Daniel Chester French: Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor, Pt. 2

"The Angel of Death and the Sculptor" in marble
by Daniel Chester French

"Having brought the plaster version of "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor" with him to Paris, Daniel French left it behind there to be cast in bronze. In May, the completed work went on exhibit at the Salon de Champs-Élysées, where it won a third-place medal from the jury, a rare honor for an American. 'To those who understand the undercurrents of the Parisian art world,' marveled art critic William A. Coffin, 'the significance of such an award under the circumstances is very great, for it shows that the work was thus recognized purely because of its transcendent merit.'

French had meanwhile shipped the plaster model back home to New York, where it soon stimulated an extraordinary publicity wave of its own, fueled by two separate and widely praised local exhibitions, the first at the Society of American Artists, the second at the New York Architectural League. Photographs of the model were soon 'seen in every picture store,' with sculptor Lorado Taft reporting that 'they hang in thousands of homes' and could be found 'in offices and upon the desks of men of business.' Applauded Taft: 'It is a wonderful thing, a very great privilege, to be able to talk thus to one's countrymen. - and to do it in a language so exalted, with an eloquence so sustained.'

The craze for these photos made French aware for the first time of a potentially lucrative confluence of media: sculpture and photography. One-dimensional images of his three-dimensonal works might not convey the full depth of the originals, but they could successfully 'puff' his creations and, in the bargain, earn extra money as authorized reproductions. Within months, the sculptor would copyright an official photograph of 'Death and the Sculptor,' presumably to begin marketing copies on his own. For the rest of his career, French kept a close watch on photographs of his statues, trying when he could to control the images and profit by them.

In August 1893, without the fanfare of an official public dedication, the Millmore family quietly installed the original bronze over their brother's gravesite at Forest Hills Cemetery. With the approval of the Milmore heirs, Dan French authorized four new plaster copies - one each for museums in Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Chicago, where it became a mainstay and an inspiration to both writers and musicians. One poet composed an ode, a minister wrote and published a long sermon lauding French for 'shaping death as a friend', New England composer George Whitefield Chadwick created 'a Symphonic poem,' which he debuted at the New York Philharmonic that February, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, commissioned French to  produce a marble version for their permanent collection. By depicting an artist confronting the tenuousness of life against a backdrop of eternal mystery, he had managed to suggest that great art would outlast great artists - and much more."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor

"Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor"
by Daniel Chester French

"Without question, the most acclaimed of French's works in the 1890s was the ambitious composition in extreme high relief formally titled 'Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor.' This memorial to French's deceased contemporary and onetime artistic rival, Martin Milmore, was commissioned for the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

French knew precisely what his subject looked like.. He had known Milmore in both Florence and Boston, though never intimately enough to consider him a close friend. Milmore had died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of thirty-eight in 1883, without ever approaching French's success.

French's original clay maquette showed an elaborately winged angel calling home a vigorous young sculptor midwork, his chisel and mallet in hand, and his knee resting on a ledge for support as he labors on a sculpture of his own. His final composition strayed little from this. It showed the angel of death hooded, her face in somber and perpetual shadow, yet somehow unthreatening, even comforting. She would appear clutching a garland of poppies, signifying both death and the bestowal of fame, leaning towards and gently touching the chisel held by the visibly startled, quintessentially modern young artist. 

As always, French conducted methodical research to get his details exactly right. In 1890, he even wrote to his childhood bird-watching companion, William Brewster, with this request: 'I have this winter to model an angel and it occurred to me...that you might help me in the study of wings. Can't you without much trouble...get me a lot of them? I should like half a dozen pairs or so of different kinds and sizes, not with a view of copying anyone particular specimen, but for the purpose of studying up on the subject.' Before long, French's studio boasted a collection of birds wings. 

He took a plaster version with him on yet another extended European trip that began in November 1891. Returning to Paris, he established a 'dear little studio" not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Here, French received compliments from guests who inspected the Milmore as it progressed, and then basked in additional praise from a hundred 'artists and otherwise" who visited  when French exhibited the finished plaster at a studio salon in January 1892.  

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial's Sculptor" by Cynthia Close for "Art & Object.")

 

Daniel Chester French: Lighting the Lincoln Memorial

"When the Lincoln Monument was finished and the statue put in place, it was found that the lighting was so bad that for those first few years it was a constant grief to the sculptor and his artist friends. If Mr. Bacon had lived, this could, of course, have been corrected, but, with the architect of the building gone, it became a serious problem.

As at first designed, the whole ceiling was of glass, the light coming from above, as it should, to light the statue properly. During the process of building, the scheme was changed and a slightly colored marble was used in place of the glass. This gave a beautiful soft glow to the interior of the great room, but, alas! it, in conjunction with the hard light coming from the blue sky in front, was fatal to the face. At certain times of the day it was well enough, but at other times the effect was distressing. It made the face lined and haggard, and the knees unduly prominent. I think at the time, Mr. French was so discouraged about it, and for a while so hopeless of any solution of the problem, that he felt that it could never look as it was intended to look."*

"Nothing could be done, of course, without the government's sanction and an appropriation from Congress. When French's initial appeals fell on deaf ears, he turned to modern technology for evidence. He had photographs made of the large model still at Chesterwood - lit perfectly by his overhead studio skylight. Then he ordered corresponding photos of the statue in Washington as it looked in the worst possible light streaming in from the visitor entrance, then he released the comparative shots to the public.

In 1927, he asked Ulysses S. Grant III, the new director of public buildings and grounds, to allow Tiffany & Co. to try designing new glass panels overhead - to no avail. Finally he turned to the Sunlike Illuminating Company to design 'not merely a bulb, but a specially made reflector with a prismatic arrangement of cobalt oxide mirrors inside' to light the statue artificially. At last Grant came around, and floodlights were finally installed on the ceiling, removing the last barrier to the perfection French had long sought for the Lincoln Memorial. He described himself as a 'happier man' after visiting Washington in the spring of 1929 and finding the illumination 'more satisfactory than I could have believed possible.'**

To be continued

(* Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.
** Excerpts from "Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial's Sculptor" by Cynthia Close for "Art & Object.")

 

 

Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial, Pt. 2

The Piccirilli brothers lifting the left 
hand of the Lincoln statue into place. 

"The Piccirilli Brothers were awarded the contract to cut the Lincoln in marble from the plaster model. The great size - it is, I believe, the largest marble statue in existence - made it necessary to build it up from twenty pieces of stone. It is a proof of the accuracy with which the copying was done that, although the pieces were cut separately and were not assembled until put together on the pedestal in the Memorial, they fit together as perfectly as if carved from one block and sawn apart.

