International studio (31.1907)

American Sculpture of To-day

to the full tide of present-day American]-sculpture.
If Ward is still with us as a strong and sane
influence, Augustus St. Gaudens stands in the
front of American contemporary art, where his
position is assured beside such men as Lafarge
and Daniel Chester French.
Of mixed French and Irish descent, St. Gaudens
while a boy studied with a cameo cutter in New
York, drawing at this time in his evenings in the
life class of the Academy of Design. Thus, even
before he reached manhood the young student
had a sure mastery of the essentials of his craft;
and when at length he found his way to the
“ Beaux-Arts ” he was [equipped to gain
the fullest advantage from his weekly
figure, modelled from the life, and from
the companionship of such men as Bastien-
Lepage and Mercie. Thus, in 187/], he
returned to the States again fully prepared
for his life work ; and the result was seen
when, four years later (1878), he gained
his commission for the statue of Admiral
Farragut, which still stands in its place
in Madison Square. Here, as in his
Abraham Lincoln, Mr. St. Gaudens was
assisted in the architectural setting by
the late brilliant architect, Stanford White;
the result we shall find to be harmonious
and entirely satisfying. The Admiral
“stands on his feet,” at rest within the
pose; he is yet alive with force, and
looks keenly out on the world, a born
leader of men. The treatment of the
pedestal itself is novel and daring. For
the contour of these figures on the exedra
flows easily, is entirely decorative, yet
subordinated to the bronze above : here
a sword is introduced with perfect har-
mony of effect, there a fish sports in the
water and a crab crawls upon the shore
below. Perhaps the artist has never trans-
cended this figure, which has stood in its
place now for twenty-five years; but in
his Abraham Lincoln, at Chicago (Lincoln
Park), he created one of the finest portrait
statues of modem times—a figure instinct,
as the man himself was, with vital force.
His Deacon Chapin presents to us, with
a certain humour in its rendering, the
sturdy, uncompromising Puritan, with his
staff and Bible; while in the Rock Creek
Cemetery, a few miles without Wash-
ington, I found by his hand one of
the most noticeable and overpowering “genoa”
3 6

presentments of all modern art. For I should
not hesitate to call this the most impressive
monument to the dead which I have seen, or
expect ever to see. Dark fir-trees surround an
enclosed space, where a marble seat or exedra of
Scotch granite, very highly polished, faces the
shrouded form of a woman of bronze, seated
herself too upon a great slab of granite. The very
soul of tragedy seems to dwell in that veiled form,
set apart within its grove of trees in the quiet
graveyard.
With two noble monuments to the war I must
leave (for space compels) this great and imaginative

BY AUGUSTUS LUKEMAN