Confessions and Criticisms Part 6

The opportunity is great--much greater, I should think, than the intelligence necessary for availing ourselves of it; and it is a unique opportunity. In other words, it lies within the power of every cultivated family in the United States to enrich itself with a work of art which is entirely American; which, as art, fulfils every requirement; which is of permanent and increasing interest and value from an ornamental point of view; and which is embodied in the most enduring of artistic materials.

The studio in which Mr. Kemeys works--a s.p.a.cious apartment--is, in appearance, a cross between a barn-loft and a wigwam. Round the walls are suspended the hides, the heads, and the horns of the animals which the hunter has shot; and below are groups, single figures, and busts, modelled by the artist, in plaster, terracotta, or clay. The colossal design of the "Still Hunt"--an American panther crouching before its spring--was modelled here, before being cast in bronze and removed to its present site in Central Park. It is a monument of which New York and America may be proud; for no such powerful and veracious conception of a wild animal has ever before found artistic embodiment. The great cat crouches with head low, extended throat, and ears erect. The shoulders are drawn far back, the fore paws huddled beneath the jaws.

The long, lithe back rises in an arch in the middle, sinking thence to the haunches, while the angry tail makes a strong curve along the ground to the right. The whole figure is tense and compact with restrained and waiting power; the expression is stealthy, pitiless, and terrible; it at once fascinates and astounds the beholder. While Mr.

Kemeys was modelling this animal, an incident occurred which he has told me in something like the following words. The artist does not encourage the intrusion of idle persons while he is at work, though no one welcomes intelligent inspection and criticism more cordially than he. On this occasion he was alone in the studio with his Irish factotum, Tom, and the outer door, owing to the heat of the weather, had been left ajar. All of a sudden the artist was aware of the presence of a stranger in the room. "He was a tall, hulking fellow, shabbily dressed, like a tramp, and looked as if he might make trouble if he had a mind to. However, he stood quite still in front of the statue, staring at it, and not saying anything. So I let him alone for a while; I thought it would be time enough to attend to him when he began to beg or make a row. But after some time, as he still hadn't stirred, Tom came to the conclusion that a hint had better be given him to move on; so he took a broom and began sweeping the floor, and the dust went all over the fellow; but he didn't pay the least attention. I began to think there would probably be a fight; but I thought I'd wait a little longer before doing anything. At last I said to him, 'Will you move aside, please? You're in my way.' He stepped over a little to the right, but still didn't open his mouth, and kept his eyes fixed on the panther. Presently I said to Tom, 'Well, Tom, the cheek of some people pa.s.ses belief!' Tom replied with more clouds of dust; but the stranger never made a sign. At last I got tired, so I stepped up to the fellow and said to him: 'Look here, my friend, when I asked you to move aside, I meant you should move the other side of the door.' He roused up then, and gave himself a shake, and took a last look at the panther, and said he, 'That's all right, boss; I know all about the door; but--what a spring she's going to make!' Then," added Kemeys, self-reproachfully, "I could have wept!"

But although this superb figure no longer dominates the studio, there is no lack of models as valuable and as interesting, though not of heroic size. Most interesting of all to the general observer are, perhaps, the two figures of the grizzly bear. These were designed from a grizzly which Mr. Kemeys fought and killed in the autumn of 1881 in the Rocky Mountains, and the mounted head of which grins upon the wall overhead, a grisly trophy indeed. The impression of enormous strength, ma.s.sive yet elastic, ponderous yet alert, impregnable for defence as irresistible in attack; a strength which knows no obstacles, and which never meets its match,--this impression is as fully conveyed in these figures, which are not over a foot in height, as if the animal were before us in its natural size. You see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and plates of muscle, and clothed in s.h.a.ggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil.

The action of the right arm and shoulder, and the burly slouch of the arrested stride, are of themselves worth a gallery of pseudo-cla.s.sic Venuses and Roman senators. The other bear is lolling back on his haunches, with all four paws in the air, munching some grapes from a vine which he has torn from its support. The contrast between the savage character of the beast and his absurdly peaceful employment gives a touch of terrific comedy to this design. After studying these figures, one cannot help thinking what a n.o.ble embellishment either of them would be, put in bronze, of colossal size, in the public grounds of one of our great Western cities. And inasmuch as the rich citizens of the West not only know what a grizzly bear is, but are more fearless and independent, and therefore often more correct in their artistic opinion than the somewhat sophisticated critics of the East, there is some cause for hoping that this thing may be brought to pa.s.s.

