The trip was a nightmare. The ship was dismasted in a violent storm. The passengers helped to clear away the wreckage and drop it overboard. Then with a few spars for masts and sails made out of bedding they gathered wind enough to carry them to the New World. They were six weeks on the way, most of the time at the mercy of the mad sea.
The honeymooners lingered only a day or two in New York. Steam trains took them to Nebraska City on the west bank of the Missouri River. There they joined an expedition of 126 wagons starting out for Oregon.
They were months on the road, rarely traveling more than ten miles a day. The day’s course depended on the distance between water holes. They traveled without incident until they came into the land of the Cheyennes at the confluence of the North and South Platte rivers. The team boss had died. James Borglum, who was an able doctor and popular with the people in the train, was chosen to converse with some visiting Indians. One of them asked permission to examine Borglum’s pistol and shot himself with it. The chief blamed the mishap on the white spokesman because he had owned the pistol. He demanded the surrender of Borglum’s person and was refused. The Indians, loudly muttering, went away.
They spent a restless night, but the expected attack did not come. Toward midnight a band of wild horses rushed into the expedition’s herd of mules, horses and oxen. These animals were well tied and guarded and there was no alarm save for the sudden screaming of a woman. Nothing amiss was discovered until a check was made toward morning and the wife of a teamster was found to be missing. Twenty years later she was found in Montana, the wife of a chief, with grown children. She refused to leave her adopted people or to return to the whites.
James Borglum never forgot the tragedy of this long trip. The desperate hardships came near the end. There was scarcity of everything. It is hard to realize the amount of food consumed by some 450 men, women and children in four months, or the amount of water necessary daily on a dry plain in midsummer to keep horses and oxen on their feet. Borglum used to tell of a small group of voyagers who had joined his party in Wyoming. They had been living on mule harness which they boiled to give salt and “some strength” to the water.
James de la Mothe Borglum crossed the line into Idaho and reached Bear Lake on the road to Oregon. There, literally, he dug in—half the house in the ground, then sod, then log. That was in 1862—or maybe 1863. John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum joined the family there most likely, as his unfinished autobiography says, in 1867.
Gutzon remembers his mother (Ida Michelson Borglum) as a great woman, gifted and beautiful. She had one other son, Solon, born on December 22, 1868, the boy to whom Gutzon frequently referred as his little brother.
Not many years after Solon was born, Gutzon recalls, “She left us. I was five. She turned to see me as she lay ill. There were tears in her eyes and she was trembling as she took my hand.... And she told me to take care of little Solon.
“I never forgot it, but I wondered why. I thought she was going to stay with us. She and Father had always been with us. I could not understand....”
Gutzon was a baby. He was at the age when children are said to be only slightly interested in family changes, but he seems to have realized that something had happened.
“By the time I was seven,” he says, “I knew what it meant not to have a mother of my own. I thought I didn’t want to stay around things that reminded me of her any more. So I ran away.”
CHAPTER THREE
ALONE
Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly 1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s caravan had come to Bear Lake, Idaho, he had been singularly restless. Gutzon had been born in Idaho, Solon a year later in Ogden, Utah. Father Borglum had moved back eastward. He had another wife. He had acquired horses and cows, a home and an office. When Gutzon ran away, home was in Fremont, Nebraska.
The child left suddenly, accompanied only by his dog. He hadn’t thought to provide himself with food. He had heard of Omaha; so he started in that direction. He was three days on the way and had gone what seemed to be miles and miles when the sheriff caught up with him and brought him home. The sheriff dropped him at the Borglum house and went away. Fearful and hungry, Gutzon slept that night in the dog kennel.
Next morning he had a memorable return to the bosom of the family. His father was somewhere out of town, and his grandfather on his mother’s side had come for a visit. The grandfather was a martinet who felt that children should be taught that it is wrong to run away from home. He took charge of Gutzon and Gutzon never forgot him.
“I was only seven,” the sculptor remembered, “but I made up
INTERIOR OF 38TH STREET STUDIO
At the left is “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” and at the right is the “Mares of Diomedes.”
my mind that I would get away from there and that I would keep trying until I succeeded ... and, eventually, that’s what I did.”
