Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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[C] Address delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on
February 22, 1908. Now revised and enlarged.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of
March, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. His
childhood and youth were passed in the city of New York, as was a great
part of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelong
associations had stamped him indelibly an American. The greater part of
his work was done in America; almost all of it was done for America; and
I do not think it is fancy that sees in his art the expression of a
distinctively American spirit. Yet from his mixed French and Irish
blood he may well have derived that mingling of the Latin sense of form
with a Celtic depth of sentiment which was so markedly characteristic of
his genius.
His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from the
little town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town of
Saint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and its
name. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin. Augustus
Saint-Gaudens was one of several children born to this couple and not
the only artist among them, for his younger brother Louis also attained
some reputation as a sculptor, though his entire lack of ambition
prevented his achieving all that was expected of him by those who knew
his delicate talent. The boy Augustus attended the public schools of New
York and received there all the formal education he ever had; but at
thirteen it was necessary for him to face the problem of earning his
living. His artistic proclivities were probably already well marked, and
to give them some scope, while assuring him a regular trade at which
money could be earned, he was apprenticed in the good old way to a cameo
cutter named Louis Avet, said to be the first man to cut stone cameos in
the United States. Thus it came about that the greatest of American
sculptors had much such a practical apprenticeship as a Florentine of
the fifteenth century might have had. He himself always spoke of it as
"one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him" and
attributed much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquired
at this time. Probably, also, the habit of thinking in terms of relief,
fostered by years of work at this ancient art, was not without influence
in the moulding of his talent.
His relations with Avet lasted from 1861 to 1864, when his master
quarrelled with him and abruptly dismissed him from his shop. The boy
was already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered an
injustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce them
to send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for him
in the person of a shell-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and with
him Saint-Gaudens remained three years. During his six years'
apprenticeship under his two masters the youth showed already that
energy and power of will that made him what he was. He meant to be
something more than an artisan, and he spent his evenings in the
classes, first of the Cooper Union, afterward of the National Academy of
Design, in the hard study of drawing, the true foundation of all the
fine arts. It was one of the elements of his superiority in his
profession that he could draw as few sculptors can, and he always felt
that he owed an especial debt to the Cooper Union, which he was glad to
repay when he modelled the statue of its venerable founder. Of the other
institution by whose freely given instruction he had profited, the
National Academy of Design, he became one of the most honored members.
By 1867, when he was nineteen years old, he had saved a little money and
was master of a trade that could be relied on to bring in more, and he
determined to go to Paris and begin the serious study of sculpture. He
worked, for a time, at the Petite Ecole, and entered the studio of
Jouffroy in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1868, remaining until 1870.
During this time, and afterward, he was self-supporting, working half
his time at cameo cutting until his efforts at sculpture on a larger
scale began to bring in an income.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place for
the carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went to
Rome, where his associates were the French prizemen of the day, of whom
Mercie was one. He remained there until 1874, except for a visit to New
York in the winter of 1872-3 for the purpose of modelling a bust of
Senator Evarts, and one or two other busts, which were put into marble
upon his return to Rome. In those Roman days he executed his first
statue, a "Hiawatha," one of his few studies of the nude, and a
"Silence," a not very characteristic draped figure which yet fills with
some impressiveness her niche at the head of the grand stairway of the
Masonic Temple on Twenty-fourth Street.
From 1875 to 1877 he had a studio in New York, where he seems to have
executed some of his earliest portrait reliefs. During these years he
came into contact with La Farge, for whom he turned painter and aided
in the execution of the decorations of Trinity Church in Boston. It was
at this time, also, that he received his first commissions for important
public work, those for the Farragut statue in Madison Square, the
Randall at Sailors' Snug Harbor, and the angels for Saint Thomas's
Church. He had married Augusta F. Homer in 1877, and in that year,
taking his bride and his commissions with him, he returned to Paris,
feeling, as many another young Paris-bred artist has felt, that there
only could such important works be properly carried out. The "Farragut"
was completed and exhibited in the plaster at the Salon of 1880, and
from that time his success was assured. For the rest of his life he was
constantly busy, receiving almost more commissions for work of
importance than it was possible for him to carry out. He returned to New
York in 1880, and in 1881 he opened the studio in Thirty-sixth Street,
where he remained for sixteen years and where so many of his greatest
works were executed. From that studio came many of his exquisite
portraits in relief, his caryatids and angelic figures, such as those
for the Morgan tomb, so unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1882 (a fate
since shared by the earlier angels of Saint Thomas's), the great statues
of Lincoln and Chapin, the "Shaw Memorial," and the "Adams Memorial";
and in it was done all the preliminary work of the great equestrian
monument to General Sherman.
It is in these years of his prime that he will ever be most fondly
remembered by those--and they are many--who had the privilege of his
friendship. Admittedly our foremost sculptor, and one of the founders of
the Society of American Artists, he became at once a person of
importance in the world of art; and as his brilliant career developed
he established intimate relationships with an ever-widening circle of
men in every walk of life, while no one who ever knew him well can have
felt anything but an abiding affection for him. That long, white studio
became a familiar meeting-place for all who were interested in any form
of art; and the Sunday afternoon concerts that were held there for many
years will be looked back to with regret as long as any of their
auditors remain alive.
