Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 21))

JOHN DONOGHUE.
1E worst calamity that can befall an artist is to cling all his life
long to an ideal which, belonging as it does to another age, can not
be realized under any condition. This was the fate of John
Donoghue, sculptor. His ideal was the abstract, ideal beauty of
form, the return of pagan athletes and goddesses in all their outward perfec-
tion. He had no sympathyfor modern portrait statues of stout middle-aged
gentlemen in vestments. His art disdained mere technical tricks or catchy
emotional effects. He was a disbeJiever in Rodin’s new gospel of formal
expression, for to him any deformity, any ungracefulness, militated against
that pure beauty of form to which sculpture totally devoted itself in former
ages. He did not wish to represent physical infirmity and moral ills, but
the perfection of the body and the calmness and gayety of a non-moral life.
He was almost a Greek in feeling, and technically sufficiently well equipped
to furnish convincing proofs that shapes of Greek perfection were still possible
in modern sculpture. But why was it his misfortune to be an American by
birth ? In France he might have realized his dreams. But in America, where
face and hands are the only mentionable portions of the human body, where
a prejudice against the “altogether ” is deeply rooted in the mind of the
average person, which is the public,and where drapery has become a necessity
as the subterfuge behind which civilization seeks to hide her sins against
nature! His non-success was a foregone conclusion, for every intellectual
product in order to achieve success must converge to the point of view of the
age and the people, in which it is produced. With Donoghue’s lofty, austere
ideals popular fancy had nothing in common. Nudity is truth, and people
prefer to drink of the Fountain of Expediency forgetfulness of their physical
and mental deficiencies.
Yet fortune smiled on him at the start. I met him in the heyday of his
success, 1886, in Boston. He had just returned from Europe, and intro-
duced himself to the American public by an exhibition of his “Sophocles,”
“ Venus” and “Diana.” His “Sophocles Leading the Chorus After The Battle
of Salamis,” now at the Chicago Art Institute, is one of the finest nudes of
modern times. Ideal in form, graceful in attitude, simple in emotional ele-
ments, it stood out in clear and bold relief in the gray monotony of modern
life. With all our older classicists, even Hiram Powers, sculpture had not
been much more than cold, lifeless imitation. Donoghue, like a few French
and English sculptors, succeeded in lending animation to ckssic forms, and
in making the soul shine through the outer form. Having accomplished more
than any other American sculptor at his age—he was not yet thirty—he was
hailed as a genius. Had he not received the gold medal for his “Sophocles” at
the Paris Salon, and sold his “Phaedra” to some European gallery? Hewas
even heaped with orders. Nonchalant and arrogant in his manners, as any
youth can be, enthusiastic, sincere and conscientious when it was a question of
art, he lived in luxury, hoping to realize in his “ Boxer ” a perfect image of
manly force.


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