For all his muddled childhood, Gutzon loved his father. James Borglum was kind, tolerant and a philosopher. He sensed his son’s unhappiness, even though he would have had trouble explaining it, and a great bond developed between them. The boy went everywhere with him when not in school, even on his sick calls out in the country. Gutzon remembered that they would ride along for miles and miles in sunshine or cold or wet, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, but always in perfect peace.
One afternoon the doctor called to him and asked him to help hitch the horse. Gutzon at the time was a little over eight years old, but he did what he could with the harness and thereafter believed that he had been just as skilled and agile as any professional horse handler.
“I want you to come with me,” his father said. “There is a wounded man out on Rawhide Creek and I may need some help.” And Gutzon saw nothing wrong about that, either.
“We’ll fix him up fine,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to sew him up.”
“Sure,” said the doctor as he lifted Gutzon into the buggy.
Rawhide Creek was a stream with a sorry reputation. It had taken its name from an English hunter who had turned away from slaughtering buffalo long enough to murder a young squaw. Other squaws had tied him to a cottonwood tree near the creek and skinned him alive. Gutzon recalled in his chronicle:
As for our call for medical help, we found our man in the cabin armed. He was stern, fine looking. I admired him greatly and what followed made us lifelong friends. He was an outlaw on the run who had been in some shooting scrape and had received a charge of goose shot in his arm. Father had no anaesthetic for him. I doubt if at the time there was more than a pint of it in the whole state of Nebraska. The wounded man was bleeding terribly, his arm resting on some blood-soaked blankets. A piece of rope, tightly drawn about the elbow, partly stanched the flow. He was alone with two inscrutable Pawnees. After they had washed the arm in warm water, my father turned to me and said, “Gutzon, you will have to help hold his arm.”
The Indians gripped the man’s hand; my job was to keep the lacerations open so that Father could find the shot. We were still working when there was a sharp knock at the door. Sheriff Gregg, with a deputy at his heels, came in and put our patient under arrest. Gregg and Father were friends and Father said, “He stays here till this job is done, Bob.” And we went on doing what we had to do.
The man, whose name was Fielding, was then taken to jail to be held for trial. There I visited him frequently with Father and later alone with the permission of the sheriff who liked me. Fielding was an excellent draughtsman and I brought him red and blue pencils. He loved to draw the American Eagle and the flag as we saw them on the older coins.
Weeks later when his arm was well healed there was a sudden alarm of “Jailbreak!” Fielding and another man had sawed through one of the bars with a hacked table knife. It must have been the work of many days. I prayed that he would escape. But posses went out and caught him as he was crossing the river in an open skiff. Report came back that the sheriff had killed him in midstream with a lucky shot.
Fielding was a kindly man. He told me of his shooting trouble. He’d been wronged, robbed and shot at. Why he broke jail I never knew. He dreaded imprisonment. I shall always feel that he had a great deal to do with awakening my interest in drawing and developing my ability in that direction, although I really had no idea of becoming an artist until I was fifteen. We never know where little unsuspected impulses for good may lead, or what is back of them.
Often in a family of five or six children there is one who does not want to work. He would like to write on birch bark, examine a flower, get a little color on a board or canvas ... and there is an artist. All very simple and natural, but it comes out of the lives and struggles of perceptive men and women who follow these impulses along. I believe music first started when some mother was trying to get her little child to sleep when he was scared to death about something. She found that certain tones were pleasant when she repeated them. And thus the thing that is behind all instrumental music—woman’s voice—brought harmony and sweetness to life.
Not all of Dr. Borglum’s errands had to do with wounded men, and the little boy found that some of the simpler ones were more terrifying. Once they went on a long quest that had something to do with a baby. Gutzon stayed outside the house. He sat on a knoll, looking at the moon across a ravine. Of this incident Gutzon writes:
I had watched it come out of the grass in front of me. It was about three times its usual size as it came above the dull blue horizon.
My father came and I asked him, “What is the moon?” And without waiting for him to answer I told him how beautiful she was and how I loved the moon better than the sun, better than anything in the world. He picked me up and said, “I’ll give her to you if you promise never to take her away from us.”