Mr. Bacon and the young architects in his office worked for some ten years upon the plans. Once given the order it had become the absorbing object, the inspiration of his life. He took but small interest in other work, his whole mind seeming to concentrate upon the gradual evolving of this monument, as well as to the idea of abstract beauty for which it stands.

A year after its completion he died at the age of fifty-eight. His friend Dan French said of him, at the time, that it seemed as if Bacon had been created for the sole purpose of making the Lincoln Memorial; that he had achieved a reputation for monumental work when the commission was given him; that after its achievement it would have been difficult for him to go back to more commonplace work; that, his great work finished, it seemed almost part of the scheme that he should pass on.

Great honor was conferred upon him. The greatest of these, and indeed the greatest ever conferred upon an architect in America, was when the Institute of Architects presented its medal to him at a dinner which concluded the Annual Meeting of the Institute in Washington, May 18, 1923. The dinner, attended by five hundred members and guests, was held in a great marquee at the east end of the Lagoon in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and at its close there was a beautiful pageant. Bacon, attended by the President of the Institute, guests of honor, and special guests, embarked upon a barge in the Lagoon and this, escorted by the members in costume upon either bank, was rowed down to the steps of the Memorial, which was effectively illuminated for the occasion. Here President Harding awaited them, and, introduced by Chief Justice Taft, the Permanent Chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, he presented to Henry Bacon, with an appropriate address, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects - 'the highest honor within its power to give.' Mr. Cortissoz referred to Henry Bacon as 'an embodied conscience.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

 

Daniel Chester French: Lincoln Memorial Preliminary Work

Daniel French with a 6 ft. high model for
the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

"It was during the last years of the war [WWI] that Mr. French made, or at least finished, the seated statue of Lincoln for the Memorial in Washington D.C. His friend, and for years his collaborator, Henry Bacon, had been appointed the architect to design and build the Memorial, and he immediately engaged Mr. French to make the statue for which his beautiful building was to be the shrine. This was in 1915, but it was not till 1920 that it was finished and erected.

Few people understand the hazards, aside from the labor,  of cutting a statue in stone. The finest marble still comes from the ancient quarries in Italy - Carrara and Serravezza; but however carefully selected, a dark spot or defect of some sort may develop, necessitating the choosing of another block and beginning all over again. An excellent white marble from Georgia was chosen as being particularly well adapted to the execution of so large a figure as the Lincoln.

The popular idea that a sculptor rises from his couch at midnight, seizes his mallet and chisel, and, in a fine frenzy, hews out a beautiful statue before morning, exists only in poetry. Sculpture is a much more serious business than that. Occasionally a sculptor, when the spirit moves him, himself cuts a head or a torso out of the marble without a model or previous study, but usually the sculptor's model is copied by a marble-cutter and finished by the artist. There is evidence to prove that the old-time sculptor proceeded in much the same way as do the sculptors of the present day.

In order to determine how large the statue should be, a temporary plaster model of the Lincoln was made about twelve feet in height and erected in place in the Memorial. This proved much too small, and two solar prints were made, one eighteen feet in height, the other twenty feet, and put in place. Cut out from the background, they looked strangely like the real thing, and, as a consequence of these experiments, the statue was eventually made twenty feet in height instead of twelve as was orginally planned. Mr. French and Mr. Bacon, our daughter, and Evelyn Longman, who did much of the decorative work in the Memorial, went down to Washington to try the experiments."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Portrait Painting!

"Margaret French," a pastel by Daniel French

"During our summers at Chesterwood, Mr. French's greatest amusement was to play at portrait painting. He always hoped for a free summer when he might go off with a painter friend and study, and, with no idea of exhibiting, he painted all the girls who came to visit us. He was quite wonderful at catching a likeness, which showed, of course, his trained hand and eye in another line of work.

Some painters, as we know, care but little for the likeness, but Mr. French always claimed that, if the drawing were absolutely correct, the painting must look like the sitter. 'A likeness,' he used to say, 'consists not so much in getting in all the details, as in getting what you do get right. It really does not need very many details to convey an impression of a face or figure. A silhouette is a strong likeness as far as it goes, and it goes pretty far in spite of the fact that there are no eyes, no ears, no modelling of any kind. If the outline is absolutely correct, it looks exactly like the person.'" *

"In 1885, he took lessons and studied in Paris the following year and frequently painted portraits of his daughter, Margaret. She sat for at least four oil portraits and five in pastel. Inspired by her father, she also studied art at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, and became known as a portrait sculptor. And it was Margaret, the Frenchs' only child, who ensured that Chesterwood and her father's legacy would be transferred to the National Trust for Historic Preservation." **

To be continued

(* Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.
** Excerpts from "Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial's Sculptor" by Cynthia Close for "Art & Object.")

 

 

Daniel Chester French: The Question of Expense

Maquettes by Daniel French

"In connection with studio life and the making of statues, there is one question - grave to every sculptor - which is naturally little understood by the outside world - the question of expense. A large room - for architectural sculpture a huge room - is an absolute necessity. The clay, the wax, the setting up of statues and busts, the skilled carpentry work, heavy express charges, models, the turning of the clay into plaster, and later the turning of plaster, by skilled workmen, into bronze or marble - all, unless a man is highly paid, eat up a large part of the profits.

I have known, in Mr. French's case, that sometimes when a statue was put in place, it was found that the entire large appropriation - in one case some $50,000 - was entirely used up in the expenses of casting, stonework, water for the pool, etc. Except in the case of another appropriation being made, there would be nothing left for the sculptor.

People generally do not understand the expense. For example, there was one of the great captains of industry. He wanted a statue of a certain kind for a certain place. He commissioned his architect to ask Mr. French - not to give the order, but to make a model on approval. Mr. French said that he should be glad to do so and submit the model, but that he charged for his designs, and that the price would be $500. Shortly after this, the architect received a letter from the captain of industry saying: 'What's the matter with these artist fellows What does French mean by charging for a design? Tell him that when I want a job, I go for it! Why, I've crossed the ocean in search of a job.' This so amused the architect that he told us about it, and Mr. French's comment was, 'Tell Mr. R___ that it's a great many years since I have had to go to Europe, or anywhere, to get a job.' 

