CHAPTER VIIIOF GARDEN SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENTA
Visitorswere standing by the fountain in the garden of a sculptor; and some one was asking him what in his opinion was the most beautiful material to model in. The questioner probably had in mind clay, wax, stone, metal and other solid substances; but the sculptor answered quickly: “Water. There is nothing in the whole world so marvelous to manipulate as water.” A gleam of creative rapture lit his face. “Shall I show you my ‘Veil of Mist?’ or would you rather see my ‘Jeweled Elm-Tree?’”
AThis chapter is largely a reprint, permitted through the courtesy of theAmerican Magazine of Art.
AThis chapter is largely a reprint, permitted through the courtesy of theAmerican Magazine of Art.
There are few sculptors who have not been fascinated at one time or another by the designing of fountains, with their primary interest of sculpture and their secondary mystery and magic of water; whether of still water, with its mirrored pictures of blue sky, dark trees, many-colored flowers and sun-flecked walls; or of gently dropping water, suggestive of leisure and repose; or of leaping, flashing, dancing water, hypnotic even without copper or silver balls tossed up and down; or of water brought from afar in grandiose cascades or canals, as in the garden art of the Villa d’Este, the Villa Lante, Versailles, and Saint Cloud; or even of water turned at great cost to wondrous baroque inventions for drenching the unwary bystander, as in the Villa Aldobrandini. Fortunately, at the present hour, thepractical joke in fountains is out of date; and there is a growing use of fountains as memorials, either stately or intimate, either in public squares or in private gardens.
Setting aside the innumerable pots, urns, sarcophagi and other “containers” for trees, shrubs and flowering plants, the larger part of our garden sculpture centres about water and its works. Besides the more or less imposing figure fountain, with its bronze boys, dolphins, fauns, nymphs, Nereids, Tritons, turtles and other hardy perennials of the aquatic imagination, there are tanks, reservoirs, bathing pools, all no less practical if touched with some suggestion of the sculptor’s art; there is the basin of the well-knownpozzotype, flowering out intoputti, corpulent or lean, bending under their swags of foliage and fruit; there is the little wall-fountain, borrowed from the lavabo of Renaissancechurches, and dear to the careful gardener, replenishing from it the green-painted, fine-snouted watering-pot kept sacred to his tiny seedlings. Then there is the water-spout, ready with its witty word of grotesque, and the rainwater pipe-head, in which English lead-work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed a vigorous and interesting art. There is even the bird-bath, that modern invention of the nature-lover, since today, though we profit by many of the garden ideas of the Renaissance, we do not imitate those Siennese gallants who tied blinded thrushes to the dwarf ilex and cypress, to decoy winged creatures for convenient garden shooting. The twentieth-century bird-bath lures birds to life rather than to death, as is shown in a decorative bronze by Annette Saint-Gaudens, who has represented upon it characters in Percy MacKaye’s bird-masque, Sanctuary. The masquingspirit is afoot these days with new opportunities for sculpture; the outdoor stage, now no very uncommon feature in private gardens and groves, shows a retaining wall and other boundaries ready for suitable sculptural accent by means of statues, Hermæ, vases, mascarons or garlands.
BACCHANTEBY F. W.MacMONNIES
BACCHANTEBY F. W.MacMONNIES
BACCHANTE
BY F. W.MacMONNIES
As not every day is fit for verse, so not every artist is gifted with the happy hand for designing garden forms. It is a temperamental matter; generally the note should be that of joy, or at least of serenity. Mr. MacMonnies’s Bacchante and his Boy with Heron long ago set the perfect pace of gayety for American gardens. And today, what gladder creature this side of Arcady can you find than the MacMonnies Duck Baby? Unless it is Edith Barretto Parsons’s laughing Child with Turtle, or else one of Miss Scudder’s engaging imps of Frogland. Some of our most accomplished sculptorshave delighted us with their garden art. How exquisite is the graciousness of John Gregory’s kneeling Philomela, a statue lately designed for the bird-garden of Mrs. Payne Whitney! No figure in recent years has seemed more original and alluring than this “blithe spirit” considering the wonder of her pinions.
FOUNTAIN FIGUREBY JANET SCUDDER
FOUNTAIN FIGUREBY JANET SCUDDER
FOUNTAIN FIGURE
BY JANET SCUDDER
The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble—a fine relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design. You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical modeling.Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once launched out on the simple joy of “copying amorceau.”
Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides, but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment; to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of artistic training, that offered by ourAmerican Academy in Rome, does not begin and end with Houdon’s “Copiez toujours,” but allows for contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward influences in art to someGryphon of an Academy, of which little is known, and everything suspected.
Meanwhile, Mr. Manship from Rome and Mr. McCartan in New York have both proved in their work that they not only know how to model the nude and compose a statue, but, what is far more rare, that they can “handle ornament.” Now ornament is often regarded as beneath the notice of the new-fledged sculptor, while as a matter of sad fact, it is more likely to be quite beyond his powers; and this is partly because he lacks invention, and partly because he is without knowledge of the rhythms of design; not hearing the music, his mind cannot march. Garden sculpture as well as severe monumental form calls constantly for the light touch or the strong arm of ornament. Noting our Americanlack in this direction, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, in coöperation with the National Sculpture Society, has been at pains to install in New York ateliers in which the ornament-modeler, as distinct from the sculptor, may seriously study his art. And when an artist like Mr. McCartan designs and models the exquisite ornament seen upon his Barnett Prize Fountain, a new hope is breathed into the efforts of those who would improve our American standards in artistic craftsmanship, and break down the stupid barrier between artist and artisan. Somewhere in the unknown lies a vast continent of design-forms not yet touched by any Columbus—a wealth of fauna and flora not of the Acropolis or the Roman Forum or the Gothic cathedral, but akin to Greek and Gothic in beauty and power; and the world is waiting for these new good things.