I wriggled out of his arms and ran toward her. I stumbled, fell, rose up, ran on, began to cry but kept on, faster and faster, Father slowly following.... But the moon was retreating faster than I could move. And then the knowledge came to me—I could not have my moon. I stood weeping my heart out.... That moon has hung in my heaven for well over half a century with the child fable written all over it.... I have never reached it.
Fremont was a town of bewildering experiences. It was filled with fantastic excitement—Indian alarms, the coming and going of prairie schooners, visits of parties of Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs, gun fights beyond the hills and reports of Indian massacres on the Niobrara. Against all this the simple village life of the Swedes and Danes looked like that of quaint foreigners. Yet there were tragedies among Gutzon’s own people—sickness and death and evil times, thin crops and blizzards, high winds and floods.
There was a brief school life at home, then school life at a distance. Each year when the boy returned he would find that some of his Fremont had vanished. Not exactly vanished, he felt; rather, the town had grown and he had grown, and somehow they had parted. The doctor moved his family after years of this to Omaha. There didn’t seem to be much difference.
He had been gone a long time—or so it seemed to him—when he was eighteen years old. The thought came to him that he must see his old playground and playmates, swim in the old Rawhide, go graping or be once more with the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. He bought a train ticket for Fremont and long remembered how he could hardly wait to reach the town.
The train slowed down at the platform and he was off before it stopped. He looked at the crowd of strangers pressing about, and tried to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. At last he found a few ... but very few.
He went into town and to the homes of friends. He found the girls he had known. Their hair was piled high on top of their heads; their dresses were long, their manners awkward. The boys stared at him and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell what had happened to these people, and, he realized later, they were puzzled in the same way about him. All of them had grown.
There was no longer any school from which to play hooky, no occasion to hang one’s clothes on a cottonwood and dive into mud from an old stump. Gutzon was now a stranger to all that. And, though he refused to see it, so were these close friends of a few years ago. None of them could understand. He wrote:
I turned like one frightened and hurt and brokenhearted and ran back to the station. There on the platform I sat for hours waiting for any train to get away from Fremont. No—away from the reality that had blotted out my magic world, the world that a boy of from six to twelve lives in. And I have never had the courage to return.
The Fremont, Nebraska, of my boyhood days has gradually reconstructed itself and still lives in my memory with its two little streets and a half. Its quaint old citizens I know are still trading, spinning yarns—the occasional Indian or more, single file, quietly moving about. There are some prairie schooners and the annual one-ring circus. And as I pass the town, as I have done many times, it has always been at night—for which I have been strangely glad. I watch in the dark for all the old ways and byways I know so well, and the dark has always helped me to believe that they are all there just as I left them.
Thus far the words of Gutzon Borglum. He ceases to comment on his life in the forbidding period of early youth. He is hopeless about what has gone by and terrified at what lies ahead. But he need not have been. He was alone, a child of the night, only in his imagination. Actually, he was one of the very few human beings of his period who were singularly popular. He might have succeeded at anything he tried.
CHAPTER FOUR
CALIFORNIA
Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records. But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind.
Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to Omaha.
His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon was independent and lived his own life.
The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.
During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India. She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar trick in painting and not hard to achieve.
Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont. His schoolmates there recalled that the margins of his books were covered with sketches and that he liked to draw maps and make caricatures of his teachers or of local men in public life.
His teachers at St. Mary’s had readily noticed his talent. They had set him to drawing saints and angels—subjects of which, at the time, he was not particularly fond. He refers to his Kansas experience in an article written in 1919:
My interest in the beautiful began before I came to St. Mary’s, but it was due to encouragement there, and to a definitely expressed desire on the part of two young men who were graduated the year I left that the determination was awakened in me to treat seriously what I had previously considered a delightful trick.