I have often wished that I knew Mr. R___. He is a big man in his way, and I know that he must have a sense of humor and would appreciate the idea, if his attention were called to it, that he could not approach a work of art as he would a leak in the bathroom." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

Daniel Chester French: The Chesterwood Studio

Daniel French studio, Chesterwood

"In 1897 we bought our place in Stockbridge, about three miles out in the country. We had lived in Concord and had spent two summers in Cornish, but we wanted to be on the direct route to New York with which, in those days, Mr. French felt obliged to keep in touch, both with his own work and especially with that of the Metropolitan Museum, of which he was a trustee.

We chose Stockbridge because we loved it from the first moment we looked upon it, the long flat street, with its old houses and great trees, its atmosphere of respectability and culture, and its intimate hills. We bought a place about three miles out on a back country road with a rambling house and beautiful trees, and a view which had an air of being especially created for our front porch. And there we settled down to live for the rest of our lives, at least from May through mid-November."

"The sculptor turned his immediate attention to the construction of a new free-standing studio, for this was to be not only a country home but a workplace. Construction began in the summer of 1897 while the Frenches were touring Europe. But the following summer, back in residence in Stockbridge, French was able to take up occupancy in his new studio, which he made sure included a colonnaded piazza from which, seated in wicker chairs, the sculptor and his visitors could enjoy unobstructed views of Monument Mountain. 

In the northern entranceway to the studio, French set up a sitting room to receive guests and patrons. The high-ceilinged workroom featured a strategically placed skylight to supply all-important soft, indirect illumination without shadows and shelving and pedestals ample enough to display plaster and bronze maquettes in abundance. A bookcase overflowed with easily accessible research volumes on such vital topics as military uniforms. Hanging intriguingly on one large hook was a leather saddle, ready whenever needed to accommodate a model posing indoors for an equestrian statue. A trap door in the floor allowed assistant to store old casts and fresh clay in the cellar.

'A fine casting room was at the back of the studio replete with all the paraphernalia that a sculptor needs at hand. There was a sink and faucet for the water that has to be sprayed on a clay statue every day. A portable wooden potter's wheel stood on casters, enabling French to roll his clay models from room to room so he could examine them from many angles and in different shades of light. But by far the most innovative feature of the studio was a revolving modeling platform atop a railroad flatcar. The car sat on a submerged indoor track leading outdoors through twenty-two-foot-high, double doors. By utilizing it, French could roll his latest work outside so he could view even his largest models in the full light of day - just as the public would eventually view his finished statuary."

To be continued

(*Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.
**Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Six Bronze Doors and a Headstone

Bronze door depicting "Wisdom"

Bronze door depicting "Knowledge"

"When Mr. French made six bronze doors for the Public Library in Boston, it was just nine years from the time he began them until they were finished, and McKim, slightly discouraged, used to write to him and say, 'How long, at the rate you have taken for the doors, would it take to make two statues for Alabama or' - or any one of his numerous projects? The doors drew high praise from sculptor Lorado Taft who described the low relief  as 'one of the final tests of a sculptor's skill' Then he noted: 'In the importunate and most difficult problems of composition, foreshortening, and draping, reduced almost to the ethereal, Mr. French has shown his skill to be quite equal to his refined taste.'

About this time, Mr. French had the opportunity and pleasure to doing something towards the completion of the headstone which the Alcott family were having made for their famous Aunt Louisa. After it was finished, her nephew, Mr. Pratt, one of Meg's sons, in writing Mr. French, wished they could show their appreciation of what he had done, and for which, of course, he had not been willing to take any remuneration.

Mr. French, after thinking it over, wrote back to him and said: 'There is something I would like you to do. My child is eight years old, and it would be a great pleasure if she could have some memento of Miss Louisa and her work. Perhaps you would send her one of the books - for instance, 'An Old-Fashioned Girl.' Later, to our great surprise, and almost - but not quite - to our embarrassment came a box with twenty-seven volumes of Miss Alcott's works, beautifully bound in blue and gold, with an autographed poem in the first volume. Of course we were all delighted, and Margaret almost overwhelmed at the importance of such a present..."

To be continued

(*Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.

Daniel Chester French: The John Boyle O'Reilly

"John Boyle O'Reilly Memorial" by Daniel Chester French

"One of those winters, Mr. French was making the John Boyle O'Reilly for the Back Bay in Boston. It was a large group, and he had already devoted himself to it for a couple of years, but he called me into the studio one day and said with a few anxious wrinkles in his forehead:

'Mary, I left this group here last spring on purpose so that I shouldn't see it for six months and could come back to it with a fresh eye, and now what should you think' - he gazed at me with a still more troubled expression - 'if I told you that I was going to pull it to pieces and make it over, more like the original sketch? We may not have much to eat for a while' - which was, of course, only a figure of speech - 'but I know I can better it, and I really don't see what else I can do.'

So we studied it carefully - I had always liked the sketch better myself - and that winter was devoted to getting into something that he felt he had missed in his previous year's work. Of course, all artists do that kind of thing, and having an artist for a husband and cousin, I was quite used to the idea.'"*

"John Boyle O'Reilly was an Irishman, who had agitated, sometimes violently, for Irish independence in the old country. He had been captured, tried for treason, and exiled to remote Western Australia. From there he had escaped and come to Boston, where he resumed his campaign for a free Ireland. He also quickly rose to prominence, writing for, and later running, the Catholic Newspaper, the 'Pilot,' and published half a dozen books of fiction and poetry. Sadly, he died young in 1890 after accidentally ingesting an overdose of his ailing wife's sleeping potion, and quickly became a legend. His passing unleashed an outpouring of grief which resulted in a campaign to raise fifty thousand dollars to fund a statue in his honor. His admirers invited French to design and execute 'a suitable memorial to the genius and manhood of John Boyle O'Reilly.'

"French proposed a larger-than-life bronze bust of the thickly mustachioed O'Reilly set against a richly carved granite stele. For the opposite side, against a similar backdrop, he would install a trio of allegorical statues in tribute to O'Reilly's virtues. A draped, hooded, and enthroned central figure would represent Erin, the personification of Ireland, her head downcast in mourning, weaving a wreath of shamrock for the fallen hero. She would be surrounded by statues representing 'Patriotism,' a Celtic warrior clutching a sword in one hand and an oak leaf - the symbol of strength - in the other; and the seminude, winged figure of 'Poetry' offering laurel - the ancient reward to poets. 

