sity of California ;hern Regional irary Facility I ... CORTISSOZ V ' AVGVSTVS SAINT.GAVDENS "AMOR CARITAS" This bronze in the Luxembourg illustrates an idea which had a peculiar fascination for Saint'Gaudens. The same fig'' ure, but with arms lowered, was used by him for one of the angels of the Morgan tomb at Hartford. Practically identi' cal with this bronze is the angel on the tomb of Ann Maria Smith at Newport, which was carried out by the sculptor's brother, Louis Saint'Gaudens. AVGVSTVS SAINT- GAVDENS BY ROYAL CORTISSOZ * ILLVSTRATED HOVGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK - MDCCCCVII COPYRIGHT 1907 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1907 REPRINTED APRIL, 1908 TO E. H.C SRLF ARTS 1 901 PREFATORY NOTE THE chronology of the works of Saint'Gaudens is difficult, and, in some cases, impossible to fix with abso^ lute accuracy. He was apt to have several commissions in process of execution at the same time, and in more than one instance he carried a task over a considerable period. For example, when I asked him about the Shaw monument, he replied, "I had this many years in my studio, my interest making me do a thing beyond what the sum contracted for justified me in doing." In plac^ ing most of the statues and medallions here illustrated I have followed indications given to me by the sculptor himself. For permission to make use in this monograph of material previously contributed by me to " The North American Review/' " The Outlook," and " The New York Tribune," I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of those publications. ROYAL CORTISSOZ. New York, November i, 1 907. LIST OF ILLVSTRATIONS AMOR CARITAS FRONTISPIECE HOMER SAINT/GAUDENS PAGE 3 RODMAN GILDER 5 PETER COOPER . 9 BASTIEN/LEPAGE 13 GEORGE W. MAYNARD 15 THE CHILDREN OF JACOB H. SCHIFF 19 THE FAMILY OF RICHARD WATSON GILDER . . 21 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 25 FRANCIS D. MILLET 27 THE ADAMS MONUMENT 31 DEACON CHAPIN 35 C. C. BEAMAN 37 MRS. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER 41 MISS VIOLET SARGENT 43 ADMIRAL FARRAGUT 47 WILLIAM M. EVARTS 49 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 53 ROBERT GOULD SHAW 57 GENERAL SHERMAN 61 THE COLUMBUS MEDAL 65 DR. JAMES McCOSH . 69 JOHN HAY 75 CARYATID 83 AVGVSTVS SAINT GAVDENS HEN modern sculpture was betrayed by its leading figures, early in the nineteenth century, through their ex- cessive devotion to the antique, a tra^ dition was established which for a long time seemed beyond all chance of death or change. Canova and Thorwaldsen, in Rome, erected classical precedent into a fetish. In France, which was later to be the scene of a plastic renaissance, anything that savored of personal idiosyncrasy or of romantic feeling was anathema to the Emperor and to Louis David, his court painter, who possessed authority in the direction of public taste in every field. American sculptors, proceeding to Italy for inspiration, were confronted by a kind of unwritten law which left inspiration, in the strict sense, outside the pale of respectable things. In the studios all over Europe masters and pupils were united on the principle that to be great it was absolutely necessary to be " grand," and for the true measure of the grand style they looked only to Greece. Surveying the earlier history of our own school, one is appalled by the damage suffered through this sheep'like adoption of a classic ideal, passionately worshipped but only half understood. It fell like a blight upon those well-meaning workmen, and though many of them lingered long upon the scene, their art, years ago, was dead as nail in door. Greenough, Hiram Powers, Thomas Crawford, William Henry Rinehart, and the rest as I recall the names I recall the lines : As dust that drives, as straws that blow, Into the night go one and all." It is just because these men, members of a group once powerful and famous, have since been so thoroughly dis- credited as artists, that it is interesting to revert to them in approaching the work of Saint-Gaudens. He was, by virtue of actual accomplishment, what even the best of his predecessors was only through the accident of chro- nology a pioneer of American sculpture. The develop- ment of the art with us may fairly be said to date from his appearance. He was not only our greatest sculptor, but the first to break with the old epoch of insipid ideas and hidebound academic notions of style, giving the art a new lease of life and fixing a new standard. All can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed. There are contemporaries of Saint'Gaudens who deserve honor, hardly less than he deserves it, for having breathed vital- ity into American sculpture. There was, for example, 2 HOMER SAINT/GAUDENS This portrait of the sculptor's son was one of the earliest medallions he produced RODMAN GILDER Modelled in Paris at nearly the same rime as the portrait of Homer SainfGaudens. the late Olin Warner, who was born four years before Saint'Gaudens, and who exercised always an elevating influence. But Warner would probably have uttered with eagerness the tribute which the living sculptors in this country yield to Saint^Gaudens, testifying to the initiative he took, to the constructive part he played, in the formation of our school. He entered the field with the mixed racial equipment characteristic of so many distinguished Americans. His mother was an Irishwoman; his father was born in France. Saint'Gaudens himself, born in Dublin, in 1 848, was brought to this country in his earliest childhood; and though he spent more than one period abroad, he remained as distinctly American in his art as though he had come from a long line of native ancestors. With a difference. He did not take up sculpture where Green' ough and the others had left it, working on their foun^ dation and transmogrifying their tradition. He showed his Americanism in striking out in a totally new vein and making his own tradition. Half Irish, half French, and wholly sympathetic to his environment, he was committed to American tendencies, not as an heir, with much to unlearn, but simply in so far as his genius in' dined him to assimilate them. No American artist has shown a greater freedom than he from what are gener^ 7 ally called "early influences," and are specifically de^ scribed as "Soand'So's manner/' He was thirteen when he was apprenticed to a cameo cutter, and he spent sev^ eral years at this craft; but I have never perceived in his sculpture anything to remind one of these beginnings. At night he studied art. Cooper Union and the Academy of Design were both useful to him at this period. Then, / in his nineteenth year, he went to Paris, and at the Ecole des Beaux'Arts profited by the teaching of JoufFroy until the FrancO'Prussian war broke out and he entered upon a three years' residence in Rome. In all that formative period he appears to have worked patiently toward the expression of a temperament which outside influences could stimulate but could not mould to their own like' ness. He was perhaps fortunate in studying under Jouf" froy, a safe master, who, for all his classicism, was never- theless near enough to such men as Rude to have seen, and turned away from, the quicksands of commonplace in which the conventional classicist is sooner or later lost. He was enough of an individualist in his art to keep Saint'Gaudens from falling into routine, and enough of an academician to nourish in his pupil the sense of mea^ sure which might have