One of these men was named Murphy, and I shall never cease to remember with profoundest gratitude his earnest talk to me as we walked up and down during the evening recess. He talked to me of the great masters. He got books for me. I came to know the whole Italian school, painters and sculptors. And for years it seemed that I knew little else. As a result I have never gone to Italy. [Nor did he until 1931.] As I grew older I found I had a powerful bias toward Italian art and its melodrama. But I did not want to go there, even though I admire Italian and Grecian art more than all else.
Murphy went out of my life and I have never heard of him since. He may not—doubtless does not—remember what he did for me. But in those evenings at school he set me afire. And the goal he painted seems bigger, better, more wonderful and worthwhile now than it did, even then. So he served. He may never have known it, but I owe everything to his inspiring words.
The whereabouts of Murphy was never traced because his first name apparently had been forgotten, and hundreds of Murphys passed through St. Mary’s before it surrendered its charter and became a Jesuit seminary sometime after the First World War. People who knew the place in the eighties are not surprised at Gutzon’s declaration that his real inspiration came from there. It was a small school that had grown out of an early mission to the Potowatomi Indians, but it had few characteristics that identify the tank-town college. Out of it in half a century came a singular troop of famous persons, many of whom no doubt crossed Gutzon’s path without realizing that he was a fellow alumnus. Judges, lawyers, bishops, educators, engineers, builders, doctors, merchants, chiefs, sailors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, musicians and all the rest of them are included in the list. It is interesting to note that Borglum is the institution’s only offering to sculpture.
His life at old St. Mary’s seems to have been perfectly normal. He had several fights which he remembered ever after. He remembered, too, that he was always in the right, which is likewise perfectly natural. His chief exploit in fisticuffs was a wrangle with three rather hard lads in the dining room, and there is a tradition that he won. At any rate, he learned how to protect himself with his bare fists—a skill that he always counted as a major asset.
He finished the academy course—the equivalent of high school—when, at that period in the West, he was considered sufficiently adult to find a job. Dr. James suddenly moved his family to California. Gutzon quit St. Mary’s and went to work as a lithographer’s apprentice in Los Angeles, and studied engraving and designing on stone. At the end of six months he was producing work that he thought was good. That, of course, was nothing to cause any emotional outbursts among the lithographers, because Gutzon thought that everything he produced was good.
The young man wanted better pay, but he didn’t get it. The lithographer said that if he stayed at his work he would someday be an experienced hand. But Gutzon sacrificed this opportunity. He went to work for a fresco painter, and he got more money. He rented a little studio and did part-time work as he pleased.
On a ranch somewhere in the vicinity was Solon Borglum. Of all the family he was closest to Gutzon because he had shown interest in art. Gutzon eventually got him to leave the ranch and to take up the study of painting and sculpture seriously. He contributed to Solon’s support and, in time, to his tuition in a Cincinnati art school. But there is little mention of this in his written record, for he was shy about such things.
California was a constant surprise to him. He was by himself and supporting himself. He felt free and able, and he was proud of himself. His father had gone back East with a family that in time totaled nine. Someplace with that brood was August, Gutzon’s companion at St. Mary’s. It was to be a long time before Gutzon would see some of his other brothers and sisters. But no matter! California was warm in the winter, and it didn’t cost much to get things to eat. And he kept meeting people who interested him. While he was still with the lithographer he met an artist named Eberlie, a really good painter of the Düsseldorf school. Eberlie turned out beautiful ensembles that seemed perfect in color and design. Gutzon yearned to do the same thing.
Something had awakened in him. He went on and on with his work in the tiny studio, producing little that looked like anything, learning slowly what was wrong. He couldn’t have quit. He was still there even after Dr. Borglum and the family had moved back to Omaha.
Information about his early years in this paradise, however, doesn’t come so much from him as from strangers. Charles F. Lummis, whom he knew well and with whom he later wrangled extensively, wrote a piece about him in The Land of Sunshine (later, Out West) magazine in 1906. He said:
It was a matter of nine years ago. Los Angeles was a country town, just emerging from adobehood. This writer found a green, serious lad belaboring canvas in a bare room on what was then Fort Street. He had no money and not many friends. The painting he was at had many shortcomings and showed his lack of art education. Yet there was in them a creative breath that promised to make him heard from....
