom which crowns the dome of the Capitol at Washington, not unworthily. By a fortunate chance, which the sculptor could hardly have foreseen, the bulky and roughly modelled figure gains airiness and majesty from its lofty position, where its sickly-sweet countenance and clumsy adornment are refined by distance. It has become, in a way, a national ideal, a part of the Republic.

The success of these three men and the immense reputation which they attained naturally attracted others to a profession whose rewards were so exalted. The first to achieve anything like an enduring reputation was Henry Kirke Brown, born in Ma.s.sachusetts in 1814. He early displayed some talent for portrait painting, and went to Boston to study under Chester Harding. Chance led him to model the head of a friend, and the result was so interesting that he then and there renounced painting for sculpture.

Naturally, his eyes turned to Italy, but he had no money to take him there, so perforce remained at home, getting such instruction as he could. In 1837, at the age of twenty-three, he produced his first marble bust, and within the next four years, had carved at least forty more, besides four or five figures. From all this work, he managed to save the money needed for the trip to Italy, but after four years in the Italian studios, he sailed for home again. On July 4, 1856, the second equestrian statue to be set up in the United States was unveiled in Union Square, New York City, and gave Brown a reputation which still endures.

It is a statue of Washington, and, in some amazing fashion, Brown succeeded in producing a work of art, which, in some respects, has never been surpa.s.sed in America, and which has served as a pattern and guide to other sculptors from that day to this. It is a sincere, honest and dignified embodiment of the First American. Brown did some notable work after that, but none of it possesses the high inspiration which produced the n.o.ble and commanding figure which dominates Union Square.

We have said that it was the second equestrian statue produced in America. The first may still be seen by all who, on entering or leaving the White House, glance across the street at the public square beyond.

One glance is certain to be followed by others, for that statue is not only the first, it is the most amazing ever set up in a public place in this country. It has divided with Greenough's "Washington," at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the horrors of being a national joke. Its author was Clarke Mills, and its inception is probably unparalleled in the history of sculpture.

Mills was born in New York State in 1815, lost his father while still a child, and at the age of thirteen was driven by harsh treatment to run away from the uncle with whom he had made his home. Thenceforward he supported himself in any way he could--as farm-hand, teamster, ca.n.a.l-hand, post-cutter, and finally as cabinet maker. He drifted about the country; to New Orleans, and finally to Charleston, South Carolina, where he learned to do stucco work, and whiled away his leisure hours by modelling busts in clay.

With Yankee ingenuity, he invented a process of taking a cast from the living face, and this simple method of getting a likeness enabled him to turn out busts so rapidly and cheaply that he had all the work he could do. He was, of course, anxious to try his hand at marble, and procuring a block of native Carolina stone, hewed out, with infinite labor, a bust of that South Carolina idol, John C. Calhoun. It was the best bust ever made of that celebrated statesman, and was the beginning of Mills's good fortune, and of the sequence of events which resulted in his statue of the hero of New Orleans.

For his Calhoun attracted much attention and secured him other commissions--among them, one for the busts of Webster and Crittenden. To get these, he was forced to go to Washington, and there he met the Hon.

Cave Johnson, President of the Jackson Monument Commission, which had got together the funds for an equestrian statue of that old hero.

Johnson suggested to Mills that he submit a design for this statue. As Mills had never seen either General Jackson or an equestrian statue, and had only the vaguest idea of what either was like, he naturally felt some doubt of his ability to execute such a work; but Johnson pointed out that this was only modesty, and so Mills finally evolved a design, which the commission accepted.

Then he went to work on his model, and executed it on an entirely new principle, which was to secure a balanced figure by bringing the hind legs of the horse under the centre of its body. Congress donated for the bronze of the statue the British cannon which Jackson had captured at New Orleans, and after many trials and disheartening failures, it was finally cast, hoisted into place, and dedicated on the eighth of January, 1853.

The whole country gazed at it in wonder and admiration, for surely never had another work of art so unique and original been unveiled in any land. Mills had balanced his horse adroitly on his hind legs, and represented the rider as clinging calmly to this perilous perch and doffing his chapeau to the admiring mult.i.tude. A delighted Congress added $20,000 to the price already paid, while New Orleans ordered a replica at an even higher figure. Absurd as the statue is, it yet must command from us a certain respect for the enthusiast who designed it.