Given our garden fountain, with or without its ornament, what more natural than a coign of vantage from which to enjoy it? The exedra, as introduced to us long ago by McKim, White and other architects, has been eagerly adopted by garden lovers. A beloved spot at Aspet, the Saint-Gaudens estate, holds in the far distance a blue sky, a blue mountain and a lordly crest of purple pines; in the middle distance is a magic stretch of simple grass, while near at hand, and flanked by a rosy tracery of oleander blossoms, a golden god Pan pipes to the seven golden fishes spouting water into a green-veined white marble basin, rectangular in form. Facing this, and shaded by pines, hemlocks and silver birches, is a great white exedra, planned not on the usual curve but on the three sides of an oblong, and showingin relief, on the end of each wing, an ivy-crowned faun, by Louis Saint-Gaudens. Two giant terra-cotta vases, made in this country from Italian originals, stand at the entrance to the pergola that garlands the “old studio”; in an upper garden, a bronze Narcissus leads the eye toward the house, with its white balustrade accented by gracious heads of the Seasons.
Some years ago, I saw in the garden of a sculptor an exedra with outlines pleasing to the eye, and comfortable to the anatomy. The material was concrete, that first aid to the garden-mad and their domestic sculpture. Inquiry brought out the fact that the contour had been established by the sculptor’s actual sitting down,in propria persona, in a roughly shaped mass of fresh concrete. To use the human frame as a heroic modeling-tool, or templet, struck me at that time as a delightfully unique idea in sculpture;today, with so many artists keen for the queer, it would doubtless seem a mere commonplace; one might even be glad that the human templet was not used upside down, in the pursuit of novelty. But to speak justly, our garden sculpture has not succumbed to the idea that queerness is higher than beauty, and a shock to the spectator a richer artistic achievement than his delight. Garden art in our country is no longer in its infancy, and not yet in its decadence. Accepting the broad principles of Italian garden design, (such as the treatment of the garden as a place to live in, the harmonizing of the house with the garden, and the adaptation of both to climate and landscape) it does not today admit the baroque puerilities of the hydraulic practical joke, or the grotto of mechanical toys and monsters. Fortunately, much of our landscape gardening is in the hands of true artists, who employthe best resources of other days, and the genius of modern sculptors.
Among the oldest inhabitants of gardens are the Hermæ, or boundary gods, once used, it is said, to define limits of land, but now freed from that dull task, to be set up (singly, or in pairs, or in rows) wherever found desirable, as to accent a terrace, or to flank a flight of steps. The variety of type is infinite; male and female, these terminal deities are the chorus in the grand opera of garden sculpture, the only rule laid upon them being that they must play the foursquare post below the waist, and look pleasant above. Marble is their best dress, but they may with good effect wear terra-cotta in the paler tones; a material well adapted also for the legion of great decorative pots, round or square, that “help so” in gardens either intimate or imposing. Many garden owners collect “antiques,” delightful enough eventhough some of them, like women and music, are perhaps better left undated. Renaissance sarcophagi are put to the cheerful uses of pink geraniums; capitals and fonts and well-heads bubble over with all sorts of blooming things. In the sun-dial, little regarded by the Latin temperament, but dear as the lawn itself to the Britannic imagination, the American sculptor has a subject that cannot be accused of alien origin. Associated chiefly with English landscape art, it nevertheless may “mark only happy hours” in more formal surroundings. Harriet Frishmuth and Brenda Putnam are our most lately laureled dialists; both have been successful in adapting the well-modeled human figure to this form of garden sculpture.
Alas, that in every human effort shown out-of-doors, the climate has always the last word! Good old Horace, grumbling impressively about the hardwinters of Tibur, would find his sandaled toes shrewdly nipped in a Cornish garden on the Ides of December, with Mercury’s winged heel quite capable of hitting well below the zero mark. In Italy, the tooth of time is not a bad sort of modeling-tool; it has carved a veil of illusion for triviality, and has given a new grace to things already beautiful. But in our northern latitudes, the tooth of time does not model; it ravages and corrodes, often with incredible swiftness, and due winter precautions must enshroud our garden sculpture. The question of material is ever with us. Bronze endures, but turns dark; marble is fair, but frail. In the dooryard of many an American artist, home-grown miracles have been wrought from cement. I recall charming tennis benches, with ornamented ends; a wall-fountain with reliefs of satyrs; some great vases enriched with the owner’s coat-of-arms,and cast in a three-piece mold; and numerous basins, posts, balustrades and steps. But trowel-sculpture has its limitations, and the question of durability has not yet been fully answered by the years. Perhaps, at some future day, science will co-operate with art, and produce for the garden sculptor a material as easily modeled as terra-cotta, as exquisite as marble, as impressive as granite, and as durable as bronze. Until then, we must manage as best we can with the materials the ancients had, though under climatic conditions more favorable than ours; and we may at least note with thankfulness that in garden art as in all things annihilation has its uses.