slumbered if he had fallen into the hands of a more naturalistic teacher. He set him on the right path, helped him to develop his technique along 8 PETER COOPER Modelled in New York and erected beneath the shadow of Cooper Union in 1897. In his boyhood the sculptor studied in the institution founded by the celebrated philanthropist. ERECIED-BY-THE * CITIZEN SOPHEWYDRK-IK CRATEFVLRBftE good lines, and did not for a moment attempt to repress or warp his ideas. In Rome the frigid influences predonv mating did the young sculptor no harm. The classical tradition fertilized his taste, but it did not lure him into imitation of classical forms. The style which Saint' Gaudens brought back with him on his return to this country was remarkable for its blending of polish with freedom. Here was an American who could remain long in contact with the forces of European art and only take from them that which suited him. The special note of the medallions which are conspic' uous among his first productions is one of delicacy, and in the character of that delicacy lies a source of strength which was from first to last of immense service to Saint' Gaudens. It is a delicacy that leaves the door open, so to say, for the raciest realistic impression. The medallions of the modern French school are apt to be over-polished. Even so brilliant a master as Chaplain could not quite divest himself of the notion that a small work in low re- lief must necessarily have something of the character of a minted coin, with no single detail stated at less than its highest value. He and other Frenchmen strangely misread the lesson of the Italian Renaissance, which is that the complicated web of super-subtle light and shade, legitimate in a large Madonna by Mino, say, is better ex- 1 1 changed, in a medallion, for the strong simplicity of those medals in which Pisano and his followers proved that art on a small scale need not be minute in feeling. There is a medallion of Bastien-Lepage by Saint'Gaudens, made just after the brilliant young Frenchman had finished his "Joan of Arc," in which the sculptor ranks himself with the older workers in this province. The touch is at once caressing and bold ; nothing es^ sential is slurred, but neither is anything unduly empha^ sized. In this, and in certain medallions of other artists who were comrades of his in Paris, Frank Millet, Mait- land Armstrong, and George W. Maynard, the sculptor makes us feel that in the manipulation of surface he can be as subtle as anybody, but has no intention of sacrifi' cing vitality to the nuance. On the contrary, he delights in giving a clear, even forcible, impression of the person- ality before him. It is portraiture for the sake of truth and beauty, not for the sake of technique. He was faithful to the same principle in other works of a similar character which he executed in later years, steadily gaining in strength, but never losing the spontaneity which be- longs to his earliest essays. His work in the round is, in a sense, more important; but his medallions alone would serve to make him known as a great artist. In them, and in his upright or oblong panels in low relief, he allowed 12 BASTIEN/LEPAGE Modelled in Paris about 1879. It was done immediately after Bastien' Lepage had finished painting his "Joan of Arc." He made, in exchange, a sketch of Saint'Gaudens. GEORGE W. MAYNARD Modelled in the sculptor's early days in Paris, when he made the similar portraits of Francis D. Millet, D. Maitland Arm/ strong, and other fellow artists. I himself, reasonably enough, a certain decorative effect. Nothing could be happier in arrangement than "The Children of Jacob H. Schiff," with the shaggy hound indicated behind the two children, and the garlands suspended above them from the capitals of the pilasters which enclose the group. Again, in "The Children of Prescott Hall Butler," the composition and treatment of the quaint costumes have a piquancy which only the artist seeing his work as an organic thing, and bent on making it something new and picturesque, could achieve. In a marble relief of Mrs. Stanford White, both the con^ ception and the execution have the dainty realism and the exquisiteness which we associate with the finest souvenirs of Tuscan sculptors. Masterly craftsmanship marks these reliefs, but their atmosphere remains one of engaging naturalness. The exception to the rule is pro' vided by the " Miss Violet Sargent," in which the figure, in a modern dress, seated upon a carved bench, is repre- sented playing a guitar. The effect is awkward, even ugly, but fortunately it illustrates the sculptor's sole de^ parture from the ideal of subtle grace and suavity of line which was, on the whole, part and parcel of his artistic nature. The " Miss Violet Sargent " is a case of modern^ ity not quite successfully hit off. In dealing with the late Robert Louis Stevenson, on '7 the other hand, Saint'Gaudens managed to be modern without crossing the line that separates art from photo^ graphy. The Stevenson is known in two versions. The first of these, the circular one, dates from 1887, when the romancer was ill in New York. Saint' Gaudens modelled the head and shoulders in five sittings of two hours each, just before Stevenson went to the Adiron^ dacks. He did the hands from drawings which he made at Manasquan, and from casts executed at the same time, on the eve of Stevenson's departure for Samoa. The long relief for the memorial in St. Giles's Church in Edin^ burgh was modelled in Paris in 1 900 from the medallion aforesaid, and, by the way, the history of this work of" fers an apt example of the difficulty which Saint'Gaudens sometimes found in pleasing himself, and the ardor with which he rehandled a thing until he made it right. I found him laboring over it in his Paris studio and con^ siderably worried by it. The relief was cast, but on its arrival here the sculptor's dissatisfaction revived and he remodelled it, making some simplifications. To return to the question of modernity, it may be noted that, in both these portraits, Stevenson is shown as a sick man reclining. There has been some criticism of the pose, and objections have been raised to the cigarette between Ste^ venson's fingers. As a matter of fact, the details in ques^ 18 THE CHILDREN OF JACOB H. SCHIFF Modelled in New York in 1888. THE FAMILY OF RICHARD WATSON GILDER Modelled in Paris in the intervals of work upon the Farragut monument tion are, in the first place, necessary to the characteristic impression sought; and, furthermore, they have been treated with such discretion that not one of them en- dangers the balance of the design. On the contrary, these are two of the best things Saint-Gaudens ever did, real- istic in essence, but in each case with the figure so well placed, and modelled with so much delicacy and beauty of style, that the result is thoroughly sculpturesque. Cer- tainly, no more beautiful memorial to Stevenson could have been devised than the one which Edinburgh owes to this American artist. Talking one day in Paris with the late Paul Leroi, I spoke of the meretricious elements which have crept into the art of certain men, notably one celebrated sculptor at present more or less devoted to the goddess of reclame. I brought up, for contrast, the work of Saint-Gaudens, and my companion fastened upon the name. " Ah, there is a man ! " he exclaimed. " Do you remember his medal- lion of Bastien-Lepage ? " Every one remembers it who has given any thought at all to the sculpture of the last