Remember, he had never seen an equestrian statue, because there was none in the country for him to see; he had no notion of dignified sculptural treatment; but he did what he could, as well as he was able.

Mills was the last of the primitives, for following him came Erasmus D.

Palmer and Thomas Ball, the two men who, more than any others, shaped the course and guided the development of American sculpture.

Erasmus Palmer was born in 1817, and followed the trade of a carpenter.

But in the odd moments of 1845, he made a cameo portrait of his wife, which was a rather unusual likeness. Encouraged by this success, he practised further, and ended by abandoning his saws and planes to devote his whole time to carving portraits. But the constant strain so weakened his eyes, that he was about to return to carpentering, when a friend suggested that he try his hand at modelling in clay. The result was the "Infant Ceres," modelled from one of his own children, which, reproduced in marble, created a sensation at the exhibitions in 1850.

From that moment, Palmer's career was steadily upwards. It culminated eight years later in his delightful figure, the "White Captive,"

reminiscent in a way of the "Greek Slave," but a better work of art, and one which stands among the most charming achievements of American sculpture. One of its wonders, too--wonder that an untrained hand and an unschooled brain should have been able to create a work of art at once so tender and so firm. Following it came some admirable portrait busts; and finally, in 1862, his "Peace in Bondage." No doubt the sculptor's beautiful and adequate conception sprang from the tragic period which gave it birth; for "Peace in Bondage" shows a winged female figure leaning wearily against a tree-trunk, and gazing hopelessly into s.p.a.ce.

It is carved in high relief, with great skill and insight. In fact, nothing finer had been produced in America.

With this work, American art may be said to have found itself. It not only raised the standard of achievement, but it put an end at once and forever to the idea that study in Italy was necessary to artistic success. For only once did Palmer visit Europe, and then it was to stay but a short time. In fact, Italy was artistic poison for many men; its art lacked originality and vigor, and it sapped the native strength of many of the Americans who worked in its studios.

Thomas Ball was an exception to this; for, in spite of many years abroad, he remained always characteristically American. He comes next to Palmer in strength and rightness of achievement; his work, like his life, was earnest and n.o.ble.

Thomas Ball's father was a house and sign painter of Boston, with some artistic skill, which he pa.s.sed on to his son. That was the boy's only inheritance, and when his father died, he undertook the support of the family, first as a boy-of-all-work in the New England Museum, and then as a cameo-cutter. From that he graduated naturally to engraving, miniature painting, and finally to portraiture.

His first attempt at modelling resulted in a bust of Jenny Lind, done entirely from photographs, which had a wide vogue, for the Swedish Nightingale was then at the height of her popularity. Other more ambitious work followed, and finally, at the age of thirty-five, he was able to realize his ambition to study in the studios of Florence. But he found the Italian environment less inspiring than he had hoped, and two years later he was back in Boston, working on an equestrian statue of Washington--the first equestrian group in New England and the fourth in the United States. He built his plaster model with his own hands, and was three years getting it ready. The result was a work which ranks among the first equestrian statues of the country. Other works of importance followed, among them the well-known emanc.i.p.ation group showing Lincoln blessing a kneeling slave, which was unveiled at Washington in 1875.

The years touched Ball lightly, and at seventy years of age, he undertook his greatest work, an elaborate Washington monument for the town of Methuan, Ma.s.sachusetts. The princ.i.p.al figure, a gigantic Washington in bronze, was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and received the highest honors of the exposition--a distinction it richly merited by its n.o.bility of a conception and execution. Thomas Ball, indeed, set a new standard in public statuary, and one which no successor has dared to disregard. The far-reaching effects of his influence and that of Erasmus Palmer can hardly be over-estimated.

One of the most engaging and versatile personalities in the whole range of American art was that of William Wetmore Story. Born at Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1819, graduated at Harvard, admitted to the bar, the author of a volume of graceful verse and of a valuable life of his father, Chief Justice Story, he yet, in 1851, put all this work aside, adopted sculpture as a profession, and, proceeding to Rome, opened a studio there.