He was born in the West and was Western in every fibre. Soon after graduation from seminary he came to Los Angeles, and presently began the long, hard struggle of an unbefriended artist. By and for himself, by sheer dint of pluck and brains, he hewed his way. At last his pictures attracted the attention of one of the few connoisseurs then here.... A couple have been sold to Easterners at good prices....
Gutzon, however, was not long friendless. He appears to have been discovered by George Butler Griffin, who had married a Castilian lady from Colombia and lived in Los Angeles. They had several gifted children, one of whom was the mother of the actress, Bebe Daniels. Another daughter, Mrs. Eva Griffin Turner, herself a painter, was among Gutzon’s early heralds. She met him first in the eighties and never forgot a detail of their meeting.
She was twelve years old at the time and for a year or more had been sketching and painting in her own fashion with a child’s color box. She was allowed to trail along with him and a class he was instructing, and she never forgot what he said as the pupils gazed at a sunset beyond Los Angeles.
“The artist,” he declared—and it seemed to her that he was talking to himself—“The artist should approach nature with great reverence.”
He left the class for a while when he went to work with William Keith, an artist in San Francisco. Gutzon was an extravagant admirer of Keith, who was called the “Grand Old Man of California Painting.” He stayed in his class for several months. During that same period he took a short course under Virgil Williams.
Mrs. Turner vividly remembered his home-coming and how his old students reassembled with him for outdoor sketching. But he was not long for his old ways. He had painted a picture called “Stage Coach” and some rich man had seen it. There was an immediate furor over the picture and Gutzon. And so presently he went to Paris to study.
“He won prizes,” Mrs. Turner mentioned, “and he was greatly admired.”
And then we have the memory of Bob Davis, onetime editor of Munsey’s Magazine and a columnist for the New York Evening Sun. In his California days he was a printer’s apprentice with a job near Gutzon’s studio. Davis describes Gutzon’s studio thus:
His walls were the most fascinating thing in my life. They were hung with pictures of stage coaches and horses leaping at you from every direction. These things were painted in oils and I thought they were the finest things in California. He also modeled in clay and chiseled a bit in stone. During the lunch hour I visited his studio and struck up a friendly acquaintance. He confided that his ambition was to excel in sculpture and that he painted only to get the sinews with which to go on.
One noon I entered his studio and found him in high spirits. He was rigging a large canvas on the easel and making great preparations for something important.
“I’m going to do a life-size, seated portrait of General Frémont in military regalia,” he told me. “Mrs. Frémont is bringing him around this afternoon for the first sitting. Come around tomorrow at lunch time and I’ll have the figure rounded in. He has a strong face and I think I can make a pretty good picture.”
I saw the painting from the first touch of the brush. Frémont always came in on the arm of his wife who seemed to be the one person he wanted to please. She brought with her a military coat adorned with gold fringe and epaulets, a garment the great Indian fighter wore with dignity.
And it was a good picture. Day after day it assumed more life and grandeur until it was finished and taken away to be exhibited in an art gallery on Spring Street. I went to see it there. And I boasted about my acquaintance with the artist to anybody who would listen to me.
There seems to be no doubt that the Frémont portrait was one of the most important works of Gutzon’s youth. It got him attention and acclaim. But more than that it got him the friendship and advice of Mrs. Frémont. The general was nearing death when Gutzon first saw him. The portrait was finished in 1888 and Frémont died in Washington, D. C., in 1890. But the motherly interest of Jessie Benton Frémont in the artist went on unbroken for many years. She helped him with letters to important people and with advice on how and where to sell his works. Some of these letters were still in Gutzon’s effects when he died.
The most discriminating patron of the young artist in California was, perhaps, Spencer J. Smith. Smith bought enough canvases to give Gutzon a start toward his training in Paris. These pictures, tenderly cared for, are still in the possession of Smith’s widow in the same house where the artist saw them hung some sixty years ago. As then the house, surrounded by gardens, stands like an oasis in the heart of busy Los Angeles.
