Sculpture

Sculpture

Sources

The Ideal Form. “Not a nude figure, I hope,” com-ments a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne’s novel, set in Rome, tracks a band of American artists abroad. As Hawthorne’s sculp-tor, Kenyon, prepares to unveil a “figure,” his friend Miriam observes, “Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Ève, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.” Miriam’s teasing remarks shed light on the state of nineteenth-century American sculpture. At midcentury a marble nude titled The Greek Slave (circa 1843) enchanted the American art world. Hiram Powers (1805-1873), creator of The Greek Slave, had recently immigrated—like so many sculptors of his generation—to Italy, where he and compatriots such as Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) developed a taste for grandeur, classicism, and what Greenough called “colossal nudity”—ideals foisted, with varying degrees of success, on the American public. Powers’s Greek Slave, lacking clothes but retaining a measure of chastity, found an adoring audience: “It is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed,” Powers declared. Mid-nineteenth-century nudes idealized the female body, even as patriotic monuments— Andrew Jackson (1853), by Clark Mills (1815-1883) in Washington, D.C.; Washington (1856), by Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) in New York City; Thomas Hart Benton (1868), by Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) in Saint Louis—idealized the male statesman. These ideals were modified, but seldom challenged outright, by the sculpture of succeeding generations.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Hosmer, Chauncey B. Ives (1810-1894), William Rimmer (1816-1879), Erastus Dow Palmer (1817-1904), and John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910) were among the prominent American sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two dominant figures of the period, however, were younger artists: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) and Daniel Chester French (1850-1931). The historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) described his friend Saint-Gaudens as a cautious, observant, and oddly cairn artist. “He never laid down the law, or affected the despot, or became brutalized . . . by the brutalities of his world,” observed Adams. “He required no incense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of thought was excessive.” Saint-Gaudens received a cosmopolitan education in New York, Paris, Florence, and Rome; early on he won the respect and patronage of older artists such as the painter John La Farge (1835-1910) and the sculptor J. Q. A. Ward. With his Farragut (1881) and Sherman (1903) monuments in New York, his Lincoln (1887) in Chicago, and his Robert Gould Shaw (1897) in Boston, Saint-Gaudens upheld the ideal of the American hero. Saint-Gaudens’s work combines grace and vitality—quali ties that harmonized with the spirit of the con-temporary Beaux-Arts revival. The prestigious architectural

firm of McKim, Mead and White placed Saint-Gaudens’s nude Diana atop their Madison Square Garden in 1892. The following year they transported Diana to Chicago to stand guard over the White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Daniel Chester French. French possessed neither the sophisticated gloss nor the cosmopolitan training of Saint-Gaudens. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, French was largely self-trained as a sculptor. He received his first significant commission in 1873: the Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, designed to commemorate the centennial of the “shot heard ‘round the world.” President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) attended the 1875 installation ceremony at the old North Bridge in Concord; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) unveiled the statue. The Minute Man commission opened doors for the young New Englander. French sculpted a founder’s statue— John Harvard (1884)—for the campus of Harvard University and a seventy-five-foot Statue of the Republic (1893) for the World’s Columbian Exposition. French is best remembered for the pensive, thirty-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln enshrined in 1922 in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Although neither Saint-Gaudens nor French revolutionized American sculpture, each created monuments to the raw power of the sculpted form.

Sources

Charles H. Caffin, American Masters of Sculpture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913);

Sylvia E. Crane, White Silence: Greenough, Powers, and Crawford. American Sculptors in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972);

Richard McLanathan, The American Tradition in the Arts (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).