It was from the first an extraordinary studio, attracting the most brilliant people of Rome in literature as well as art; and if Story did not quite practise the perfection he was somewhat fond of preaching, it was because of his very versatility, which absorbed his talent in so many directions that it could not be concentrated in any. His imagination outran his achievement, and the most famous of his works, his statue of Cleopatra, owes its reputation not so much to its own merit, which is far from overwhelming, as to the ecstatic description of it which Nathaniel Hawthorne included in "The Marble Faun." A master of literature is not necessarily an inspired critic of art, and it is to be suspected that Hawthorne permitted some of the fire of his imagination to play about the cold and uninspired marble.

"Cleopatra" marked Story's culmination. He fell away from it year by year, producing a long line of figures whose only impressive features were the names he gave them--"The Libyan Sibyl," "Semiramis," "Salome,"

"Medea," and so on. However, he did much to increase the popularity of sculpture, for the stories he attempted to tell in stone by means of heavy-browed, frowning women in cla.s.sic costume and with cla.s.sic names, were exactly suited to the child-like intelligence of his public. He gave art, too--as William Penn gave the Quakers--a sort of social sanction because of his own social position. If the son of Chief Justice Story could turn sculptor, surely that profession was not so irregular, after all!

Another sculptor who shared with Story the admiration of the public was Randolph Rogers, born at Waterloo, New York, in 1825. Until the age of twenty-three such modelling as he did was done in the spare moments of a business life; but when he gave an exhibition of the results of this labor, his employers were so impressed that they provided the money needed to send him to Italy, where he was to spend the remainder of his life, with the exception of five years' residence in New York. Two of his earlier figures are his most famous, his "Nydia" and his "Lost Pleiad." Scores of replicas in marble of these two figures were made during their author's life time, and they still retain for many people a simple and pathetic charm. Nearly every one, of course, has made the acquaintance of Nydia, the blind girl, in Bulwer-Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii," and so gaze at Rogers's fleeing figure with eyes too sympathetic to see its faults.

Far more important is the work of William H. Rinehart, of the same age as Rogers, and resembling him somewhat in development. Born on a Maryland farm, his early years were those of the average farmer's boy, but at last some blind instinct led him to abandon farming for stonecutting, and he became a.s.sistant to a mason and stonecutter of the neighborhood. As soon as he had learned his trade, at the age of twenty-one, he went to Baltimore, where there was work in plenty, and where he could, at the same time, attend the night schools of the Maryland Inst.i.tute. This sounds much easier than it really was. To devote the evenings to study, after ten and often twelve hours of the hardest of all manual labor, required grit and moral courage such as few possess.

He was soon trying his hand at modelling, and convinced, at last, that sculpture was his vocation, he managed, by the time he was thirty, to save enough money for a short period of study at Rome. Three years of work at Baltimore, after that, gave him some reputation, and he then returned to Rome, to spend the remainder of his life there.

If you have ever visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you have seen, in the hall of statuary, one of Rinehart's most characteristic groups, "Latona and Her Children." The mother half seated, half lying upon the ground, gazes tenderly down at the two sleeping children, sheltered in the folds of her mantle. The whole work possesses a serene poetic charm and dignity very noteworthy; and this and other groups are among the most beautiful that any American ever turned out of an Italian studio.

Rinehart was one of the last American disciples of the cla.s.sic school.

Certainly no art could have been more opposed to his than the frank and vivid realism of his immediate successor, John Rogers. Born in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, the son of a family of merchants, he was educated in the common schools, worked for a time in a store, and then entered a machine shop as an apprentice, working up through all the grades, until finally he was in charge of a railroad repair shop.

During all these years he had no suspicion of artistic talent within himself, but one day in Boston he happened to see a man modelling some images in clay. In that instant, the artist instinct clutched him, and procuring some clay and modelling tools, he spent all his leisure in practice. This leisure was scant enough, for his trade kept him employed fourteen hours of every day; but at the age of twenty-nine he was able to secure an eight months' vacation, which he spent in Europe, princ.i.p.ally at Paris and Rome. He returned to America greatly discouraged, for the only thing he saw in Europe was cla.s.sic sculpture, with which he had no sympathy and which, indeed, he could not understand.