Shortly before going abroad in 1889, Gutzon married Mrs. Elizabeth Putnam, whom the family called “Lisa,” a painter of ability and a teacher of art. Unfortunately, the details of the romance are lacking. Gutzon never talked about such intimate matters. His father and other members of the family met her only after the marriage.
Lisa seems to have loved her husband. At any rate, his worries during the early years in Europe made little impression on her—nor on him. Yet, that there was some difficulty in their relationship is evidenced in letters written to Gutzon by friends of both of them. A young sculptor pupil, Arthur Putnam, who lived with them at Sierra Madre, mentioned the vague unhappiness he sensed in Gutzon and tried delicately to probe into the matter. But, unfortunately, only the question of Putnam is extant. Gutzon’s reply to his letter has not been kept.
From the sculptor’s diary, a sporadic and sketchy document, it is plain that he was passionately anxious to have a child. It is probable that the impossibility of this was the basis of whatever trouble he had with Lisa. Moreover, she was twenty years his senior and did not care much for his strenuous way of life.
Such was Gutzon’s fear of hurting her, and his almost abnormal dread of publicity in so personal a matter, that the legal tie was not broken for several years. Few of Gutzon’s friends of later years knew of this marriage, and his own children were in their teens before they heard of it.
A French servant, Jeanne, who had lived with the Borglums in Europe, accompanied Lisa to California to live with her until her death. In 1931 she wrote to the sculptor about certain of his paintings that he had given to Lisa and closed her letter with a significant and touching thought.
“You have two beautiful children,” she said, “and you are at last happy. You deserve it....”
Gutzon and Lisa bought a little house among the orange groves in Sierra Madre, near the base of the mountains back of Pasadena, not far from where the Santa Anita race track now stands. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had a horse ranch on land that included the site of the race track, was a great friend and allowed Gutzon to use his horses as models. Gutzon loved this place. His favorite subjects for sculpture were horses, and he never tired of looking at them. Mrs. Frémont, after seeing his equestrian casts and drawings at his studio in 1889, summed up his future with the gift of prophecy: “The boy is spirited. Here is one sculptor who will ride to fame on horseback!”
That wasn’t quite true, but it was near enough. Within the year he was moving. And never thereafter did he recognize the existence of anything that could hold him back.
CHAPTER FIVE
OVERSEAS ART
Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had learned something about art and he had a growing circle of friends in California. On the other hand, he gave little evidence that he might be something other than one more simple art student from the Pacific coast. That is what makes his progress remarkable.
He stopped in Omaha to visit with his father and, almost unaccountably, left a pile of his canvases with a Mr. Leininger, a dealer and patron of art. It is a little difficult now to identify or appraise these works. This is a pity, for, good or bad, expensive or cheap, they all seem to have found somebody who loved them. They never came back to haunt his garret, nor, for that matter, did the ones we are told he sold “at an exhibition in New York.”
There is little known about the “exhibition in New York” except that Mrs. Frémont, the general’s widow, had been informed of it. She wrote a note to the one person in New York who might be able to give a lift to the young artist. And that’s how Gutzon met Theodore Roosevelt, then Police Commissioner, who became a lasting friend.
Through some similar effort Gutzon also met Collis P. Huntington, one of the builders of the Southern Pacific railroad. Their encounter would be of no interest here save for the example it gave of the young man’s purpose and directness and of his confidence in himself. Huntington, impressed by Gutzon’s work and charm as well as his friends, wanted to know what he could do to help him. Gutzon shook his head and smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “When I get through with this exhibition I’m going to Paris to study art.”
This was something new to Huntington—as it would have been to any art patron in New York. “I am amazed,” he said. “Almost nobody comes to see me that doesn’t want me to do something for them.” He bowed and went away and Gutzon never saw him again.
Gutzon sailed on the Bourgogne with plenty of hope and the proceeds of his art sales in Omaha and New York. He admitted that he felt proud of himself. He had been out of St. Mary’s seven years.