thirty years ; every one has p uised it ; but I found a spe- cial interest in what recollection of the portrait led my French friend to say. The opinions of a foreigner have a value of their own, and in this case they gathered weight from the fact that the speaker had been studying 2 3 European art for half a century. What chiefly struck him about Saint'Gaudens's work was its beautiful in^ tegrity. " It is work well done," he said. " It is true ; it is sincere ; it has never been degraded by the tricks of thoughtless cleverness ; he has never made any sacrifices to reclame." There you have one of the reasons why Saint'Gaudens stands in the front rank of the creative artists of his period. There is a genuineness about all that he did which made him a tower of strength to American art. In discussing his medallions and works in low relief, I have ignored, in a measure, the chronology of his career. But even if dates were not a matter of small mo' ment in the art of a man who would keep a statue in his studio for years if he were not content with its first state, I would wish to turn now to a question bearing upon his whole record. This is the question of what sub' ject, aside from portraiture, meant to him. The only nude figure in the list of his works is the Diana sur^ mounting the tower of the Madison Square Garden in New York. As first modelled and placed in position this was eighteen feet high; but Saint'Gaudens and Stanford White took it down at their own expense and replaced it by the present version, which is five feet shorter. The incident emphasizes the point that this was not projected 24 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Stevenson was staying for a short time at a New York hotel on his way to the Adirondacks in 1887. He gave Saint/ Gaudens five sittings of two hours each for the head and shoulders of this medallion. In modelling the hands the sculptor used drawings and casts made at Manasquan just prior to the romancer's departure for Samoa. FRANCIS D. MILLET Modelled, like the portrait of George W. Maynard, during the sculptor's early days in Paris. as a piece of statuary pure and simple, but as a decorative finial, to be seen from a distance, at which the pose and the outline would alone be significant. Considered in this light, it is a captivating performance, graceful, pK> turesque, and a good illustration of what ensues to the public advantage when an artist improves an opportU' nity of the sort usually left to a mechanic. But it is not by work in this vein that Saint'Gaudens is known. For evidence of his imaginative power as applied to themes apart from the movement of con temporary life, we must look to his draped figures. Among these there stand some works of extraordi' nary nobility. They are variations on a type which he created more than twenty years ago. He showed then that he could carve an angel which would be neither fantastic nor sentimental, but simply an image of spn> ituality. Fate was unkind. The three figures for the Morgan tomb at Hartford were destroyed by fire. But even in the photograph of one of them which lies before me as I write, the loveliness of the sculptor's ideal of feminine form is obvious. The angel stands with hands outstretched, holding a scroll from which she sings. An expression of peaceful happiness irradiates the pure fea^ tures. The loose^flowing robe, confined at the waist with a girdle of leafage, is marked by many rippling folds. It 29 is a beautiful figure, the attitude is perfect, and, above all, this angel expresses an imaginative idea. The same idea recurs, somewhat modified, in the caryatides executed for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt,in the Smith tomb at Newport, and in the similar relief which, with a group of medallions, represents Saint-Gaudens in the Luxenv bourg. It is an idea of delicate form, interpenetrated with an emotion peculiarly sweet, spiritual, and reposeful. The key is tenderly poetic, elegiac. Romantic as it is, it still does not exhaust his scope. There is another work de- monstrating that Saint-Gaudens could, when he chose, rise to a tragic plane. This, the Adams monument at Washington, is, for a kind of restrained grandeur, not only the finest thing of its kind ever produced by an American sculptor, but an achievement which modern Europe has not surpassed. The single figure in this monument sits enveloped in heavy drapery on a rough-hewn block of granite, against a wall of the same material. Her face is visible ; the right hand is raised to support the chin, and one sees the bare arm to the elbow ; but, for the rest, the form is muffled as in unearthly garments. It is a mysterious, sphinx-like presence, strange and massive, with something of terror, but more of solemn dignity and beauty, in its broad sim- ple lines. Her riddle is past finding out. All that we 3 THE ADAMS MONUMENT This bronze upon the grave of Mrs. Henry Adams, in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, belongs to the middle period of the sculptor's career. It was erected in 1887. Various sym> bolical names have been given to it, but without the author/ ity of SainfGaudens, who never invented any title for it. know is that it is such conceptions as this that " light the way of kings to dusty death/' I have seen it more than once, under different conditions. It is impressive in sun^ shine, confronting happy nature with its sombre secret. But on a bleak winter's day or in rain, its mournful charm is heightened; and here, one reflects, far beyond the mea^ sure of any other of his compositions, Saint^Gaudens is the poet, the dramatist, intermingling with the concrete qualities of plastic art the more elusive qualities of mind and soul. I have thought, standing before this great work, of certain masters in French sculpture. I have recalled Dubois, in one of his figures for the tomb of General Lamoriciere ; Rodin, in divers of his hierophantic impro^ visations, and several remarkable statues by colleagues of theirs, men on a lower plane, but still eminent. None of these foreigners has, in my opinion, ever modelled a statue at once so simple and so full of meaning as this one at Washington. Where Dubois would have made it dignified, noble, but academic to the point of cold' ness, Saint-Gaudens has clothed it with an air charged with the thrilling implications of the grave. Where Rodin would have made it speak of movement, would have made it rugged and almost luridly epical, Saint' Gaudens has made the figure symbolical of rest itself, and has been tragic through intensity, not through env 33 phasis or gesture. I remember how many fine French statues have been spoiled by the hint of the theatre intro^ duced, by some exaggeration in the expression of the face or by arbitrary arrangement of the limbs ; and I rejoice anew in the determination with which Saint^Gaudens turned his back upon all meretricious expedients and gave to this statue the bare majesty of a passage from Homer. It is interesting to note that this landmark in American sculpture, on its imaginative side, was mod' elled by an artist who never wreaked himself to any extent on allegorical and symbolical composition. The several angelic figures he produced are, when all is said, merely angelic. Their physiognomies are furrowed by no lines of complex thought. But the seated divinity in the cemetery Sit Washington touches the mind at many points, and is remembered with a sense of profundity and supernatural wonder. It is Saint'Gaudens's one memorable