So, abandoning all thought of making sculpture a profession, he went to work as a draughtsman in Chicago, amusing himself, at odd hours, by the construction of a group of small figures, which he called "The Checker Players." It was exhibited at a charity fair, and awakened so much interest and delight that Rogers burned his bridges behind him by resigning his position, and proceeded to New York, and rented a studio, determined to be a sculptor in spite of cla.s.sicism.

The outbreak of the Civil War furnished him a host of subjects which he treated with a patriotic fervor that went straight to the heart of an overwrought people. "The Returned Volunteer," "The Picket-Guard," "The Sharp-shooters," "The Camp-fire," "One More Shot," and many others, came from his studio in rapid succession. They were all thoroughly American, and some were even admirably sculptural. They, at least, stood for an original idea, and deserve better treatment than the silent contempt which, in these days, is about all that has been accorded them.

At about this time, there came upon the scene the first and only really famous woman sculptor in the history of American art, Harriet Hosmer.

She had had an unusual childhood, and had grown into an original and engaging woman. Born in 1830, at Watertown, Ma.s.sachusetts, the daughter of a physician, she inherited her mother's delicate const.i.tution, and her father encouraged her in an outdoor life of physical exercise such as only boys, at that time, were accustomed to. She became expert in rowing, riding, skating and shooting, developed great endurance, filled her room with snakes and insects and birds' nests, and in a clay pit at the end of her father's garden modelled rude figures of animals.

A few years of schooling followed this wild girlhood; then she was sent to Boston to study drawing and modelling; but finding that no woman would be admitted to the Boston Medical School, whose course in anatomy she was anxious to take, she went to St. Louis and entered the medical college there. Finally, in 1852, accompanied by her father and Charlotte Cushman, she set sail for Italy.

She remained there for eight years, turning out a number of very creditable figures, which, if not great, at least possess some measure of grace and charm. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his "Italian Note-Book," has left a vivid impression of Miss Hosmer, whose eccentricity of dress and manner impressed him deeply, as did also the work which she showed him.

But she never reached any high development.

Which brings us to the present of American art, for the sculptors we have yet to consider are either yet alive or have died so recently that they belong to the present rather than the past.

The first and one of the most important of these is John Quincy Adams Ward, born in 1830 on an Ohio farm. An accident showed the possession of latent talent, for some good pottery clay happened to be discovered on his father's farm, and his guardian angel inspired the boy to take a handful of it and model the grotesque countenance of a negro servant.

The result was striking, and no doubt he felt within himself some of the stirrings of genius, but not until 1849 did he realize his vocation.

Then, while on a visit to a sister in Brooklyn, he happened to pa.s.s the open door of H. K. Brown's studio. The glimpse he caught of the scene within fascinated him; he returned again and again, and ended by entering the studio as a pupil.

He could have found no better master, and for seven years he remained there, a.s.sisting Brown in every detail of his work. His first group, modelled after long study, was his "Indian Hunter," now placed in Central Park, New York--a group instinct with vitality--a glimpse of a forgotten past, evoked with the skill of a master. It was the first of a long line of statues, many of them portraits of contemporaries, a field in which Ward has no superior. It is perhaps the highest tribute which could be paid the man to say that, with all his great production, he has never done bad work, never produced anything trifling or unworthy.

A fellow student with Ward in Henry Kirke Brown's studio was Larkin G.

Meade, the first indication of whose talent was a unique one. One winter morning, about the middle of the century, the good people of Brattleboro, Vermont, were astonished to find set up in one of the public squares of the town a colossal snow image, in the form of a majestic angel--crude, no doubt, in execution, but singularly effective.

Inquiry developed that it was the work of young Meade, then only fifteen years of age. The incident got into the newspapers, magnified considerably, and attracted the attention of old Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, who, on more than one occasion, had himself appeared as angel to struggling artists.