This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third
time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his
residence in New York. In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish,
N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt., and when he
returned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an ill
man, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode. He named
it Aspet, after his father's birthplace, and there he erected two
studios and finished his Sherman statue. In these studios were executed
the second "Lincoln," the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much other
work. The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lost
work re-begun and carried to a conclusion. What can never be quite
replaced were two portraits of himself. A study, of the head only, in
the collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H.
Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits of
him done from life in his best years. The Metropolitan Museum possesses
a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica,
painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.
From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never
recovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able
not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than
he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for
literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when
his own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strength
grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he
was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted
assistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinary
extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and
of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a
quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a
strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have
been involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 he
broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he
ceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat from
this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing
the work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried
from the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3,
1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure
and lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his
ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across
the river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in his
private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a
few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a
few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.
The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his
lifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding
Member of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies,
and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two,
one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued
most highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held
by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal
affection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in
1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts,
composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a
special diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all other
awards," an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of
American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of
the greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic and
literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish
celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fete and
open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of this
spectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columned
canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or
recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was
immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl.
23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned if
he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now
been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a
fitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he loved
as his chosen home.
Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who
ever came in contact with him--to any one, even, who ever saw his
portrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple
hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the
abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man. That
extraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small but
piercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jaw
and great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power--with power of
intellect no less than of will. His lack of early education gave him a
certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He was
apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate
himself in the comparison--indeed, a certain humility was strongly
marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident
also. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his
shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity
of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing
of talkers.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 23.--Saint-Gaudens. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque."]
Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated
Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the
service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of
his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was
twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the
"Sherman," and, though he did much other work while these were in
progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving
for perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of the
Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the
architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely
remodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness,
a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and
sympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will when
the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there
was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him to
inflict pain on any one. The conflict of these elements in his nature
sometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even to
those who knew him. He would be long-suffering, compromising,
disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would be
as staggering as it was unexpected. It was as if he struck the harder to
have done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again.
It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare acts
of self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his
natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who
showed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakable
suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give a
word of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to any
one who needed the one or had earned the other. The essential goodness
of the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most of
all, perhaps, by his actual coworkers. He could command, as few have
been able to do, the love and devotion of his assistants. To all who
knew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, and
the gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fill
than his place in American art.
But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for the
memory of his private friends. It is only as it colors his art that it
is of public interest. It is his art itself, his gift to the world, that
the world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, the
nature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear.
Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of the
manner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our country
has produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elements
of its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as its
qualities.
The time of Saint-Gaudens's study in Paris was a time of great
importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although
Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was
a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France.
The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formal
imitation of second-rate antiques and the substitution of the sculpture
of the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the direct
study of nature as a means of self-expression. There had always been
individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the
movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the
pseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by
Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris.
Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modern
sculpture were trained in the _atelier_ of Jouffroy. Falguiere and
Saint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young American
entered it, and Mercie was his fellow student there. Dalou and Rodin
have since made these men seem old-fashioned and academic, but they
were then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school;
and of this new school, so different from anything he had known in
America, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part. His own pronounced
individuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years of
his greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlike
any other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter of
the nineteenth century he essentially belonged.
Of course, his style was not formed in a moment. His "Hiawatha" seems,
to-day, much such a piece of neo-classicism as was being produced by
other men in the Rome of that time, and the "Silence," though somewhat
more modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have been
expected from a docile pupil of his master. The relief of angels for the
reredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work which
shows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with John
La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently
picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger
French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character.
It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without
study from nature--a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a
sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal,
the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the
"Amor-Caritas." In each of these developments the work becomes less
picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of
decorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in the
caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo--works of his last days,
when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially
his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility of
style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.
The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not,
primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism
is justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or
not. It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we were
forbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find another
name for it, the important fact that it is art--art of the finest, the
most exquisite, at times the most powerful--would in no wise be altered.
Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introduced
perspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and clouds
and cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs.
Does any one care? Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures?
The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatest
sculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise. A
work of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thing
of beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it in
some ready-made category. After all, the critical pigeonholes are made
for the things, not the things for the pigeonholes. The work is there,
and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is as
likely to be in the definition as in the work itself.
And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest--free in an
extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the
scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and
technical brilliancy on the other. Never more than in our own day have
these been the great temptations of an able artist: that he should in
the absorption of study forget the end in the means and produce
demonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues or
pictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents,
seem to say, "See how well I can do it!" and invent difficulties for the
sake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than a
creator. Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism--the desire to
attract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unable
to secure it by truth and beauty--one need not speak. It is the
temptation of vulgar souls. But great and true artists have yielded,
occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens never
does. I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, in
which a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without the
moulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only one
which has any spice of bravura--the Logan statue--and the bravura is
there because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artist
wished it. The dash and glitter are those of "Black Jack Logan," not of
Saint-Gaudens. The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to render
higher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to his
nature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works. He
is essentially the artist--the artificer of beauty--ever bent on the
making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and
the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become
anything more.
If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural
means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for
composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested
him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation
is well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us,
before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a
profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for
Saint-Gaudens. The modelling of the _morceau_ was not particularly his
affair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and
integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly
drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from
it--these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in
which he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for the
inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care.
The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which have
occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems.
It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that,
after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the
"Diana" of the tower--a purely decorative figure, designed for distant
effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place
because invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figures
as the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath
the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of those
artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure
is all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the
movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In
such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own
ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath
the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and
of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the
figure.
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