effort in the sphere of the loftiest abstraction. His other greatest tri' umphs were won in the field of portraiture, working in the round and on the scale of a public monument. Twice his subject met him halfway in respect to picturesque^ ness: when he made the Chapin monument at Spring' field, known as "The Puritan," and when, with the assistance of Miss Lawrence, he erected a statue of 34 DEACON CHAPIN Modelled in New York in the late eighties. It is not in> tended as a portrait, but as an ideal embodiment of the traits of " The Puritan," the tide by which it is generally known. It stands in Springfield, Mass. CO! i S ' rf -THE-FOVHDER vOF C C. BEAMAN Modelled in the early eighties. Columbus in front of the Administration Building at the Chicago Fair. The Columbus, I suppose, having been put up in staff for a temporary purpose, has ere this dis^ appeared. One is easily reconciled to the loss. It was a striking but not permanently impressive piece of work. The tall commander, standing in cloak and armor, with sword uplifted in one hand and a voluminous standard supported in the other, though undeniably effective, somehow lacked the quality of style. " The Puritan," however, endures to illustrate Saint'Gaudens's aptitude in the interpretation of a bygone personality and in the treatment of unconventional costume ; and it is a briL liant statue. The stalwart old New^Englander advances toward us with energetic tread, his stout staff seeming to ring upon the ground, and the clutch of his fingers upon the Bible under his arm bespeaking the ardent and dogmatic religionist. The wide brim of the peaked hat shades the face of a man of iron will. The long and heavy cloak, that falls nearly to his heels, seems a coat of mail for this peaceable warrior in an age of simple living and strenuous thinking on sublime themes. The statue is a strong piece of characterization. It is also an admirable study of form, boldly modelled, like all of Saint'Gaudens's public statues, but with a touch in it more pictorial than he elsewhere cared to employ. 39 Elsewhere, indeed, he practically always had to solve a far more difficult problem than he faced in making " The Puritan/' In the relief of Dr. Bellows for the Church of All Souls in New York, he could gain an inv posing effect through the flow of ecclesiastical robes, and he had some little help of a similar sort in the McCosh Memorial at Princeton. But in the five monuments in which he commemorated five heroes of our Civil War, he had no aid from costume or accessories. He had in stead to work on the bed rock of character, and he did this with results that put to shame the artists perpetually complaining that they are handicapped by the nature of modern clothes. The Farragut, in Madison Square, New York, was the first public statue he was commiS' sioned to make. He modelled it in Paris in i 880. The Lincoln, at Chicago, dates from the middle nineties, and the Logan, likewise at Chicago, belongs to the same period. Saint^Gaudens began work on the Shaw Me^ morial, for Boston, in i 8 84, and expected to complete it in a couple of years, but it was not unveiled until 1897. General Sherman gave him, in 1887, some eighteen sittings for the familiar bust, but the equestrian statue erected in New York in 1903 was begun some years later, and was long in being carried to completion. No one but the sculptor himself could have told the psycho^ 40 MRS. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER Modelled in New York in 1888. MISS VIOLET SARGENT A portrait of the sister of the painter. There is also a me/ dallion of the latter by Saint/Gaudens. logical history of these undertakings; no one else could have said to what extent each one of them was isolated from the others as a matter of study, or formed part of a kind of sequence in his mind. But I do not think one would go far wrong in regarding the entire group as the outcome of a broad sympathy for one capital fact in our history, the War, with all that it means to a lover of his country. In other words, just as we think of RafFet as the pictorial interpreter of the Napoleonic regime on its military side, we cannot but recognize in Saint' Gaudens the representative, in plastic art, of our own tremendous struggle. Was he at the outset conscious of an ambition destined to flower in such a position as this? It is more than doubtful. Yet it is pleasant to think of him as foreordained to carry out these splendid works, and certainly they have, whether taken separately or to" gether, the quality convincing us that no one else could have done them quite so well. It is not simply that each one of the monuments has certain specific artistic merits, lifting it to a high plane. It is rather that in each of his studies of historical subjects, Saint-Gaudens somehow struck the one definitive note, made his Lincoln or his Sherman a type which the generations must revere and which no future statues can invalidate. Monuments to leaders in the great conflict are already excessively 45 numerous, and some of them are worthy ; but none, as it seems to me, has the authority to which Saint-Gaudens attained in all of his. Though he strengthened his art as the years passed, this virtue of dramatic truth is perceptible as clearly in his earliest as in his latest work. The Farragut, for ex- ample, undoubtedly wants the grandeur of the eques- trian Sherman, but it remains the best of all our trib- utes to the dead admiral. I have heard criticisms of the pose. Ribald remarks have been made about what has been called "the Farragut strut/* It is not a strut at all, but simply the natural carriage of a seaman. Indeed, the whole spirit of this monument is delightfully significant of the quarter-deck, a fact which may trouble those who fear realism in art as they fear the plague, but which carries its own recommendation to those conscious of the importance of realistic principles when they are pro- perly handled. They are handled with excellent judg- ment in the Farragut. To call it breezy would be to overstate the case, but it is true that Saint-Gaudens pro- duced on this occasion a figure instinct with the energy of a man fronting perils in the open air, amid great winds and under a vast sky. It owes something, by the way, to the pedestal, which is at once charmingly decorative and quite weighty enough to provide a true monu' ADMIRAL FARRAGUT This was the sculptor's first commission for a statue. He modelled it in Paris, exhibiting it in the Salon there in 1880. It was erected in New York in the following year. WILLIAM M. EVARTS Modelled in New York immediately after the sculptor's return from Italy. Mr. Evarts was one of his first patrons, and this was the first portrait bust that Saint'Gaudens exe/ cuted. mental base for the bronze. It is well to remember the date of the Farragut, 1880-81. At that time we were still more or less held in thrall by the facile makers of "soldiers' monuments," those dreary, lifeless produc- tions which cheered our patriotism and ought to have shocked our taste. Saint-Gaudens pointed a way to a better order of things. To do this was to do much, but the sculptor did more when the commission for the Lin- coin at Chicago was given to him. Under the pressure of a greater inspiration than Farragut supplied, his art leaped forward, rising to a more imposing height. The Lincoln has always seemed to me one of the salient statues of the world, a portrait and a work of art of truly heroic mould. Simplicity is its predominating characteristic. Precisely in this attitude does one prefer to see Lincoln portrayed, with no hint of dramatic move- ment, with nothing of the orator, but with everything of the quiet, self-contained genius that was the same under all circumstances, in all crises. There is more elo- quence in the grip of the left hand on the edge of the coat than in any gesture which an artist of melodramatic tendencies might possibly have invented. Invention, in- deed, has no place here. It is as if Saint-Gaudens had divined Lincoln's very soul and had imaged him forth as men saw him under the stress of the war, and as he lives in the imagination of millions who never beheld him in the flesh, but who feel, with deepest gratitude, as though they had known him all their lives. Here, in the tall and intensely human figure, American to the core, with its magnificent head that has, to my mind, more of living grandeur than belongs to the marble of any antique hero we have the Lincoln of Lowell's lines, How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead ; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear'grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity ! They knew that outward grace is dust ; They could not choose but trust In that sure/footed mind's unfaltering skill, And supple'tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. His was no lonely mountain/peak of mind, Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind ; Broad prairie rather, genial, leveMined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, 52 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Modelled in New York in the eighties, and unveiled in Chicago in 1887. The pedestal and exedra were designed by the late Stanford White. Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface And thwart her genial will ; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. Lowell, gathering up into his "Commemoration Ode" the traits which all men have learned to see in Lincoln, gives us a portrait with an accent of its own. Saint' Gaudens does the same thing. We think first of Lincoln when seated in the stately exedra with which Stanford White partly enclosed the statue, but one of the mariy thoughts with which we leave the work is of its origix nality, of the way in which Saint'Gaudens has stamped his own individuality upon the bronze. I come back to the question of his style, its polish that is never hard, its freedom that never passes into license. In the treatment of the hopelessly commonplace costume in the statue, all depended upon an avoidance of anything like self- assertion. WTien occasion requires it, Saint-Gaudens can beguile us with every touch that he bestows upon the clay. We see a work of his as a whole, and yet linger with pleasure over this or that passage. In the Lincoln the modelling is so broad, it is so sterling an example of the art of generalization, that no single detail attracts 55 the eye. This is the grand style as the classicists of our old school failed to understand it, to their lasting cost. Saint'Gaudens abandoned it, consciously or uncon^ sciously, when he modelled the equestrian statue of General Logan for Chicago, and was, no doubt, justified in so doing. He had a valiant warrior to portray, and perhaps it was fitting to represent him controlling a fiery animal and bearing a flag aloft with the air of a con^ queror in the face of the enemy. It is a stirring piece of sculpture, ebulliently alive, and, like the Farragut, a wonderfully intimate interpretation of a moving per^ sonality. All that the motive demanded is adequately ex' pressed. The smell of the battlefield has to go into a good portrait of "Black Jack" Logan, and Saint'Gaudens, conscientious artist that he was, paid it due attention, But somehow he does not seem happy in this work, he is not wholly himself. The flamboyant lies outside the sphere in which he moved with greatest ease and con^ tentment, and I cite the Logan both for its confirmation, by contrast, of the broad drift of his art and for its per^ feet illustration of what the French critic I have quoted called the "beautiful integrity" of Saint^Gaudens's work. If the Logan does not impress us as the Lincoln does, it is the fault of the subject, not of the sculptor; he at least did his duty by it. One is easily lured from this, 56 ROBERT GOULD SHAW When Saint'Gaudens undertook this memorial in 1884 he expected to complete it within a comparatively short time, but he became absorbed in modifications of the scheme, and kept it by him for a number of years. It was unveiled in Boston in 1897. however, as the Lincoln lures us from the Farragut, to the two other equestrian monuments which complete the group of Saint'Gaudens's Civil War memorials, the Shaw and the Sherman. The first of these suffers from two serious drawbacks. The bronze casting of the Shaw is far from satisfactory, and the monument is unfor^ tunately placed in front of the State House in Boston, at a point which prevents the spectator from seeing it unobstructed at just the right distance. But it might be still further handicapped without losing its effect, which is one of interfused fire and pathos. The colored troops marching across the relief to the beat of the drum con^ vey the needed impression of martial animation ; and Shaw, on his advancing charger, deepens the sense of tense excitement which it is one of the sculptor's aims to communicate. Simultaneously, though, with our appre^ hension of what is spectacular and thrilling in the relief, comes our perception of the sadness in Shaw's face and the melancholy beauty of the figure that floats above him. The scheme is daring. Ever since Velasquez pain ted the Surrender of Breda, his arrangement of the long lances in that glorious canvas has been emulated by one artist after another, and always the collocation of verti" cal lines has driven them to despair. Saint^Gaudens must have struggled sorely before he marshalled the uplifted 59 muskets and flags in the Shaw in an array neither rest' less nor inert. As the work stands, however, there is no sign of struggle. The weapons represented, like the fig' ures, fall into an unbroken harmony. The composition is a perfect unit. This is one explanation of the grandeur of the Sher^ man. The difficulty of the problem by which he was confronted when he undertook it, and the measure of his success in dealing with it, are the better understood if one pauses to consider the rarity of those occasions in history upon which similar problems have received any' thing like adequate solution. Ancient times give us the steeds of the Parthenon and the famous horses of St. Mark's ; the splendid animal which the bronze figure of Marcus Aurelius bestrides in the Piazza del Campidoglio, at Rome; the leaping chariot team of the Vatican, and other fine but less eminent examples. The great eques' trian statues of the modern world may be counted with' out exhausting the fingers of one hand. Verrocchio's Colleoni at Venice heads the list, with Donatello's Gat' tamelata at Padua. Had Leonardo's model for the mon' ument of Francesco Sforza, at Milan, not been destroyed by vandals, leaving no wrack behind, we may be sure that a third triumph would have been compassed. But of the statues that survive how many are worthy to stand be' 60 GENERAL SHERMAN In 1887 Saint'Gaudens made the well-known bust of Sher/ man, modelling it "with great care," as he said, in about eighteen sittings of two hours each. This bust supplied the basis for the portrait in the equestrian statue. The figures of Sherman and the horse were modelled in New York, as was the Victory (the latter being first modelled from the nude), and then the work was taken to Paris to be enlarged to its present scale and cast in bronze. The monument was unveiled in New York in 1 903. side the Venetian and Paduan masterpieces ? Certainly not the Philip IV of the Florentine, Tacca, at Madrid, spirited though it is. Nor is Falconet's Peter the Great, at St. Petersburg, the perfect work that that accomplished Frenchman sought to make it. Coming down to more recent generations, the Frederick the Great of Rauch, at Berlin, impresses us without waking the least enthusi' asm, and in our own day really inspired equestrian stat' ues are harder than ever to find. One exists in Paris, the Jeanne d'Arc of Paul Dubois, but it is the sole French masterpiece of its kind. The general level of the Parisian school is that of Fremiet's Jeanne d'Arc, in the Rue de Rivoli, brilliant but not lofty. It is no exaggeration to say that if Saint'Gaudens's Sherman is to be grouped with any of these statues I have mentioned, it must be with those of the Renaissance masters. It is worthy of them partly because of its unity of composition, the horse, its rider and the figure of Victory being consummately well adjusted one to the other, and all three to a single effect of dramatic grandeur ; partly because it is a product of great technical skill; partly be^ cause it bears the stamp of style, breathing the authority of a man of genius. But no less important than any one of these elements perhaps, indeed, the most import' ant of the various sources of the artist's success is his 63 power of interpreting his subject at just that moment in which its vitality passes the most felicitously into the envelope of art. In the representation of an equestrian group, sculpture, since the Athenian era, has always os- ciliated between the repose that spells lifelessness and the movement that spells violence. Only the very greatest artists have found that middle ground on which their horses, whether stock-still, pacing, or prancing, have kept the golden mean, signifying neither the uncapturable freedom of nature nor the immobility of art, but a perfect blend of what is strictly sculpturesque in both. Saint' Gaudens found that middle ground. His horse is obvi- ously advancing, and Sherman's body, tense with nerv- ous energy, is at one with the body beneath him, equally expressive of movement. The winged Victory in every fibre quivers with the rhythm of oncoming resistless force. But so perfect is the balance of this group, so un- erring has the sculptor been in the fusion of elasticity with restraint, that, while his work is at every point alive, it has the calm dignity which alone befits a monumental work of art. One way of emphasizing this is to compare the Sherman with some such familiar composition as the Emperor William of Begas at Berlin; the gulf that separates genius from mediocrity is then vividly realized. The German sculptor's solution of his problem is THE COLUMBUS MEDAL - Modelled for the exhibition held at Chicago in 1893, in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of Columbus. Of the two designs made by Saint/ Gaudens, the second was adopted. The reverse of the one abandoned has a special interest, the figure illustrating, as does the Diana for the top of the Madison Square tower in New York, the very rare introduction of the nude into his work. fully disappointing, even though he had the precious aid provided by an elaborate architectural scheme. Not all the paraphernalia of the vast monument on the Spree can obscure the fact that the central group is made up of only factitiously related parts, that no harmony of form or line, of mass and light and shade, is established amongst the varied elements of the design. In Saint' Gaudens's work the rhythm of the dramatic conception is held so well in hand, it is so majestic, that classic art itself could not produce a more nobly monumental effect. Saint'Gaudens had, indeed, this much in common with the antique, that he could not be trivial or violent, but had to see life and treat it in his art with a wide and steady vision, a strong hand, and a lofty feeling. Sincerity is writ large upon everything he did, from the medallions of his earlier days to the Sherman, which was the fruit of his maturity. He was fortunate in his opportunities, which enabled him to illustrate American history in statues of some of its most representative figures. At Springfield, in the Chapin monument, he embodied the traits of our Puri- tan forefathers. At Chicago his statue of Lincoln touches the highest plane in the commemoration of our noblest type of statesmanship. In New York his Farragut is an unique souvenir of our naval history, and the Sherman stands with an even greater eloquence for the other arm of the service. It is a matter for deep gratitude that the man who had these opportunities used them in such wise as to strengthen among his countrymen both pa^ triotism and the love of beauty. This dual significance of his work is particularly to be noted. Saint' Gaudens was always a keen craftsman, always solicitous of the decorative note, but so, likewise, was he invariably care^ ful to have something to say, to make his art interesting as well as effective in pure form. " Interesting " is env phatically the word, denoting a virtue which embraces a multitude of things and belongs in the foreground, es^ pecially where public monuments are concerned. We rightly praise an artist for working with no thought of anything save the task in hand ; we despise him if he " plays to the gallery ." Yet it is transcendently import" ant that the portrait in bronze or marble of a national hero should speak in unmistakable terms alike to the connoisseur and to the quite uninstructed man. A char^ acter must be humanly realized, made to live upon its pedestal so that the heart of the patriot as well as the mind of the dilettante may be touched. There is no thought here of making a vulgar concession to the mob ; there is thought only of the sympathy, the emotion, by which the greatest men of genius in all ages have been 68 DR. JAMES McCOSH This memorial to the President of Princeton was erected there in 1889. moved. It is because with Saint-Gaudens this sympathy, this emotion, always kept pace with his strictly plastic faculty, that his statues lifted themselves far above the level of ordinary sculpture and have leavened the public taste to an extent difficult to compute without the use of terms which might, at first blush, seem excessive. The influence of Saint-Gaudens is only partly to be indicated by reference to the younger men who served as his assistants and otherwise received instruction in his studio. In fact, this phase of the question need scarcely detain us, for his way with a disciple was to encourage the latter's own gifts ; and while several sculptors of tal- ent might be cited as owing him much, it could not be said that he founded a school. No followers of his have caught the magic of his style. But what is infinitely more to the point, the whole broad movement of art in this country is the better for his having touched it ; appreciation of what is right and fine is the wider and deeper because he did so much to accustom men's minds to a higher standard. We like to believe that all a nation needs for the creation of a national art is a band of com- petent artists, but these men must breathe a congenial atmosphere and their work must be wan ted by their con- temporaries. The statues made by Saint-Gaudens have richly contributed to the awakening and the fostering of our artistic conscience. They have shown the layman, long put off with imitation sculpture, what the real thing is, and have thereby led him to be more and more fastid" ious in his demands. The appeal of the public monu' ment is direct and lasting. You cannot live in the same place with a work like the Lincoln and continue to be content with grossly inferior sculpture. If, by chance, you happen to have a voice in the preparation of some memorial in bronze, you^are bound to give your vote for something that at least approximates to the master*- piece you have learned to admire. Nor, in this matter, am I indulging in pleasant theory. Bad sculpture, vulgar sculpture, no doubt persists in getting itself made to this day, but that we have less of it every year the squares of our cities abundantly prove, and that the example of SaintxGaudens did a great deal to bring about the change is, I think, equally certain. Besides educating the community through his works, he exercised a beneficent influence in ways not generally known. Many more commissions than he could find the time to execute were offered to him or brought to his knowledge. He would give advice as to their treatment and often he would select the sculptor, at once helping a junior to make his way in the world and satisfying the need of the patron or committee, for he had a fine 72 sense of responsibility and never would place a task in the wrong hands. Few realize the amount of time and trouble that he gave to interests not his own, but im- portant to the cause of art. When he made his second journey to Europe, in 1 87 8, he was asked to serve on the jury of the Universal Exposition, and thenceforth, all his life long, he was constantly assuming similar bur- dens. If the city of Washington ever develops along the magnificent lines laid down in the now famous re- port of the Park Commission, its beauty will be due in part to the share which Saint-Gaudens had in the fram- ing of that report. He was of a nervous temperament and a man who loved the retirement of his own studio, but he would give freely of his energies whenever they seemed to be needed in a good work. His generosity came out, too, in all the private relations of an artist. No one could have been more helpful than he was to young men of talent. I remember the delight and pride a sculptor of my acquaintance had in a visit Saint- Gaudens once paid him. My friend had put a fine piece of work to his credit. Saint-Gaudens did not know him, but when he saw it he demanded the stranger's address, jumped into a cab, and, though he wasnot by any means in good health, made the rather long journey to the young man's door. " I am Mr. Saint-Gaudens/' he said, 73 when it was opened, " and I Ve come down to tell you what I think of the beautiful work you have done/' He stayed long enough to give his grateful and bewildered listener such happy stimulus as he had never known before. It was the more encouraging, too, because praise from Saint'Gaudens was long ago recognized as having a special value by those who knew him or knew of him it was always as wise and suggestive as it was kind. No one could have been more sympathetic than he was in the discussion of work by other men. He was not a voluminous talker, but, like every creative artist of the first rank, when he did talk he spoke to the point. He would remain silent sometimes while others were tear' ing a question of art to pieces. When, in a quiet way, he made his contribution to the subject, it was apt to carry more weight, to be more illuminating, than anything any one else had said. You felt, too, the play of a singularly just spirit in his conversation. Once, in a long talk in his New Hampshire studio, we got round to certain French painters, to Ingres, a man of genius, and to others like Delaroche, Flandrin, Scheffer, Chasseriau, whose names are scarcely more than names to the young artist of to' day, delivered over as he is, body and soul, to the mas" ters and methods of a later generation. Saint'Gaudens went to the heart of the subject, speaking warmly of 74 JOHN HAY the grave spirit, the pure style, and the fine mastery with which those men triumphed over what the modern eye finds "old fashioned" in the French school of that epoch. That was like him, like his liberal and loyal ture, quick to seize upon essentials in art. His own ius was for things grave and pure and fine. Also it was for things frankly human and alive, and if, as I have shown, no student ever emerged from the discipline of the French seventies with a greater freedom from aca^ demic coldness, with a keener zest for the realities of life and art, none ever kept this fervor more superbly down to the end. Discipline helped, it did not enchain him. As we talked I could see, stretched across the wall at one end of the studio, an immense photograph of one of Raphael's faultlessly constructed decorations, and I thought of how Saint'Gaudens himself strove constantly for a kindred perfection, responded to the abstract appeal that is Ra^ phael's, yet never touched the clay without putting upon it the impress of a powerful and totally free personality. In his criticism, as in his work, he seemed to know all the laws, but to be simply incapable of giving them pe^ dantic application. There was another way in which Saint'Gaudens re^ called that Renaissance of which he was so worthy. I refer to his unusual productivity. Sculpture is no child's 77 play. No other artistic profession entails such arduous and even back-breaking labors. The mere physical de- tails that go to the making of a statue are excessively burdensome. "People think a sculptor has an easy life in a studio," he once said to me, with a rueful smile, as we entered his workshop, a maze of clay models, plas- ter casts, scaffolds, and ladders, in which half a dozen assistants were busily occupied. "It's hard labor, in a factory," he added. He worked slowly, too, and he was easily depressed. I recall his moodiness over the criticism a friend had made when pressed to give an opinion on a matter of proportion in a statue just then being mod- elled. It troubled him until he forgot it in the fun of re- membering that we are apt to put our own traits into a work of art, or look for them there unconsciously if some one else has made it. "You know," he went on," they say an artist with a large hand always gives his figures large hands. Perhaps in the same way our friend was looking for his own proportions in my statue." So with a laugh he dismissed the teasing thought, yet he was at bottom an artist to brood long over the details of his work, to change and change and change again, counting no ef- fort vain if it helped him to make his statue perfect. It was my privilege to look on, years ago, at the collabora- tion between him and Stanford White in the designing 78 of a proper base for the Lincoln at Chicago. The spec^ tacle was a lesson in devotion to an ideal of thorough' ness. This ideal was in his blood and never left him. In illness, long afterwards, he was the same conscientious type, the same exacting critic of himself. Did he wish to clarify his thoughts on the Parnell he was doing for Dublin, or the new Lincoln he had long had in hand, a full-size model of the scheme was set up in the open air, and he studied it, making innumerable and costly modifications, until the last difficulty had been con^ quered. It is nothing less than astonishing, then, that he did so much. Let us resume briefly the fruits of his genius and un^ tiring industry in a career lasting a scant forty years. He began his series of great public monuments with the full'length statues of Randall and Farragut. He made the Sherman and the Shaw, the Lincoln, which we all know, and the seated statue of the same subject which is still to be unveiled at Chicago. Besides those studies in picturesqueness, the equestrian Logan and the Chapin monument, he produced the simple memorial to Gar' field at Philadelphia; the statue of Peter Cooper, which stands so soberly realistic, yet with such poetic justice, beneath the shadow of the institution in which Saint' Gaudens studied as a youth ; and the intensely modern 79 full length in bronze of Marcus Daly, which was dedi' cated at Anaconda in Montana only a short time ago. Then, in the field of strictly imaginative work he cre^ ated the Adams monument, the three angels lost in the fire at the Morgan tomb, and the angel of the Smith tomb at Newport. In decoration he modelled the two caryatides in the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Diana for the Madison Square tower. There are busts by him of General Sherman, Miss Page, Mr. W. A. Chanler, and the late John Hay. His works in relief in^ elude the four memorials, to Stevenson, Dr. McCosh, Dr. Bellows, and Mr. Hollingsworth, and medallions portraying Bastien^Lepage, John Sargent, George \V. Maynard, Maitland Armstrong, Frank Millet, Robert Louis Stevenson, Homer Saint^Gaudens, Mrs. Stanford White, Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, Mr. Howells and his daughter, the family of Richard Watson Gilder, the SchifF children, and the Butler children. Be^ sides all these things, and divers others, he left a quan^ tity of work at his death finished save for translation into marble or bronze, and these posthumous creations embrace some of the most important he ever put forth. There are two allegorical groups, each presenting three figures, for the entrance to the Boston Public Library. One of them symbolizes Labor, Music, and Science; 80 the other Law, Executive Power, and Love. He left also a set of caryatides for the facade of the Albright gallery at Buffalo. Four monumental portrait statues date from the closing period of his life : the Parnell and the Lin^ coin, to which I have already referred ; the memorial to Phillips Brooks, which is to be erected in front of Trinity Church at Boston, and the bronze of Marcus Hanna for Cleveland. Finally, there are the new coins designed for the United States Mint. Is this not an heroic mass of work? It was perhaps the most beautiful trait in Saint'Gau' dens's nature that he himself never saw anything in the least heroic about his life's achievement. His greatness shone forth nowhere with a steadier light than in his modesty. It is to the honor of his contemporaries that he was always appreciated and made the recipient of many tokens of public regard. Degrees were conferred upon him by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At Paris, in 1 900, he was awarded the medal of honor, and at Buffalo in the following year a special medal was be^ stowed upon him, an enthusiastic tribute from his fellow artists, who sought lovingly to exalt him above them- selves as the one man they regarded as the master of them all. Yet no one could ever have divined from Saint-Gaudens's walk and demeanor that he had been 81 singled out in this fashion by his countrymen. Not only at work in his studio did he forget the world, a reverent student of his art down to the end of his days ; every > where he was modest to the point of shyness, carrying himself with a peculiar gentleness, a perfect type of the high-minded man of genius. It warmed the heart to hear him speak of some pupil who had done well. It was almost as though the pupil had surpassed him, and thereby made him happier. With his largeness of mind there went a fine sense of humor, which seemed to serve a double purpose, giv- ing a sharper edge to his ideas and manifesting itself in moods of inimitable drollery. He had a kind of passion for caricature and mimicry, and was an adept in both arts. With a few strokes of the pen he could make the gravest visage comic. When he began with voice, face, and hands to reproduce an episode in which he had found amusement, he immediately took you captive, and before the swift little performance was over you thought, through tears of laughter, that a brilliant actor had been lost in him. It is a long time since I saw him describing the first experiment made with the big foun- tain in Lincoln Park at Chicago, but to this day I can see the vivid picture he made, and smile over its incompar- able fun. The water was to be turned on, and a number 82 CARYATID Modelled in New York in the early eighties, just after the unveiling of the Farragut, for the house of Cornelius Van/ derbilt of dignitaries stood in tense expectation of a gorgeous e feet. The signal was given, the mechanics did their duty, and then, in place of magnificent gushing streams, there came forth a few feeble trickles. Saint'Gaudens made the whole scene live before his auditors ; they waited breathless and excited for the swelling climax, and they were dissolved in mirth, as he was, over the absurd cok lapse of the whole thing. To hear him tell a story was a privilege and a joy. To know him on his graver side, to realize the ten^ derness and the patience that was in him, was to be even more grateful for his friendship. He had not an atom of sentimentality, but men who once gained his affection held it, and cherished it as one of the genuine gifts of life. I like to remember him in association with the memory of the late Joseph M. Wells, an architect of genius who was one of his closest comrades. For some years after the death of this brilliant man and so long as Saint'Gaudens had a studio in New York, it was there that the survivors of his circle assembled one Sun^ day afternoon annually to listen to those quartets of Beethoven that Wells had prized above all others. Saint' Gaudens was not given to the facile expression. of his deeper emotions, but in some subtle way he was the pre^ siding spirit of these concerts ; you remembered Wells 85 the more lovingly through his friend's remembrance of him. When physical trouble fell upon Saint'Gaudens himself, he suffered and was brave. I saw him in Paris when he was first called upon to bring his powers of endurance into play. We travelled to London together, and though the journey was terribly hard upon him, he made it without a murmur, and was far less concerned about himself than fearful of distressing others. It was characteristic of him that he would not allow illness to keep him the next day from going to see Sargent's work at the Academy, and in talk then he ignored his own anxieties, thinking only to praise the painter. There were many winning sides to his character, he had many moods. But most endearing of all was he in the struggle he made against sickness and pain. In that he revealed splendid courage and cheerfulness, bearing his burdens with a sweetness that those who knew and loved him can never forget. CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS U S A University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. EC'P IP ' JAN 2 3 1998 MAR 2 5 1998 JAN 1 000759331 2 University of Califo Southern Region