In 1891 a description of him was included in a passport issued by the U. S. Embassy in Paris and signed by Whitelaw Reid. It gave his age as twenty-four years; stature, 5 feet, 8½ inches; forehead, broad; eyes, gray; nose, regular; mouth, medium; chin, round; hair, dark; complexion, dark; face, oval—and it is a matter of great puzzlement to one who knew Gutzon for forty years. It shows the picture of a somewhat thin, energetic young man of dark complexion, regular features, broad forehead and no great height. Yet, not until he had read this record did an old friend realize that Borglum’s complexion was anything save that contrived by weather and wind. Even more astoundingly came the revelation that Gutzon was less than six feet in height. He looked to be taller.
Nobody seems to have found much about Gutzon’s art studies in Europe worth recording. He passed two years in Paris, studying at the Julien Académie, at the École des Beaux Arts and under individual masters. He exhibited in the Old Salon as a painter in 1891 and 1892. His picture called “Clouds” attracted some attention. In 1891, through a deliveryman’s mistake, a piece of bronze was taken to the New Salon. It was accepted by the New Salon, which made him a member of the society.
The notice informing him of this unexpected honor was followed by a personal letter of congratulation written by the celebrated painter Puvis de Chavannes, who had succeeded Meissonier as president of the Salon. Borglum’s work of sculpture was called “Death of the Chief” (Mort du Chef) and represented a horse with lowered head beside the body of a dead Indian. A copy of the group was unveiled in Los Angeles in 1947.
The great experience of Gutzon’s life in Paris was meeting and forming a friendship with Auguste Rodin. He said afterward that it wasn’t a new experience. “It was rather a feeling of coming home,” he said, and finding something he had dimly sensed in himself and was trying to express. Rodin at the time was having trouble with the Academicians and would follow a long road before being acclaimed the great master the world now recognizes. Gutzon’s attitude toward life was much the same. He was also committed to a long quarrel with that state of mind which accepts stereotyped standards and resists change or improvement. Gutzon wrote this about Rodin:
I hold Rodin to be one of the great individuals of history. He was one of the rarest souls of whom we have any record during the last 3,000 years. He is passing and there will be nothing left to speak for this man, who stands with Phidias, Donatello, Rembrandt and Shakespeare, but a trail of broken fancies. The nineteenth century has made no adequate use of his incomparable gifts.
He quoted Rodin’s remarks as recorded by M. Gsell in his book about the master:
To any real artist worthy of the name, all nature is beautiful, because the eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in a book, the inner truth. Not a feature deceives him. Hypocrisy is as transparent as truth. The beauty of the Greek ideal is ever present and there is as much loveliness in the human form today as when Phidias immortalized his race. But this loveliness is passing into oblivion unrecorded, because the artists of today are blind. That is all the difference.
Whether or not we follow what Rodin said, there is no doubt that Gutzon did. He brought home with him from Europe nothing that so continuously affected his life. Again he writes of Rodin:
Rodin meant more. He meant what I will add. The artists have not seen, nor felt, nor understood the present, although they still seem to appreciate the beauty of the Greek.
Great emotion, with great understanding, again united with mastery over medium, are indispensable in the production of masterpieces in song, form or color. Prophetic insight, coupled with great love and trained to be a master in one of the mediums which the human race has invented or discovered to express itself, is lost in our day, as Rodin laments.
This paragraph seems to sum up Gutzon Borglum’s position on the matter of art expression, and it explains his reaction to much of what is called Modern Art. Years afterward he augmented it with another bit of learning out of his two years of study in France. At a meeting in honor of the French during the First World War he said:
France has been a foster mother and I shall always remember her, as Hugo put it, as my second birthplace, because to be “educated in another place is to be reborn there.”
So I was born in France at Auvers-sur-Oise. Here at Auvers I had a quiet little home and for three years grubbed and labored with my stubborn Americanism.
Finally I returned to America after having tried while there to acquire French art. And then it came to me in an hour. I shall never forget that hour. It came to me that the value and greatness of French influence are in their superiority and their devotion to the “inspiration” and not special concern for technique.
France has taught me respect for the sincere effort of other men, courage in my own, and that originality lies in being true to one’s self.
I learned that what is known as “French Art” is not the art which has placed France as art mistress of the modern world. Rather, it is Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Chavannes. It is not the Parisian article, any more than it was Falguière or any other dozens of masters of the technique, but Rodin and Dalou who helped French sculpture to its high place in our century and fixed France with the ancients.
