MADONNABy Herbert AdamsTympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York
MADONNABy Herbert AdamsTympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York
MADONNA
By Herbert Adams
Tympanum for St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York
PORTRAIT BUSTBy Herbert Adams
PORTRAIT BUSTBy Herbert Adams
PORTRAIT BUST
By Herbert Adams
Evidently actuated by such intentions, Adams has frequently resorted to colour in portrait reliefs and busts, with so choice a feeling that they have a quality of very rare distinction. In one case, while the form is marble of a pinkish, creamy hue, the bodice of the dress and full-puffed sleeves are carved in wood of a pale-cedar colour and an embroidered band across the bosom is sprinkled with gems of lapis lazuli and green. This last feature is handled with exquisitefinesse, while the character of the rest of the design is large and simple. Two of his busts are illustrated here, and in one case there is colour treatment and in the other the marble has been left in its purity. The former suffers by reproduction, since the photographic process has altered the relation between the coloured portions and the rest, giving a sharpness of contrast to the eyes and mouth; and it is at a further disadvantage, for the sake of comparison, because the other is an exceptionally fine example of Adams’s work. A portrait of the artist’s wife reveals an intimacy of sympathetic comprehension and a loving reverence of expression that make it a quite unusual work. It is pervaded also with an exquisite mystery of feeling, as of something beyond the artist’s and the husband’s knowledge hidden behind the veil of the woman’s separateexistence, but a mystery the quality of which his knowledge comprehends. For there is mystery also in the face of the other bust, but more enigmatic; only a partial reading of the character and to the rest no clue. While the one portrait reveals a character matured and comprehensible, notwithstanding that its outlines merge into conjecture, the other leaves one guessing, as do many of the old Florentine women’s portraits.
The “Bust of the Artist’s Wife” in its melodious rendering of light and shade illustrates very pointedly the predominance of the colour or painter feeling over the sculptural, of expression over structure. It is more or less felt in all Adams’s busts, and is very noticeable in low reliefs, such as the “Hoyt Memorial” and the “Pratt Memorial” tablets, where he followed his own promptings. But when he works in coöperation with an architect, the latter’s influence disturbs the oneness of his motive and draws him to considerations of the architectonic use of form, which results in some impairment of the expression.
In the “Hoyt Memorial” two angels, floating in the air, support a tablet with inscription. Emphasis is given to the heads and arms and, in a less degree, to the wings; but the rest of theform is indicated little more than is necessary to explain the arrangement of the streaming folds of light drapery. The result is a delicate pattern of light and shade, a decoration of sweetly refined imagination, corresponding with the gracious refinement of the expression in the faces. A similar appreciation fits the “Pratt Memorial Angel” which he modelled for the Baptist Emmanuel Church in Brooklyn, although the figure is in the round. In the “Pratt Memorial” tablet, executed some years later, Adams reveals how exquisitely he can use flower forms as motive for decoration. The design forms the border of a long, narrow panel. At the top is a winged head, symbolising the Angel of the Resurrection, and at the foot a head without wings, representing the Sleep of Death. The latter is enfolded with poppy-flowers and leaves, these forms being carried up the sides of the panel, until at the middle distance they become interspersed with lily-forms which finally assert themselves at the top. The modelling is in very low relief with the exception of the heads, to the lower of which a modest emphasis is given, while to the upper a much stronger one. Both these faces are very beautiful, the expression being chiefly centred in the eyes. The lids in the one case are half-raised, as in the act of awakening before consciousness has fully dawned; in the other lying as softly over the eyeballs as folded petals. The exquisite chastity and serenity of these ripe, rounded faces are echoed in the floral borders; so richly patterned, yet with such reserve and tender piquancy. And, in contrast with the usual tedious reiteration of time-wearied ornamental motives, how refreshing the novelty and imagination in these borders! The artist has gone to nature for his models, and, while reproducing the character of Renaissance ornaments, has used the natural forms with so delicate an exuberance of fancy that no motive is repeated, the whole being quick with fragrant and fresh appeal. Indeed, so far as my knowledge goes, no plastic decoration has been produced in this country which can approach it in beauty; perhaps not even in the actual beauty of the ornamental forms, certainly not in the sentiment of pure and holy calm which it exhales.
Nor even in other decorations by Adams shall we find, I think, such perfect harmony between the form and feeling, for in his other examples he was working with divided mind. While the floral borders upon the pair of bronze doors which he executed for the Library of Congress are intrinsically as beautiful as these, displaying the same freshness of invention and loving insightinto the decorative suggestion of flowers, they have not the same perfectly balanced relation to the character and feeling of the whole design. The artist was dragged from his own poise by two outside influences. The doors had been commenced by Olin Warner, and before his death the figures in the panels had been planned and partly executed. Adams was called upon to complete the work and strove loyally to preserve as much as possible of the dead artist’s intention. Consequently, the figures are neither his nor Warner’s. Moreover, the planning of the doors had been originally the architect’s, and he, too, made his influence felt in the direction of a predilection for the profuse exuberance of Roman ornament. With this Adams has absolutely no sympathy, his own tendency being toward an ardent nature-study purified by the influence of the antique which prevailed among Florentines of the fifteenth century. Therefore, again he was twisted from what he would have done instinctively. Compared with his independent work in the “Pratt Memorial” tablet, these doors are overloaded and lacking in singleness and unity of motive. Yet with what devotion Adams worked! The process of casting in the bronze could only reproduce the front surface of his decoration; the undercutting of the leavesand tendrils had to be executed afterward with a graving tool, and for weeks he superintended the work. Viewed in detail, the borders in these doors are unusually alive with beauty, but, as I have said, theensembleis lacking in the crowning beauty of harmony of form and feeling.
He has recently completed a tympanum in marble and two bronze doors for the Vanderbilt Memorial Entrance, which has been added to St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York. Here, again, he coöperated with the architect. Such coöperation necessarily imposes certain conditions upon the sculptor’s imagination; I had almost written limitations or restrictions, except that the necessity of having to conform to an architectonic plan need be no bar to the freedom of imagination, but merely directs it into a certain channel. It permits, indeed, a liberty within the law; but this is not the sort of coöperation that has existed between the sculptor and architect on the present occasion. The latter has not only established the architectural plan of the design—a geometrical arrangement of bands and spaces which presents a very agreeableensembleand nice apportionment of graduated emphasis—but has also imposed upon the sculptor the character of his decoration. The church is a modern rendering of the Romanesque style;
BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFEBy Herbert Adams
BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFEBy Herbert Adams
BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE
By Herbert Adams
therefore, the architect has sought the models for the decoration in medieval sculpture of the eleventh or early twelfth century. It is a characteristic example of the way in which the American architectural mind frequently works. Such a course is so obvious and reasonable, yet what a meagerness of imagination it displays! It has mastered the “styles” and lives up to its tables of laws and formulas as rigidly, as literally and with as little regard for their spirit as the Jews of old clung to their Decalogue. It dare not, or cannot, rekindle the spirit of the past with an infusion of the present, as has been done in all living periods of architecture, but to commemorate a New Yorker of the nineteenth century, reproduces the ungainly types of figures, fashioned at a time when architecture was better understood than sculpture. So in the principal panels of the doors the architect has arranged four apostles—rude, formalistic figures, too short in the leg—and filled the subordinate ovals with dry little rigid groups; succeeding in his desire to remind us of the past and failing utterly to affect us in the present. For what possible appeal, religious, emotional or esthetic, can these groups make to the modern imagination? Yet, from the point of view of the subject we are discussing, the saddest thing is that a sculptor of “delicatelyimagined sensations” should be so distorted from the true bent of his genius and compelled to exert ingenuity in lieu of imagination. It is an incredible waste, for only in the borders can we discover Adams’s real self; yet, if he had been permitted to work in a reasonable liberty of imagination, he might have made the groups conformable to the style of the building and possessed also of some vital elements of beauty and of beautiful appeal.
One effect, however, of this unequal coöperation with the architect which may bring some compensating benefit to Adams’s art has been that his mind has been directed more than previously to the architectonics of decoration and to the sculptural value of form. For, while the figures in these doors have no individual interest, the sum total of the whole decoration has a very marked structural dignity, which arouses one’s respect, if it does not warm one to enthusiasm. And this enforcement of the structural quality reappears even more conspicuously in the tympanum, both in the increased sense of force which the figures convey, and in the organic relation of the forms to the shape of the space and to its architectural function.
For, as I have said before, Adams’s work doesnot usually impress one by its qualities of form, but rather by its sentiment and expression. Even in the portrait-statue of Joseph Henry in the Library of Congress and the “Channing,” recently unveiled at Boston, one does not feel the form and character of the bodies. Both figures are represented in gowns and count mainly as decorative masses. In the statue of Richard Smith, however, which is one of his latest, he has shown the professor in his laboratory, clad in shirt and trousers, with no accessory except an apron caught up on one side; and in the treatment of the head and body and more especially in the carriage of the hands, as one holds a specimen and the other a magnifying glass, has obtained a considerable measure of structural character.
Nor do I forget the tympanum, executed in 1896, for the Senate Reading-Room in the Library of Congress, a design of two mermaids supporting a cartouche. The nude forms display a thorough knowledge of the figure and a truly sculptural appreciation of the charm of muscular movement rippling over firmly constructed bodies. It seems to prove, if it were necessary, that the preference which Adams has shown for the pictorial possibilities of sculpture is due only to his particular temperament; to a reticence of feelingthat shrinks from too exact an expression of the idea, around which in his own imagination also he preserves a certain zone of vagueness.
So, in the tympanum for Saint Bartholomew’s Church, illustrated on an accompanying page, he is divided between the motives of expressing a sentiment of tender adoration and of giving the figures at the same time an architectonic force. In the latter direction we may feel that he has been the more successful; for in the attention paid to form he seems to have become preoccupied in the model. The same face appears in each of the three figures and with a self-consciousness in the eyes that contradicts the devotional expression of the mouth; a self-consciousness that I find myself connecting with the little niceties of arrangement with which the hair is prinked. I conclude by wondering if this tympanum will prove a turning-point in the artist’s career!
For when one studies the beauty of form, so strongly realised beneath the draperies, its fine expression and functional propriety, it is to feel that this work, despite a certain lack of Adams’s usual spirituality of sentiment, is the most important in a sculptural sense that he has yet done. For, regarded from the point of view of an architectural decoration it is unusually distinguished with admirable appropriateness of linesand masses to the space, a truly architectural feeling, and a distribution of light and shade, characterised alike by richness and by delicacy. It has the choiceness of style of his best portraits, reënforced by virility. And, if this latter quality, called into play by his coöperation with the architect, is maintained in future work, the result can scarcely fail to be a betterment of his art. For he will find a way of bringing it into complete harmony with the expression of his sentiment, since there is no necessary incompatibility between virility of style and delicacy of feeling. Indeed, the offspring of their union is a very special poignancy.
CHARLES HENRY NIEHAUS is a conspicuous exception to the general rule that our sculptors are Paris-trained. After working as a youth at wood-engraving, stone-cutting and carving in marble, he became a student in the McMicken School of Design, in his native city, Cincinnati, Ohio, and thence proceeded to Munich. His German training was supplemented by extensive travel and later by a prolonged visit to Rome, during which he devoted himself to the study of the nude under the influence of the antique.
But before the latter interlude in a life otherwise filled with the execution of commissions, he returned to America. For him the time was auspicious. President Garfield had recently been assassinated, and the State of Ohio had appropriated funds for a statue to be placed in the Capitol at Washington, and by public subscription another was to be erected in Race Street, Cincinnati. Both these commissions were awardedto the young Ohio sculptor. Each statue commemorates Garfield’s gift of oratory, but the one at Cincinnati in a more informal way, so that it probably represents very fairly Niehaus’s particular tendency at this time.
There is a dramatic touch in the pose of the figure; the weight firmly on the left foot, the other energetically advanced; both arms extended; one holding a sheaf of paper, the other raised slightly in a gesture of maintaining the attention of the audience; the handsome head well carried above the broad, arched chest. But this dramatic suggestion does not pass beyond the limit of tolerably natural characterisation; the balance between energy and controlling force, manifested in the studied carriage of a speaker accustomed to move his hearers; and the naturalism is completed by the absence of all affectations of arrangement in the costume. It comprises simply a frock coat and trousers and an overcoat unbuttoned and drawn clear of the chest. The figure, indeed, is represented in the guise and attitude in which it might be familiar to the greatest number of people. So, too, is that of William Allen, for which Niehaus shortly afterward received the commission from the State of Ohio; yet with even greater simplicity and naturalness, with an absence of the heroic or dramatic whichhad been fitting enough in the “Garfield,” considering the circumstances. The “Allen” is an intimate portrait of an incisive speaker and clear, close reasoner, in an attitude entirely unstudied, full of natural resolution.
From these two statues one may get a very fair impression of the sculptor’s natural bent as influenced by Munich training. Its prime feature is a vigorous realism that makes straight for character in the subject, finding it as much in pose and gesture as in the head, and giving expression to it in the simplest and directest fashion; if with some dramatic play as we have seen, yet without any floridness. What we do not yet observe is a feeling for the subtler expression of movement in the figure, and, in consequence, of subtler feeling in the disposition and texture of the draperies; qualities which entered into his work after his protracted study in Italy.
For, having completed these commissions, Niehaus set out for Rome and established himself in a studio just outside the Porta del Popolo, in close proximity to the Villa Borghese, devoting himself, as I have said, to the study of the nude. The only three statues which survive from this period—an athlete scraping himself with a strigil, another binding on the cestus, and a “Silenus,” pirouetting on one foot as he blows hispipes—are quite remarkable examples of the modern interpretation of the antique. Movement continuous through every part of the body and absolutely adjusted to the action; a poise of balance in the disposition of the torso and limbs, which combines the pleasure of repose with that of movement; anatomical accuracy that includes the structure of the figure and the varieties of tension according as the muscles are separately employed; and throughout a salience of modelling which imparts a dignity as well as naturalness to the whole—these are the qualities so admirably attained. The knowledge of form and the feeling for it thus perfected has naturally influenced all the sculptor’s subsequent work. He exhibits them obviously in the colossal nude, “The Driller,” executed for the Drake monument at Titusville, Pennsylvania; but no less in numerous portrait-statues.
An American sculptor has unfortunately few opportunities for displaying his ability in the treatment of the nude, the commissions which perforce engage his time being almost exclusively problems of figures in modern civilian garb or in the uniform of the army or navy. He may occasionally introduce it into a piece of decorative sculpture, or fashion some ideal subject for the pure love of doing it, since his chances of disposing
THE DRILLERBy Charles Henry NiehausFrom the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania
THE DRILLERBy Charles Henry NiehausFrom the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania
THE DRILLER
By Charles Henry Niehaus
From the Drake Monument, Titusville, Pennsylvania
THE HAHNEMANN STATUEBy Charles Henry NiehausFrom the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.
THE HAHNEMANN STATUEBy Charles Henry NiehausFrom the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.
THE HAHNEMANN STATUE
By Charles Henry Niehaus
From the Hahnemann Memorial, Washington, D. C.
of it are very limited. For while the old Puritan objection to the nude may have almost died out in America, it has scarcely been succeeded by a true appreciation of the abstract expression and beauty of the human form when treated by an artist. An old-fashioned bluntness of vision fails to see more in a nude than nakedness; may enjoy very thoroughly the structural and muscular development, play of movement and texture of skin in a horse, or the analogies of these qualities in a tree or plant, and yet miss entirely their subtler manifestations when exhibited in the freely exposed human form. Prejudice or lack of imagination obscures the fact that it is the expression of these qualities in their highest possible degree, that is the end and purpose of the artist; an obscurity, however, which, it must be admitted, not a few nude paintings and sculptures tend to perpetuate.
So Niehaus had to wait very many years before he could utilise frankly the results of his studies at Rome. The opportunity came with the erection of a monument to the memory of Colonel Edwin L. Drake, who sunk the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. The donor, who preserved his incognito, but who is supposed to have been one of the officials of the Standard Oil Company, demanded an architectural structure with planeson which the story of Drake’s life and achievements might be inscribed, and instead of a representation of himself a figure typical of his work. Thus arose occasion for “The Driller.”
It would be well if public monuments were more frequently of this typical character. Our cities and parks are peopled in bronze, not as much as possible to their embellishment. By all means hand down the effigies of great and worthy men; but why not with more regard for the really salient thing, the head, introduced as bust or bas-relief, and with less for the frock coat and trousers, the cut of which can be taken on trust or, better still, forgotten? Instead of demanding such prosaic record, how much better it would be to call upon the sculptor to create out of his imagination some subject that may represent or symbolise the greatness of the hero and appeal to the imagination of succeeding generations, meanwhile gladdening all who pass and repass it daily with its essential beauties. Have you not seen a trousered, frock-coated statue against the pedestal of which are a row of seats and sitters with their back to the man that is to be remembered? Substitute, however, for example, a fountain to his memory; and in parched summer weather, at least, all eyes would be turned toward its refreshment, and possibly some hearts reminded of theman in whose honour it was placed; who, if he were fit to be remembered, must have brought in his lifetime some refreshment and stimulus of suggestion to his fellowmen. So with our battalions of generals, mounted and unmounted, scattered over the country. Great men they were, but there was greatness also in the volunteers of the rank and file; and I for one shall continue to find more incentive to enthusiasm in the recognition of this in the Shaw Memorial than in dozens of solitary individuals. Once more, it is imagination in which we are wont to be lacking; and the best that is in our artists is seldom called forth because of our insistence upon the obvious and trite.
“The Driller,” therefore, was an unusual opportunity for Niehaus, of which he has made characteristic use. That is to say, the realism of the figure as it kneels with hammer uplifted to drive the drill into the ground, is admirably true, while the figure has a classic dignity of composition; and its expression of control, as well as of the putting forth of force, brings it within the domain of ideal beauty. In some groups which were among the ephemeral sculpture of the Pan-American Exposition he also freely introduced the nude, in a number of figures symbolising various kinds of industry. Individually theywere excellent, but the combined effect was unfortunate. The composition as a whole lacked cohesion and dignity, representing little more than an aggregation of figures, separately employed; so that one missed the idealising touch and found their realism of the crudely, story-telling kind.
And this last characteristic—I do not know whether it is a symptom of Germangenrefeeling derived from Munich—reappears elsewhere in his work. While his statues are strongly sculptural, his bas-reliefs betray not only a very pictorial feeling, but that particulargenrephase of it which is mainly occupied with enforcement of the facts. Not, however, in his earliest work of the kind, the historical doors of Trinity Church, New York, in which the representation of incidents was demanded. These he represented very realistically, but with a regard for the decorative charm of full and empty spaces and of receding planes of distance. Compared with the pictorialnuancedisplayed in these six panels, the treatment of the four which embellish the Hahnemann monument is very deficient in artistic imagination. They represent the founder of homeopathy in a series of scenes which are baldly illustrative and seem to have little interest of subject and still less of decorative value.Yet they are affixed to a monument setting off a portrait-statue which is Niehaus’s finest work, and equalled by few others in the country. The expression of benign dignity in the head flows through the whole length of the figure, which is disposed in lines that are as suave as they are noble. From every point of view it has the grandeur of monumental repose, softened, one might almost say humanised, by this exquisite winding movement. Among modern portrait-statues I can remember few that make so sweet and serious an impression. In the composition of this figure one can trace unmistakably the effect of the sculptor’s close study of the antique, not only in the suppleness of movement and statuesqueness of pose, but also in the abstract appeal to one’s esthetic enjoyment that the composition of the figure yields. Moreover, this freedom, force and sensitiveness extend to the handling of the drapery, in which every fold has a grace of naturalness and also a value of expression. These qualities are again happily united in the sitting statue of Lincoln at Muskegon, Michigan. While it is neither so forceful nor so persuasive as the “Hahnemann,” it yet has a liberal measure of graciousness and dignity and a finely monumental feeling.
In these statues and in some others, as inthe Gibbon in the Library of Congress and, though perhaps by more apparently contrived means, in the standing statue of Stephen Girard, Niehaus obtains from the composition of the single figure a degree of decorative effect which seems to fail him in treating groups. Thus the pediment of the Appellate Court, New York, while good in detail, is without much unity or harmonious feeling. It is, indeed, in the portrayal of character—as in his fine, straightforward rendering of Farragut, or in those striking busts of Rabbi Gottheil and of Ward, the sculptor, and in the statues already noticed, wherein the pose and drapery, besides contributing to the character, yield an additional suggestion of monumental dignity—that he is at his best.
IN these days when we are trying to raise “artists,” as we do chickens, by a process akin to incubation, we regard it as an anomaly if one emerges to eminence from surroundings which, according to our system, do not seem congenial. And people have expressed surprise that Warner, the child of a New England Methodist minister, brought up in a community which had no artistic inclinations, should have made up his mind to become a sculptor before he had ever seen a statue. But the history of art is full of such surprises; and the thoughts of youth are ever like the wind, “which bloweth where it listeth; thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” The greater and more beautiful surprise is that the boy had foundation of character on which to nourish the flowers of his imagination, and that when in after years they were matured, it was found that he had kept them so choicely select, that their fragrance was not unlike that of the flowers which in old timebloomed on the hills of Hellas. Something of the old Greek spirit had been revived in this son of Connecticut: intellectual stability, moral balance and spiritual serenity. Presently we shall consider how these qualities became translated into terms of art in his work—into a feeling for form, monumental rather than picturesque, a rhythmical and harmonious reserve, a peculiar sensitiveness to the significance of the essential facts in the design—but at the moment let us note how they affected his early conduct.
By the time that he left school at the age of nineteen, the desire of being a sculptor had so grown upon him as to press for a decision. Accordingly he arranged for himself a test. He would attempt a bust of his father, and thus determine once and for all the “to be or not to be” of his ambition. So, in ignorance of the easier way by which sculptors proceed, he bought some plaster of Paris, converted it into a block, and set to work with a knife. His only notion of art was to produce a good likeness, and in this he succeeded. The bust was exhibited and commended at the State Fair, and Warner felt that his cherished wish was justified. But the deliberation which had characterised the choice of a profession was followed by an equal seriousness in determining the means of attaining it. Hecould not have known that sculpture in America at that time was in a poor way; he had, in fact, no acquaintance even with the mediocre kinds of statue; but the old-fashioned, New England conscience within him viewed the matter very earnestly. Already he felt a reverence for the work to which he was to devote his life, and that the best of preparations must be made. He would seek it in Paris. But he had no funds nor could his father spare them, so he quietly laid aside his longings and proceeded to earn the necessary money. Mastering the trade of telegraph operator, he pursued it for six years, not, as may be supposed, without some ultimate benefit to the facility and delicacy of his manipulation. At length, with his savings of $1,500 he started for Paris. This was in 1869, when he was twenty-five years of age.
Arriving in the great city without introduction, friends or knowledge of the language, he made his way to the Louvre. Here were students busy copying; fellows such as he meant to be, and he was drawn toward them, wandering from easel to easel, until upon the woodwork of one he espied a name, “Arthur Wilson.” He ventured to address the owner and tell him of his quest, and was directed to a studio occupied by two young sculptors, an American and an Englishman. With them he studied for nine months, until, through the influence of United States Minister Washburne, he was admitted to the École des Beaux Arts. Here he worked in the studio of François Jouffroy, where he had the benefit of associating with such artists as Falguière, an older pupil of the master, and with Falguière’s pupil, Mercié, a man of his own age. Both of these artists had broken away from the master’s severely academic style and were tempering their own with the life and movement of the new naturalistic tendencies. Warner also in modelling from nature incurred the old master’s strictures, because his sturdy individualism refused to lend itself to conventional methods; but, on the other hand, his studies from the antique were commended. In time, however, his funds were exhausted, and, having to find employment, he entered as an ordinary workman the studio of Carpeaux, the strongest decorative sculptor in France since Rude, whose pupil he had been. Warner’s ability was recognised by the master, and he received the great compliment of an invitation to remain and study in the studio. But he declined, being eager by this time to return home.
The years of studentship had been diversified by the thrilling events of the Siege of Parisand the Commune. Warner in his own country had experienced the war-fever, and, eager to join the Army of the Republic as a drummer-boy, had been dissuaded by his father, who during the stormy days of the Civil War carried him off to a quiet spot among the Vermont hills, that he might continue his studies. So, when the empire fell and a republic was established, he regarded the action of the Germans in continuing the war as an attack upon liberty, and enlisted with many of his comrades in the Foreign Legion. But his duties were confined to mounting guard upon the fortifications.
When, in 1872, Warner returned to New York it was to suffer the hard experience of disillusionment. In Paris he had found art occupying a prominent position in the public and private life of the community, artists honoured and encouraged by the State and his own ability acknowledged by some of the masters of his craft. He returned to his native country to find a prevailing ignorance concerning art; to find the trained artist competing for jobs with the commercial stonecutter and metal-worker, the competitions decided more by political favoritism and wire-pulling than by artistic merit; to find, indeed, that he was transplanting the delicate growth of his ideals from a congenial soil to whatwas, artistically speaking, very much of an arid and howling wilderness. These words are scarcely too strong to express the conditions of the field of art in this country more than a quarter of a century ago, before the Centennial Exhibition had sounded the tocsin of an improved taste; before the students of art had begun to return in numbers from the foreign schools, and schools of art in this country had been put upon a better basis; before the importation of all sorts of works of art from Europe and the East, and the travel of our own people abroad had become so extensive; before the spread of interest and knowledge which all these causes operated to produce. Even now the slime of politics is very apt to foul the fair working of competitions, and it is often difficult for a sculptor, unless he is at the very top of his profession, to secure a public commission without some degree of wire-pulling. But in 1872, when the factories kept on hand a stock of military statues, complete in every particular except the number of the regiment—which was riveted on to suit the requirements of the intending purchasing committee—the outlook for an unknown artist with high ideals, clean of purpose, who reverenced his profession as his life, was dark indeed. Warner held hunger and despair at arm’s length for four years, and
BUST OF DANIEL COTTIERBy Olin Levi Warner
BUST OF DANIEL COTTIERBy Olin Levi Warner
BUST OF DANIEL COTTIER
By Olin Levi Warner
CUPID AND PSYCHEBy Olin Levi Warner
CUPID AND PSYCHEBy Olin Levi Warner
CUPID AND PSYCHE
By Olin Levi Warner
then decided that he had better return to his trade of telegraph operator.
So he wrote to Mr. Plant, the president of the Southern Express Company, with whom he had previously been employed, asking for a position. This gentleman, however, learning the circumstances of the case, met them with a commission for a portrait-bust of himself, followed by one of Mrs. Plant. About this time, too, Warner made the acquaintance of Mr. Daniel Cottier, who had recently opened a gallery for the display of the objects of art which he was importing, and now invited the sculptor to make an exhibition of his works. This proved to be the turning-point of his affairs; commissions began to come in with increasing frequency, until he was fully engaged upon a number of important works. He was elected a full member of the National Academy, and was one of the original group of painters and sculptors who founded the Society of American Artists.
In the too short period left to him before his sudden death in 1896, which resulted from a bicycle accident in Central Park, New York, he produced a variety of works of high merit. They comprise portrait-busts, among the best of which are those of Daniel Cottier, Alden Weir, W. C. Brownell and Miss Maud Morgan; three heroic statues,representing, respectively: Governor Buckingham of Connecticut, William Lloyd Garrison and General Devens; fountains for Union Square, New York, and for Portland, Oregon; many medallion portraits, including some of Indian Chiefs; ideal subjects, “Twilight,” “The Dancing Nymph” and “Diana”; an alto-relievo of “Cupid and Psyche” and one of the sets of bronze doors for the Library of Congress at Washington. In all these works, covering so wide a range of motive, there is present a union of monumental feeling with extreme sensitiveness, which gives them in a marked degree the sculpturesque character and invests them with a singular individuality.
I shall never forget the impression made on me by a memorial exhibition, held in 1897, of a considerable number of his busts and medallions and of the “Psyche.” It may sound a little incongruous, but they suggested the impression that a highly bred, finely trained race-horse makes upon the imagination; an intensity of force and suppleness, nothing superfluous, everything expressive of its function, the whole an embodiment of keen vitality, of power and grace. There was a similarly high-bred feeling in these heads, the sign-manual of an unusually keen perception of facts and of a most refined sensibility in therendering of them. I doubt if anywhere in modern art, except in that of Rodin, will you find busts of such vital power. They exhibit the same regard for the structural significance of the head; something more than the suggestion of form and bulk—a rich, strong, jubilant recognition of these facts as the ones of peculiar interest to the sculptor, offering him the opportunity of indulging his especial delight. They exhibit also, as do Rodin’s, the same delicately precise handling of details: like the obligato which a musician composes upon his basic theme, yet with a different range of motive. Warner’s work does not reveal the psychological analysis of Rodin’s; the penetrating, almost troublous intensity of his bust of Dalou, for example. He is scarcely less keen or subtle in his analysis than the French master, but studies the ripple of flesh above the muscles, the tremor or fold of an eyelid, the curves of nose or mouth, the disposition of the hair, with a pure delight in their expressional force or grace. He views the head as a type rather than as an individuality, and seeks to extract from it the essence of its character. It is in this respect, among others, that he shows himself to be imbued with the kind of spirit that animated the Greeks. As compared with Rodin, whose vision grasps the complexities of modernemotion and the underlying sadness of an age that has come late in time and whose energy is enclosed in a frail web of nerves, Warner is a child-man, with a man’s reserve and poise, and a child’s unsophisticated eagerness of eye and its pure delight in beauty and the joy of living.
And this strain of the Greek temperament in sculpture is a very different thing from the motive of the so-called “classic” school. The latter drew its primary inspiration from Roman sculpture, in a search for something supposedly heroic, that would fit the genius of the new republicanism which had arisen out of the chaos of the Revolution. It was at first grandiloquent, but, growing senile, fell to babbling of the abstract beauty of line and form, always without direct reference to nature and gradually with the increased formalism that grew from the perpetuation of certain arbitrary rules and precedents. Such “classic” statues, when they are the work of a master, have their beauty, but it is inert, without the thrill of life; when the work of a mere practitioner, they are unspeakably jejune and paltry. Both kinds are alike in their divorce from nature-study, from the inspiration which it gives to an intimate appreciation of line and form. They will not show the fluidity of line,the delicate surprises of curve, the infinite subtleties of modelling that invite caress, the texture and quality of flesh, nor the mingling of firm and supple in the form, the pliant movement adjusted to the action of the figure—in a word, the stir of life within the material. Warner gives us this sensation and with so choice an instinct for the exact point at which the naturalism should melt into plastic immobility, with a love so keen and unalloyed for the manifestations of nature and in a spirit so seriously jocund, that we recognise, as I have said, his affinity with the old Greek ideal.
We may trace it also in his feeling for the monumental rather than for the picturesque; for those qualities in sculpture which belong to it preëminently, as opposed to those which it derives by analogy from painting. It appears in the alto-relievo, “Cupid and Psyche,” most conspicuously, because the subject might have been treated differently. The modern sculptor, working from the background to the front plane by repeated superlayers of clay, can introduce a variety of subtly differentiated planes, and may become absorbed in this composition of light and shade, producing an effect which we can describe as full of colour and which is exceedingly beautiful. The artist of old time, however,graving the marble, wood or metal, started with the form of the figures under his hand, absorbed himself in them and regarded the open spaces of his composition, when he reached them, simply as a background. Instead of a quasi-pictorial subtlety of light and shade he strove for a purely sculptural tangibility of modelled form. It is this insistence upon form which is so conspicuous in the “Psyche”; in the contrast between the child’s podgy softness and the maiden’s long, lithe, firm figure.
This principle, applied to decoration, is most successfully represented in the artist’s last completed work, the bronze doors of the Library of Congress. In the lunette-shaped spaces above the doors the figures are in very high relief, and the background is modelled with forms of mountains and clouds, producing an effect of great richness, while upon each valve of the door is a single figure in low relief; the flesh parts having an emphasis of roundness, the draperies being flattened, yet amply indicating the dignity of the form beneath. The left-hand figure with the lyre (how I wish that it were possible to reproduce it here!) is supremely beautiful in its poise between life and art, in its exquisite rhythm of lines and in the alternate ebb and flow of the planes of surface.
But it was in his rendering of the nude that Warner exhibited the loveliest qualities of his art. He viewed it, as one views a flower, with single vision for its exquisite abstract beauty. Flower-like and fragrant, the “Psyche,” the “Dancing Nymph” and “Diana,” have the quivering sensibility of contour that one finds in the free growth of nature; united, however, to a firmness of texture and strength of structure and to a conscious play of movement, responding to the play of spirit, which in their perfect alliance are only to be found in the human form. The spirit which animates these figures is, of course, the sculptor’s, and it reveals itself most choicely in the serenity of the “Diana,” in the suspense between absolute repose and projected movement. For the figure seems about to rise; the carriage of the head and body alike suggest the activity inherent in the languor. One may believe that in the precision of beauty displayed in this statue, in the complete adjustment, that is to say, of every one of its qualities of beauty to the supreme idea of discovering that imaginary line upon which life merges into art, the mobile into the immobile, Warner reached most nearly his ideal. For in his busts and heroic statues, as in the fountains and decorative subjects, he was more or less constrained to a point of view. But inhis nudes, and particularly in this one, the product of his maturity, he could work in the full liberty of his imagination. And the latter is found to be the ideal expression of those qualities of character which I have already attributed to him: intellectual stability, moral balance and spiritual serenity.
The singularly choice discretion which governed Warner’s appreciation of form is shown equally in his Portland fountain: a circular bowl with broad, flat brim, supported upon a rectangular pedestal and balanced by two caryatides. The design is almost severely simple, yet tempered with a grace of fitness in every detail, so chaste and noble as to produce an impression of perfect repose. It has, indeed, just that suggestion of being firmly rooted, of strong growth upward and of natural spread at the top, which exactly befits its architectural character, while in the contour and details it is as delicate as a lily.
We have traced this feeling for the monumental side of sculpture in Warner’s reliefs, where it is revealed in the thoroughly plastic treatment of form, so that it quivers on the edge between immobility and life; in his fountain, that presents a conspicuous immobility quickened with animation, and in his busts, wherein the form