Beside the grizzly stands the mountain sheep, or cimmaron, the most difficult to capture of all four-footed animals, whose gigantic curved horns are the best trophy of skill and enterprise that a hunter can bring home with him. The sculptor has here caught him in one of his most characteristic att.i.tudes--just alighted from some dizzy leap on the headlong slope of a rocky mountainside. On such a spot nothing but the cimmaron could retain its footing; yet there he stands, firm and secure as the rock itself, his fore feet planted close together, the fore legs rigid and straight as the shaft of a lance, while the hind legs pose easily in attendance upon them. "The cimmaron always strikes plumb-centre, and he never makes a mistake," is Mr. Kemeys's laconic comment; and we can recognize the truth of the observation in this image. Perfectly at home and comfortable on its almost impossible perch, the cimmaron curves its great neck and turns its head upward, gazing aloft toward the height whence it has descended. "It's the golden eagle he hears," says the sculptor; "they give him warning of danger." It is a magnificent animal, a model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself head-foremost down appalling gulfs of s.p.a.ce, and poise itself at the bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the more one studies Mr.

Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and breathing life do they appear.

It would be impossible even to catalogue the contents of this studio, the greater part of which is as well worth describing as those examples which have already been touched upon; nor could a more graphic pen than mine convey an adequate impression of their excellence. But there is here a figure of the 'c.o.o.n, which, as it is the only one ever modelled, ought not to be pa.s.sed over in silence. In appearance this animal is a curious medley of the fox, the wolf, and the bear, besides I-know-not-what (as the lady in "Punch" would say) that belongs to none of those beasts. As may be imagined, therefore, its right portrayal involves peculiar difficulties, and Mr. Kemeys's genius is nowhere better shown than in the manner in which these have been surmounted.

Compact, plump, and active in figure, quick and subtle in its movements, the 'c.o.o.n crouches in a flattened position along the limb of a tree, its broad, shallow head and pointed snout a little lifted, as it gazes alertly outward and downward. It sustains itself by the clutch of its slender-clawed toes on the branch, the fore legs being spread apart, while the left hind leg is withdrawn inward, and enters smoothly into the contour of the furred side; the bushy, fox-like tail, ringed with dark and light bands, curving to the left. Thus posed and modelled in high relief on a tile-shaped plaque, Mr. Kemeys's c.o.o.n forms a most desirable ornament for some wise man's sideboard or mantle-piece, where it may one day be pointed out as the only surviving representative of its species.

The two most elaborate groups here have already attained some measure of publicity; the "Bison and Wolves" having been exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1878, and the "Deer and Panther" having been purchased in bronze by Mr. Winans during the sculptor's sojourn in England. Each group represents one of those deadly combats between wild beasts which are among the most terrific and at the same time most natural incidents of animal existence; and they are of especial interest as showing the artist's power of concentrated and graphic composition. A complicated story is told in both these instances with a masterly economy of material and balance of proportion; so that the spectator's eye takes in the whole subject at a glance, and yet finds inexhaustible interest in the examination of details, all of which contribute to the central effect without distracting the attention. A companion piece to the "Deer and Panther" shows the same animals as they have fallen, locked together in death after the combat is over. In the former group, the panther, in springing upon the deer, had impaled its neck on the deer's right antler, and had then swung round under the latter's body, burying the claws of its right fore foot in the ruminant's throat. In order truthfully to represent the second stage of the encounter, therefore, it was necessary not merely to model a second group, but to retain the elements and construction of the first group under totally changed conditions. This is a feat of such peculiar difficulty that I think few artists in any branch of art would venture to attempt it; nevertheless, Mr. Kemeys has accomplished it; and the more the two groups are studied in connection with each other, the more complete will his success be found to have been. The man who can do this may surely be admitted a master, whose works are open only to affirmative criticism. For his works the most trying of all tests is their comparison with one another; and the result of such comparison is not merely to confirm their merit, but to ill.u.s.trate and enhance it.

For my own part, my introduction to Mr. Kemeys's studio was the opening to me of a new world, where it has been my good fortune to spend many days of delightful and enlightening study. How far the subject of this writing may have been already familiar to the readers of it, I have no means of knowing; but I conceive it to be no less than my duty, as a countryman of Mr. Kemeys's and a lover of all that is true and original in art, to pay the tribute of my appreciation to what he has done.

There is no danger of his getting more recognition than he deserves, and he is not one whom recognition can injure. He reverences his art too highly to magnify his own exposition of it; and when he reads what I have set down here, he will smile and shake his head, and mutter that I have divined the perfect idea in the imperfect embodiment. Unless I greatly err, however, no one but himself is competent to take that exception. The genuine artist is never satisfied with his work; he perceives where it falls short of his conception. But to others it will not be incomplete; for the achievements of real art are always invested with an atmosphere and aroma--a spiritual quality perhaps--proceeding from the artist's mind and affecting that of the beholder. And thus it happens that the story or the poem, the picture or the sculpture, receives even in its material form that last indefinable grace, that magic light that never was on sea or land, which no pen or brush or graving-tool has skill to seize. Matter can never rise to the height of spirit; but spirit informs it when it has done its best, and enn.o.bles it with the charm that the artist sought and the world desired.

*** Since the above was written, Mr. Kemeys has removed his studio to Perth Amboy, N. J.