Gutzon was not a pupil of Rodin, but he was a frequent visitor in his studio. He used to tell of watching Rodin make quantities of water-color sketches of his model, who was allowed to sit at ease and to change her position as she wished. He gave Gutzon some of these sketches, which have been preserved. They are inscribed “A mon ami, Borglum” and signed “Rodin.” Letters from him across the years have also been kept. During the First World War, when Paris was being bombed, Gutzon invited Rodin to come to the United States and use his studio in Stamford. Rodin declined and said he had decided to find refuge in Rome.
During this early period in Europe, Gutzon also passed an interesting year in Spain about which his American friends seem to have known very little. As a record of his stay, many spirited sketches of bullfights are still extant. One of them is owned by O. R. McGuire, the art connoisseur of Washington, D. C. He also made a copy of Velasquez’ portrait of the court jester, and a wood carving done by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo, in the Toledo cathedral. His studies of Cortez’ conquest in Mexico and the tragic fate of the Aztecs made a deep impression on him.
He prepared background sketches for a large painting which he started on his return to California. It depicted the gray dawn on the broken causeway of Mexico City when the soldiers of Cortez were floundering against the Aztecs in the gap. The episode, known to history as noche triste, was a subject that haunted Gutzon through his life. But although he first planned his picture of it for exhibition at the Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems never to have finished it.
Other sidelights of his year in Spain are found in a letter to Mrs. J. Seddon of Hollywood who bought a painting labeled “Don T., Toledo, Sept. 1892.” She had written to him for information about it, and his reply to her query was this:
I am very much interested in the picture, and I have wondered what had become of it. It ought to be in good condition, for it was honestly and well painted.
It is the portrait of a Catholic priest, Don Tomas, pronounced To-mass. He was the canon in charge of the great cathedral in Toledo, a remarkable little man, very kindly and friendly, but he belonged to the period of Philip II. He was extremely fond of bullfights. He and I attended them regularly.
I first started to paint him smoking a cigarette, but when he saw it, he threw the cigarette away and said it was undignified for a priest. He is sitting in the outer room, the library room, which forms the entrance to the Council Chamber where some 250,000 more or less heretics and Protestants were tried, burned, exiled or condemned to the galleys. The chamber beyond was like a court, surrounded with seats against the wall in which the judges sat. Into the middle of the room, the victim, or the accused, was brought.
I don’t remember much of the carving of the background, but the room was richly carved by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo. The work was done between 1549 and 1551, and this particular chamber is called the Sala Capitula and was executed under orders of the Archbishop of Toledo and in the reign of Philip II.
Gutzon returned from Spain to California in 1893 and brought a bit of the Old World with him. He arrived to find a matter seemingly awaiting his attention, as most matters did—the restoration of California’s Spanish missions. It cannot be said that Gutzon Borglum ever came to lavish his indignation over affairs with which he was unfamiliar, and admittedly he was indignant over no small number or variety of them before he died. In this instance he found a battlefield made to order, because he had been studying the old records of the Spanish missions in Spain.
His argument about the course and methods of the restoration became his first recorded controversy, and was dragged out and redebated every time he had a disagreement with somebody about something else. But, for all that, it wasn’t much of a fight.
Charles Lummis, the editor, was at the head of a group of Californians interested in restoring the ruined missions. He appears to have been somewhat irritated when Gutzon came home from Spain and demanded an important share in the work. The reconstruction plans, the sculptor declared blithely, were prodigiously wrong. Incensed by this, Lummis wrote several angry letters to Gutzon. Gutzon, never at a loss for words, replied in kind. Unfortunately, some steps in the correspondence seem to be lacking. There is no indication of how this battle came to be resolved; however, the strong language presently ceased. Gutzon got his way about the methods that should be pursued in restoring the buildings, and he and Lummis became close friends. It appears that many of Borglum’s arguments turned out that way.
Gutzon’s most important comment on the California missions never saw the light until some time around 1927, when he was discussing the missions of Texas. He wrote: