Studio: international art (40.1907)

American Sculpture of To-day

with considerable power and breadth of handling,
all show this tendency, which becomes positively
exasperating in his Fountain of Truth at the Pan-
American Exposition.

The native Indian race affords a fine subject to
American artists for treatment in sculpture, and
Mr. Proctor, in his Indian Warrior, has success-
fully embraced this opportunity ; but perhaps no
living sculptor has more thoroughly identified
himself with this subject than Cyrus E. Dallin, of
Boston. Mr. Dallin was born, in 186r, at Spring-
ville, and spent his boyhood under the Wasatch
Mountains, within touch of the native race ; he
came thus to understand and sympathise with the
Indian, and this feeling finds expression in much
of his later work. Notably is this the case in
The Protest, which I saw last spring within his
studio at Arlington, and which attracted attention
at the St. Louis Exposition. Here a nude Indian,
mounted on a mustang and wearing a chiefs head-
dress of eagle feathers, raises his hand, as if in
menace, to the invading white man ; and the same
subject I found worked out yet more completely
in Mr. Dallin’s large group which he calls The
Appeal, and which is to be shown at the Sculpture
Society’s Exhibition at New York this autumn.
Though he has treated portrait sculpture as
well, and also the nude female figure (The
Awakening of Spring and Despair are examples),
it is in his Indian figures that his art seems
to find its most individual and its strongest
expression.

I turn from him to another leading Boston
sculptor, Mr. Bela L. Pratt, whose work I
recently visited at St. Botolph Studios in that
city. Mr. Pratt was born in Connecticut in
1867, and worked in St. Gaudens’ studio in
New York, and at Paris under Chapu and
Falguiere. He had two colossal groups at the
Chicago “World’s Fair”; in the Washington
Congressional he has a figure of Philosophy,
besides six large spandrel figures over the main
entrance, and four medallions of The Seasons
within — these last especially attractive. His
Butler Memorial (at Lowell, Mass.) deserves
notice; here Mr. Pratt gives us two draped
figures, male and female, in bronze relief;
the one grasps his sword, the other lays her
hand upon the arm that would draw it forth
—thus symbolising effectively and simply “War”
and “ Peace.” Admirable too are his portrait
busts of Bishop Brooks, for Brooks House in
Harvard University, and Bishop Huntington in
Emanuel Church, Boston, both strong, simple

in treatment, fine in characterisation ; and I hear
by report of his Dr. Shattuck, for St. Paul’s
School, Concord (modelled in 1900), for which
school his heroic figure of a soldier—in memory
of one hundred and twenty St. Paul’s boys who
fought in the Spanish-American War — was also
destined. In his Fountain of Youth, the nude
form is treated with that simplicity and breadth
which makes me almost associate him in my
mind with an old friend, now lost to us, Mr.
Harry Bates.

At Boston, too, I visited Mr. Kitson’s studio in
Columbia Avenue, where I found him busy upon
the relief to be cast into bronze for the monument
at Vicksburg, Mississippi—giving a vigorous render-
ing here of A Confederate Battery in Action.
Henry Kitson is an Englishman by birth, having
been born (1865) at Huddersfield, Yorkshire; he
was in Paris at the “ Beaux-Arts ” in 1884, where
he met Mr. Harry Bates and Mr. Frampton.

I have now reached the limits of my subject,
and shall mention only briefly two workers who
had escaped my notice, but are too important to
be omitted. Mr. Lorado Taft (born i860) is now
in charge of the modelling classes in Chicago
Institute. He studied for several years in the

PORTRAIT STUDY BY CHARLES GRAFLY

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