 Dedication day for the finished bronze was scheduled for June 20, 1896. With outgoing Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson I in attendance and Daniel Chester French looking on, the presentation exercises drew a large throng to witness a program of prayers, orations, and music. Toward the conclusion of the ceremonies, a male chorus sang out the words of 'Forever,' one of O'Reilly's beloved poems, aptly beginning with: 'Those we love truly never, never die.' As its final verse floated into the air, the Irish martyr's daughter tugged at a cord, releasing the veils, and revealing the striking memorial to the appreciative crowd."**

To be continued

(*Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.
**Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Cornish

"Christmas Morning" by Maxfield Parrish

"Cornish was, in my day, and of course still is, a community rather than a village, a scattering group of houses among the New Hampshire hills. For the mail and for whatever small business affairs there were, we drove down long hills, and along flat river banks, and through an old ramshackle covered bridge, into the town of Windsor.

The places were lovely and unusual. There was none of the old-fashioned method of clearing off a tract of land, cutting down trees, filling up ravines, laying out roads between the house and the view. In other words, the taking out of everything that naturally grew there and putting in everything that was foreign.

I think of the sculptor, Herbert Adam's place how exquisite it was, and yet a house and a barn about sixty feet apart with a high fence connecting the two and painted white, a parallelogram of green inside, a few columns, a stone floor against the house, and am amphora or a colored relief against the white walls of the barn - one might have been in Italy or anywhere, and yet no effort, no expense, no display.

And of course Maxfield Parrish's place - a little rambling farmhouse on a hillside, as I remember it. We wandered up along a winding pathway, and there, in front of the house a few yards away and slightly lower, was the oval pool which he has made famous with blue waters and peaked Alps, recumbent maidens and youths.

Charles Platt's home was a kind of American Italy. The Tom Dewing house, low upon the road, with its little garden ablaze, as I remember it, with every shade of yellow, and upon the hill opposite, the Italian villa which Mrs. Johnston, then Miss Annie Lazarus had built and made beautiful.

Some of the artists used to say that Saint-Gaudens had the only real house in Cornish. It was a brick of the severe Colonial type, and had in the earlier days been a tavern. He had done everything to it that he could think of to make it as little like New England as possible. He had put an elaborate fence around the top of the bank with Greek heads at regular intervals, and a big, elaborate porch at the front to get that 'infernal Puritan look' out of it, which offended his Celtic soul. This porch looked towards Ascutney, as do most of the houses in Cornish, just as in Sicily they look toward Aetna, and in Japan towards Fujiyama."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

Daniel Chester French: The Chicago World's Fair

Daniel Chester French's statue of the "Republic" with his
and Edward Clark Potter's Quadriga atop the Great Arch

"When our child and I came back to America in the spring of 1893 and went to Chicago, we found Mr. French with a tremendous group of other artists working upon the buildings of the World's Fair. It was an interesting time, with so much going on, on a very big scale, everyone doing something, Millet, MacMonnies, Kenyon Cox, Blashfield, and others. Augustus Lukeman, sculptor of the 'Stone Mountain Memorial,' had charge of Mr. French's particular gang.

Mr. French was building the great statue of the 'Republic,' sixty-five feet high, which was to stand in the Lagoon. It was a good deal, it seemed to me, like building the Tower of Babel. They made a big square platform a few feet from the ground, and upon this, near the edge, a kind of stockade or fence ten feet high in broad convolutions, covered it with a mixture of jute and plaster which gradually developed into the great ripples of a not very conventional woman's skirt.

Of course, it was a good deal of a job for a mere artist to plan this great structure, but I have always said that, if Mr. French had not been a sculptor, he would have been an inventor; and the work went steadily on until finally all the sections, one at a time, were carried out, planted in the Lagoon, and the head and shoulders of the statue settled into place.

He and Edward Potter were also making some figures for the Quadriga, which was to stand upon the Great Arch where the Lagoon opened out into the lake, and four groups of bulls and horses and humans, to stand at the entrance of the Agricultural Building. One corner of the interior of the building was fenced off from this particular work into a rough studio, and there Mr. French and Mr. Potter made their horses with the attendant figures of girls and pages, and here the models came and posed for them, some in Greek draperies, and sometimes, I imagine, without draperies.

I used to go down and watch the work going on and shiver to see my only husband climbing around at such a height. The men were always tumbling off things, the work was rushed, and the workmen were perfectly reckless. Ambulances were dashing around the town at all hours of the day and night, and we wives, sitting at home, used to wonder at each noise clanging by the house which particular husband was being brought home, and what particular accident had happened to him!"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

Daniel Chester French: The Music Club

"La Carmencita" by J.S. Sargent

"In those early years in New York we were invited to join the Music Club. It was started, I believe, by Mrs. Gilder, Mrs. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Henry Holt, George Vanderbilt and those two tall beautiful Minturn girls, who would have lent distinction to any assembly. It met in the great studio of William Merritt Chase on West Tenth Street. 

Chase was a real Bohemian with his soft tie, his narrow French silk hat, looking (as he, of course, wanted to look) as if he had just escaped from the Latin Quarter. He had no money to speak of, but he was long as to children - I believe there were eight - and as to studios. Room after room, as I remember them, full of all kinds of curios that he had picked up all over the world. We used to go there once a month in the winter to hear great artists play amid congenial surroundings and among friends. Among others I there heard Ysaye, Plançon, and Paderewski.

One evening Carmencita danced there, but it was not for the Music Club, and I did not see it and had to be content with that my husband told me of it. Sargent was painting her portrait. They said he sat and watched her as if almost in a trance, hypnotized by the motion, grace, abandon, which he put into every inch of one of his greatest of portraits."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Marriage

"Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell"
by Daniel Chester French

"Dan French and I were married in Washington in July, a terrible time and place to be sure, in which to marry, or to do anything, but if one will marry an artist...

A few weeks before the day set for the wedding, which was to have been in June, Dan wrote me, 'What should you think if I told you that even now at the last minute I must change my statue' - this was the Gallaudet which was to be put up at the Deaf Mute College outside of Washington -' and I am afraid it will put off our wedding for a month.'

The rest of the letter was apologetic and contrite, but - 'Saint-Gaudens has been in and says that the legs are too short. Perhaps I should have known this without any one telling me, had I not been diverted by the prospects of approaching matrimony. However, when you can pin Saint-Gaudens down and get a real criticism from him, it is better than anybody's, and so what can I do except give the Doctor an inch or two more of leg, and meanwhile, what kind of a lover will you think me anyhow?'

Of course I knew well enough that, in sculpture, legs and arms and heads were always being cut off and jostled about, and there was nothing to do but accept it, so we picked out a nice hot day in the hotteset city in the world, so to speak, and were married, and I went to New York to live.

Dan French had lived in New York only that last year before our marriage, having given up his studios in Concord and Boston. That first winter he had worked in that of his friend while his new house in West Eleventh Street was being prepared for us. This house was most interesting and I loved it, but a home in a side street, with all the hustle and hubbub of a great city, with no intimate friends and no neighbors, seemed somewhat appalling to me after the easy-going life of Washington in which Ihad grown up. My husband knew already most of the literary and artistic people who afterwards made our lives interesting, but it took a little while for me to know who people were, and to get used to the hurried, slap-dash methods of a metropolis.

There were the Gilders, the Saint-Gaudenses, the Will Lows, the Dewings, the Kenyon Coxes, the Blashfields, William Dean Howells, the Martin Conways, and always Mr. French's old friend, Benjamin C. Porter. And at these houses, which were thrown open to us, there were all their friends, writers and painters from all over the world."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

 

Daniel Chester French: Endymion and Home

"The Awakening of Endymion" by Daniel Chester French

"Ensconced in the fairytale setting of Thomas Ball's studio whose uplifting atmosphere he likened to a Renaissance workplace of old, Dan French began shaping his concept for 'Endymion," the long-slumbering Aeolian shepherd of Greek myth. Although he carefully observed Ball chipping away skillfully at polished stone, French had not quite mastered the technique himself. If nothing else, he learned in Florence to concentrate on his clay and plaster models, and delegate to specialists the task of enlarging, casting, and carving his 'sketches' into final form. It was a routine he would follow for the rest of his long career. 

As French learned, great sculptors conceived their works, but did not necessarily carve them, too. Michelangelo may once have done so in this city, but the masters of the modern age were no longer expected to be expert marble cutters. French vowed never to take chisel to marble again. Except for polishing and finishing, which he would always insist on performing himself before any of his marbles were unveiled, after 'Endymion' he never again worked in the medium. 

During his final months in Florence, he added the finishing touches to his sculpture, for which he had high hopes. He had labored on it for more than a year. Once, after sending a photograph of the conceptual clay sketch home to his father, he had been gratified to learn that his family and friends thought it 'the loveliest thing that ever was.' But then others added what must have been received in Florence as a devastating critique 'Can a sleeping man's arm stay up from his body as the left one is? Would it not fall down?' Young French set to work trying to subdue it.

Not until late June did he satisfy himself that the sculpture could not be improved upon further. After bidding goodbye to the sprawling Powers family, French departed Florence on July 10, 1876 - just six days after the centennial of American independence. He was also determined to attract a high-paying customer for 'Endymion.' He was destined to be disappointed. Eventually, shipped back to Concord at considerable expense, it earned decent enough reviews when placed briefly on exhibit at Boston's St. Botolph Club, but still ended up a white elephant. Years later, perhaps eager to forget the entire experience, a disappointed French would leave the statue behind when he moved out of his Concord home. A century later still, a subsequent owner would relegate the weather-beaten marble to the backyard. Not until 1983 would it be rescued and installed at Chesterwood."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)  

 

Daniel Chester French: Italy and Thomas Ball

"While Dan French's father in Concord was looking after his boy's interests at home, the son over in Florence, where his good luck seemed to pursue him, was trying not to have too good a time. 'They all do everything they can to make me happy,' he wrote. 'They not only treat me like one of the family, but they take me about to see everything and everybody - such interesting people!'

He lived with Preston Powers' family [Dan's friend and son of sculptor Hiram Powers], and within a few days of his arrival, he and Mrs. Powers, a young girl of twenty or twenty-one, went out in search of a room which would be suitable for a studio. They found one quite near the Porta Romana, outside which dwelt the numerous families of Powers, and Mr. Thomas Ball, at that time the most distinguished American sculptor as well as a man of a most wonderful personality.

Mr. Ball's villa was a large brown structure, in the middle of Italian gardens, a coterie of the literati, the musicians, the artists from America and England, and from the neighboring Florence, delightful surroundings for a young man who had led such a quiet life in a small town in America. To the youth it seemed incredible that such good luck could have come to him. 

Mr. Ball wrote to Dan's father:

My dear Sir: You would like to know why I have done this thing. I would ask you why the hearts and homes of the entire neighborhood were thrown open to your son before he had been here a week? Why do all the mothers (five at least), if he happens to be unwell vie with each other in their endeavors to make him enjoy it? Why did I, when I went from curiosity, to see his 'Minute Man,' notwithstanding its surprising merit for a first work, find myself when I left the studio, thinking much more about the artist than the statue? And why did I go again and take my wife to see the artist?

As far as I am concerned, I will tell you, I recognized in his simple, ingenuous artist nature, something more than talent; something indispensable to a true artist. And when he came here and took a studio not far from me, but too far for me to see him as often as was good for him, I thought how, twenty years ago, I came here to make my first struggle, and how welcome was the face of dear old Powers whenever it brightened my door. 

And then I thought how nice it would be, when I was up to my elbows in clay, on a ladder 15 feet in the air, to have someone that I could call upon to receive my visitors; and I decided at once to give him a corner in my studio and invited him forthwith. I find it works well... and if he does not try my patience...he can stay as long as he pleases... Believe me, my dear sir, it will always give me pleasure to do anything in my power to advance the professional interests of your son. Very truly yours, Thomas Ball

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)

 

Daniel Chester French: The Minute Man

The "Minute Man" by Daniel Chester French

"The town of Concord had decided to erect a statue of a Minute Man on the battle-field by the 'rude bridge that arched the flood.' The Commission appropriated one thousand dollars, and had unofficially asked Dan French, at that time twenty-one, to make the statue. The tradition in the family is that he made a sketch and took it down to Mr. Emerson and Judge Hoar, upon whose recommendation it was immediately accepted.

Of course this commission was a serious thing for a youth whose only training had been one month in the studio of Mr. Ward in New York, some lessons in drawing with Dr. Rimmer in Brookline, a prize in the cattle show the year before, and some advice from Miss May Alcott. 'I wonder whether I can do it,' he wrote to someone. 'By this time next year I shall know.'

He made his models, the second and final one in a room in a business building in Boston, with a poor light. He still wonders how he was able to do it. There was no one except a stray sculptor at that time who knew anything about the mechanics of the trade, so he and his father went to work, and his practical mechanical instinct carried him through, though with various catastrophes. When his first model was finished, they got the plaster ready - the amount which someone had told him would be sufficient - made their mold, dissolved the plaster, stood the model on its head, and poured the plaster into it. There must have been a hole somewhere, underneath the hair perhaps, for all the plaster ran through the mold and out upon the floor - the last drop they had - so they had to wait for another day when they could renew their supply.

I don't remember whether it was the 'Minute Man' or whether it was a bust made about the same time which gave him great trouble as to the hair. They tried in every way to make it have a natural look, and finally his father said, 'Oh, take a brush and comb, and treat it the way you would treat hair, and I guess it will look like hair.' His struggles must have been of great interest and amusement to his family.

The statue was unveiled after Dan had gone to Italy for studies. His father wrote, 'A perfect spring morning. The sun is bright and the air still, and the bluebirds and robins are talking very busily about their nests... The old Minute Man does us credit... Everybody, great and small, is delighted. I confess to a great thrill at the sight of 'D.C. French' on the base!'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.) 

 

 

Daniel Chester French: First Instruction

While still a teenager Daniel French
executed this bust of his father

"There was at that time in New England but little art but there was a love, as represented in old prints and engravings, a reverence for old furniture and for all inherited worth, that was at least appreciative. In Concord there was small need of money, small ambition for purely worldly success, and Dan French, with an absorbing interest in the worthwhile things of life, cared little, even at that period, for aught save to be left alone to work out his newly discovered vision of art.

His father wrote often for the magazines, was a man of literary attainments, and welcomed eagerly the first glimpse of anything like genius in his children. His family, who had probably never seen a sculptor in their lives, were amazed and interested, and his fellow townspeople immediately decided that something like a miracle had happened in their midst, that this young product of their beloved town was going to be the greatest sculptor of all ages.

But at that time there was no art school or art class in Boston, but he frequented the Athenaeum and studied the Greek casts there, modeled for a short time with J.Q.A. Ward in New York, and for a while in Boston with Dr. Rimmer, whose recognition as a sculptor, he always claimed, was not commensurate with his achievements. Rimmer was a very great draughtsman, and to him in after years Mr. French attributed the solid foundation of his work. Miss May Alcott, who had recently come back from her studies in Europe, did much to help him, both with her sympathy and with her tools. 

'Father talked to May Alcott about my newly developed interest in sculpture,' I have heard Dan tell many times in later life,' and she said, 'If he will come down to see me, I will lend him some tools.' I tell you I lost no time. I harnessed old Bucephalus, hurried down to the other end of the town, learned what I could in a short call, and brought a handful of tools back in triumph. One of these crude wooden implements I have always by me and am using it to this day.'" 

Some of Daniel French's sculpting tools

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.) 

 

Daniel Chester French: An Introduction

Head of the "Lincoln" and Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French, the creator of the famous Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., was, at first, just one of Mary Adams French's cousins, but their lives were to become intertwined in the years to come, as he studied abroad and she grew into a young woman. This story is told in her book, "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife," which we shall take up at that point in their lives.

"When I was about sixteen, my cousin Dan came home from Europe and came with my young aunt Sarita to see me. I remember it perfectly, the first time I definitely remember him, in that square box of a convent parlor, the high room painted a gloomy brown, with horsehair furniture, and one entire side a square lattice, through which now and then a nun was permitted to talk to a friend. Dan was twenty-six, and, I thought, very handsome. It was romantic to tell to my school fellows of this new cousin, a sculptor - an unknown quantity in those days in Washington - who had lived abroad. He had just come back from his studies in Mr. [Thomas] Ball's studio in Florence, and spent the next two winters in Washington, where, though I saw him little, he brought a new and artistic touch into my life.

When I read of Raphael, 'whom the gods loved and whom women loved,' I have often thought that my artist was at least born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Of sturdy New England stock, a race of lawyers back of him, with an intellectual environment certainly unequaled in American life, Dan French seems never to have encountered the struggles of poverty and misunderstanding which have been considered - which he theoretically considered - as necessary to the development of genius.

His father was a judge, his two grandfathers were lawyers - one of them Chief Justice of the State of New Hampshire - while his life, during the most crucial years, was spent amid the 'high thinking and plain living' of Old Concord.

It was a simple and interesting life when I came to know it a few years later, but just before that time, while he was growing up, while his first statue, the 'Minute Man,' was coming into life, and during his two years in Italy in the studio of Mr. Ball, it must have been filled with an atmosphere of high purpose that was unusual as well as of great intellectual interest."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)  

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Curtain Drawn

Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial

 Concerning Augustus Saint-Gaudens' completion of the Albright Caryatids, Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "With that commission my father's work came to its end, closed while he was making almost superhuman efforts to keep active despite the progress of his illness. In that commission he gave his strongest indication of what his future work would have been, work notably of a monumental character he had never before attained. His sickness brought only feebleness of hand, none of mind. To the last his vision grew even fuller and deeper.

A few days before his death which came on August third, 1907, he lay watching a sunset behind Mount Ascutney, from 'Aspet,' the spot which years before had seemed to him restful and far away. He spoke out of a long silence, 'It's very beautiful,' he said, 'but I want to go farther away.'"

His obituary in "The New York Times" on August 8, 1907 read:

"Attended by artists of note from many parts of the East, the funeral services over the ashes of Augustus Saint-Gaudens were held late today in the small studio near the late sculptor's hom, 'Aspet.' The services were conducted by the Rev. O.B. Emerson, a retired Unitarian clergyman of Cambridge, Mass., while tributes to the life work of the deceased were paid by Kenyon Cox, the artist, and Precy Mackaye, the playwright. Arthur B. Whiting of Boston, presided at the organ, playing a number of selections throughout the service. 

Besides Mrs. Saint-Gaudens and her son, Homer, the relatives present included Miss Marie Saint-Gaudens of New York, a niece; Louis Saint-Gaudens of Plainfield, a brother; Dr. Arthur H. Nichols and wife of Boston, Joseph Homer of Brookline, Mass., and Mrs. O.B. Emerson of Cambridge.

The Summer colony of artists about Cornish was represented by Joseph Earle Frasier, John Flanagan, Mr. Keeck, and Adolph Weinman of New York, and Herbert Adams of Plainfield.

The ashes were interred in Ascutney Cemetery at Windsor, Vt., in a lot near that of Senator Evarts." 

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)  

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Brooks

"Rev. Phillips Brooks" monument
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' monument to Rev. Phillips Brooks, a respected and beloved Anglican clergyman and author of "O Little Town of Bethlehem":

"Indeed there were few objects in his later years that my father 'caressed' as long as he did this figure. He selected and cast aside. He shifted folds of the gown back and forth. He juggled with the wrinkles of the trousers, which invariably obstructed the development far more than their final interest justified. He moved the fingers and the tilt of the right hand into a variety of gestures. He raised and lowered the chin of this long-studied portrait until finally he left it lowered, since he considered the angle of the head a question of art and not of fact, and since he felt that he expressed more definitely the magnetism of the preacher by having him appear to talk directly at the visitor. He shifted the left hand first from the chest to a position where it held an open Bible, and last to the lectern; because, although the lectern has aroused argument as not being the point from which Brooks spoke, it was vitally necessary for the composition.

The process certainly brought my father pleasure. As long as he could stand and model for himself, he resumed his former habit of singing airs from old Italian operas and of whistling as he worked, after the fashion of the days in Rome and later in the New York Thirty-sixth Street studio. 

When he first turned seriously to the character of the figure behind Brooks, he designed sketches of fully thirty angels. But after coming to work in Cornish he received the suggestion that he substitute a Christ for the angel he had planned. The conception appealed to him more because of what he might develop in the composition and because of the fitness of the subject than from any desire on his part to portray an idea of the character of Christ. However, as was his custom, he sought a biography, and on being handed Renan's 'Life of Christ,' read it eagerly. Next he procured Tissot's 'Life of Christ.' After that, the story has it, he went to his friend, Mr. Henry Adams, explained what he had been doing and asked for another book on the subject. Whereat Mr. Adams promptly suggested one called the Bible.

From that time Saint-Gaudens began to express a genuine faith in his conception of the physical image of Christ as a man, tender yet firm, suffering yet strong. He wrote to Tissot on the subject:

'I am making a statue of Christ and turn to you as the highest authority in anything pertaining to Him. I would be most grateful if you could give me some information with regard to the shape and size of the garments He wore; details of arrangement I cannot get by simply studying the illustrations in your extraordinary work which I have the good fortune to possess. Will you excuse me if I take this opportunity to express the profound admiration I have felt for your art for a long time, beginning with the etchings of 'The Prodigal Son' which I saw years ago at Knoedler's in New York. Your sincerity and devotion have been a great incentive and inspiration to me.' 

The head of the Christ was one of the last two pieces of sculpture that he actually touched with his hands, and as it stood alone he felt most happy over the result. However, when the bust had been placed upon the figure he believed it too abstract and too remote...and wished the head draped and in shadow. Accordingly, he set upon the problem an assistant, Miss Frances Grimes, who, under his direction, modified the features until at last he undoubtedly gained what he sought because, toward the end of the commission, and of his life, he said more than once: 'There, it's all right now; all right now!'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.) 

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Albright Caryatids

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' caryatids for 
the Albright Art Gallery, now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "The Albright Caryatids* strongly held my father's attention since he appreciated the rich worth of the architecture he was adorning. For such a building, bearing to him a strong note of Greece, he wished to create his caryatids as large, reposeful women, in no way personal and to some extent archaic. Short portions of letters which he wrote to Mr. Albright on the subject show his feelings toward them as well as the manner in which, from his first commission to his last, he ruminated over his tasks before ever he touched his hands to clay. He writes:

'The scheme is a most alluring one, admitting of infinite possibilities as regards treatment. I have thought of making twelve different figures, but this would be a formidable undertaking; besides, it seems to me now that it would not be necessary. I think that the system adopted at the Erechtheum, [an ancient Greet temple on the Acropolis at Athens], would be the best here, and to have two, three, or four different models of which the other figures would be replicas, modifications being made in each of the other eight, nine, or ten figures, in the folds of the drapery, some detail or accessory.'

Again:

'This doing something to recall the Erechtheum is what perhaps frightens me more than anything I have done in my life. It seems so presumptuous. However, we shall see.'

And again, much later:

'They have made good progress, I suppose on account of the years of thought, and the year of preliminary studies devoted to them before the actual large size figures were begun a year or so ago. It's not the finer but the brain-work that takes the time; and I knew what I wanted to do and have done it, in fact more than I proposed, as I have made three different heads instead of two.'

At last he decided that he would place palms in the hands of the end caryatids, while by the middle ones he should denote Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Music. At the outset he studied the figure of Painting with detailed care, as all the others were to be variations upon it. For example he had cast a heavy plaster cap, under which the living model could pose for only a moment, though during that moment he could see her head at an angle which banished the hated 'stuck out chin.' His general scheme of drapery he drew from the decorative figures on a terra cotta Etruscan altar, but he developed those compositions mostly through deliberate and original thought, partially through accident. One morning, for instance, showing pleasure when he found that the garments had happened to be cut off in a way that cast a straight, dark line across the feet."

These final works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens were first displayed in 1921 at the museum as part of an exhibition of works from the Albright collection, but it was not until 1935 that all of them were permanently installed on the east facade of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. 

To be continued

* A caryatid is a sculpted female figure used as an architectural support to hold up a roff or cornice.)

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.) 

 

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: United States Coin Designs

Ten Dollar Gold Coins by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Twenty Dollar Gold Coins by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

"After the erection of the new studio on the spot where the old one had burned, my father turned not only to the reconstruction of the statues which he had lost, but before long to a monument to Marcus A. Hanna, memorials to Christopher Lyman Magee and James MacNeill Whistler, the Caryatids for the Albright Art Gallery, the United States coins, and other commissions.

The scheme for the United States coins - the cent, the eagle, and the double eagle - also originated about this time at a dinner with President Roosevelt in the winter of 1905. There they both grew enthusiastic over the old high-relief Greek coins, until the President declared that he would have the mint stamp a modern version of such coins in spite of itself if my father would design them, adding with his customary vehemence, 'You know, Saint-Gaudens, this is my pet crime.' Saint-Gaudens wrote Roosevelt, 'The making of these designs is a great pleasure, but the job is even more serious than I anticipated. You may not recall that I told you I was 'scared blue' at the thought of doing that; now that I have the opportunity, the responsibility looms up like a spectre.'

He first purposed to model the cent with a flying eagle, the formal lettering treated in a new fashion, and to execute for the gold coins a full-length figure of Liberty mounting a rock, with a shield in her left hand and a lighted torch in her right, backed by a semi-conventional eagle, with wings half-closed. For one reason and another, however, the scheme proved impracticable. So after months of confusion, he settled that the one cent would exhibit a profile head and the lettering; that the ten-dollar gold piece should carry the same head, with the inscriptions shifted, and the standing eagle; and that the twenty-dollar gold piece should exhibit the full-length figure of Liberty, without wings or shield, and the flying eagle.

To accomplish this result, my father altered and realtered the coins for a year and a half. The flying eagle he developed from the bird on the 1857 'White Cent.' In all, he created seventy models of this bird, and often stood twenty-five of them in a row for visitors to number according to preference.

The profile head he modeled in relief from the favorite, but superseded but of the Sherman 'Victory,' adding feathers only upon the President's emphatic suggestion. 

Finally he attached the difficult problem of the inscriptions by placing upon the previously milled edge of the coin, in one case, the forty-six stars and, in the other, the thirteen stars with the 'E Pluribus Unum.' The motto 'In God We Trust,' as an inartistic intrusion not required by law, he wholly discarded and thereby drew down upon himself the lightning of public comment. It is interesting to discover in regard to this that Secretary Salmon P. Chase received quite as severe a censure for placing the words upon this coin as was aroused by their removal." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Seated Lincoln

"Abraham Lincoln: The Head of State"
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "The larger productions of the years which followed, began with a second Lincoln for Chicago, Illinois, wherein my father realized his long-cherished hope of returning to one of his earlier commissions and of developing it again according to his later ideas. It is interesting to record that he nearly lost this opportunity, however, through that very absorption in his work which had placed him where he stood. 

As in the case of the first Lincoln monument, so with the second, the Committee asked him to enter a competition, which, of course, he refused to do, and then came again with a direct offer. Near the time of this second visit, about noon of a Sunday morning, my mother went to the studio where my father was working alone. On a large board was written: 'Lincoln Committee, Century Club, ten o-clock.'

'Have you see them?' asked my mother. 'Great Scott! No!' cried my father, staring at the board. He had forgotten his appointment, engrossed in his task. At once my mother hurried to the Century Club to inquire about what had happened. Alas! Here she found only a note saying they had waited an hour in vain. From the Club, she went to the hotel where she met Mr. Norman Williams and another member of the Committee who intimated that any man so oblivious to punctuality should not be entrusted with the monument. Nevertheless, she succeeded in setting matters straight.

So now, Saint-Gaudens began the project. He set his mind this time upon Lincoln the head of state, rather than Lincoln the man, as in his earlier monument. Accordingly, to reach his solution of combining the personal with the national, he shifted the three four-foot models of the statue back and forth over seats of countless shapes and sizes; he added thereto the flag of the United States. 

While the statue progressed, Saint-Gaudens' answers to a number of questions which arose concerning it clearly revealed how he never hesitated to tread on the toes of Nature if forced thereto in the process of gaining the effects of Nature. As in the standing Lincoln he had lengthened the body a trifle at the waist, so here he slightly elongated Lincoln's legs from the knee down, to guard against the foreshortening by the low point of view of the visitor. On the other hand, he spared no pains to obtain correct materials for costume and figure. He even asked Mr. John Bixby, who posed for the statue, to wander among the farmers dressed in black broadcloth of the cut of Lincoln's time, that he might wear the proper wrinkles in the suit."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Advice to Artists

"Sherman Monument"
(detail of wing overlapping trousers)

"Sherman Monument"
(detail of coat overlapping hand and hat)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens said: "If you have modeled your best sculpture in the small, you should have accomplished your best results for your work when it is made big. Your subject should contain both the detail required upon close inspection, and the breadth that makes it tell at a distance." 

Homer Saint Gaudens added: "This need for carrying power he constantly dwelt upon in his modeling. I remember that one day as he watched four or five assistants engaged on various portions of the Sherman, he broke the silence with: 'I am going to invent a machine to make you all good sculptors.' 

The stillness promptly became uneasy. 

'It will have hooks for the back of your necks and strong springs.' 

The stillness grew even more uneasy. 

'Every thirty seconds it will jerk you fifty feet away from your work, and hold you there for five minutes contemplation!'"

He also disliked objects wholly analyzed, since he believed that the unreserved is the uninteresting. Accordingly, he experimented with Sherman's lowered right hand and hat until he had drawn across it a bit of the coat; and in the same way he satisfied himself by lapping the Victory's wing over Sherman's left leg."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: In Favor of Academic Training

"Portrait of Homer Schiff
Saint-Gaudens" by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "As one earnest of his enthusiasm [for the establishment of an American Academy in Rome] my father delivered two speeches. The task was ever fraught with much agony to his modest nature. But here he felt the cause too high and his own opinions too vital to hesitate on grounds of personal comfort. Therefore, early in its progress, he said in Washington:

"I have been asked to express my ideas concerning the Roman Academy. What I have to say can be said in few words and I take pleasure in so doing... because I am of the firm conviction that an institution, such as that, is an admirable one. My reason for thinking it admirable, is my belief that the strenuous competition required to gain access to the Village Medici, as well as the four years of study in that wonderful spot, tend to a more earnest and thorough training than could elsewhere be gained under the present conditions of life in our times.

In the repeated attacks that are made on the Roman Academy and on the Ecole des Beaux Arts and in the incessant cry for greater freedom in the development of the artistic mind, there is a certain amount of truth. But in such reaction the pendulum swings too far and the real question is lost sight of. There is a middle ground on which to stand. It seems to be rarely realized that the very men who are shown as examples against the schools were, if not actually brought up in the School of Rome, all men of thorough academic training. Only after such training does the mind become sufficiently mature and the individual personality so developed as to be able to indulge in unqualified freedom and liberty of expression.

Rodin, one of the leaders of the movement against Academic education, had a thorough and arduous training during the early years of his career, and I am of the opinion that that training instead of dwarfing or minimizing his extreme power of expression, has been of enormous assistance to it. Leaving out of the question the exhaustive early study of the great masters of the past, Michelangelo and others, and coming to our own times, to the brilliant men of the French school, we find that all have had the same early experience. Paul Dubois, one of the masters of French Art - although not a member of the Villa Medici - had a training fully equal to that which could be gained there, and is one of its strongest supporters. Houdon, Rude, Falguière, men whose work lives and breathes with divine fire, were trained there. Puvis de Chavannes and Baudry, to enter another domain, I may add to my list. It is needless to say that none of these were injured by it...

Four years of undistracted attention, devoid of pecuniary worries and surrounded by a sympathetic environment where the whole thought is directed to the highest artistic achievement possible in the formative years of a young man's life, can be anything but an enormous assistance and of vital importance to the few who have the divine gift. If it were but one in a century who was helped in this way, the institution would be worthwhile.

When this is accomplished there is nothing I shall be more proud to have my children's children associate me with than the achievement of this work." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son, Homer Saint-Gaudens.)