I

What a pity that Thackeray, surveying our pre-Revolutionary American world in the interest of his Esmond and his Virginians, had not chanced to espy the valiant figure of our first American sculptor, Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright of New Jersey,—Quaker, wax-image-maker, traveler, keen Republican observer of the moods of British royalty and the movements of British troops! Had his mind’s eye but once seen her in her eagerly-frequented rooms on Pall Mall, with the notables of the town literally under her thumb, in wax, and over her shoulder, in the flesh, we might have had from his pen a portrait worthy to live beside that of Beatrix, or of Madam Esmond, or of the Fotheringay herself. Similarly, if Lytton Strachey, building his Books and Characters, had followed out a line or two of Horace Walpole’s concerning the “artistess,” he might have given us a Mrs. Wright fully as engaging as his Madame du Deffand, perhaps almost as “inexplicable, grand, preposterous” as his Lady Hester. Such joys were not to be ours. Some of the traits that Thackeray and Strachey might have dwelt on for our delight have been well sketched by. Abigail Adams, incorruptible eye-witness and letter-writer.

Mrs. Adams, though taken aback by the “hearty buss” with which the sculptress greeted ladies and gentlemen alike, observed that “there was an old clergyman sitting reading a paper in the middle of the room, and though I went prepared to see strong representations of real life, I was effectually deceived in this figure for ten minutes, and was finally told that it was only wax.” And Elkanah Watson, meeting Mrs. Wright in Paris, where she was living in her dual capacity as artist and patriot, notes that “the wild flights of her powerful mind stamped originality on all her acts and language.” He tells us that the British king and queen often visited her in her London rooms, where they would induce her to work on her heads regardless of their presence, and where, at times, as if forgetting mundane deferences in the swirl of her inspiration, she would address them offhand as George and Charlotte.

The intrepid if somewhat incongruous figure of this Quaker artist abroad will serve very well as herald or prologue to the drama of American sculpture. Nor can I think that either Mr. Greenough or Mr. Powers, Mr. Ward or Mr. Saint-Gaudens, Mr. French or the very youngest sculptor newly laureled by our American Academy in Rome would object to that assignment of rôle. Surely in any play, it is allowed that the herald may seem somewhat more fantastic and legendary than the kings and counselors that come after. Mrs. Wright and her wax-works are important to us, but not because anyone now accounts her the “Promethean modeller” her enthusiastic contemporaries charged her with being. She is important because her vogue reveals the artless taste of her time, its awe in the presence of perfect imitations of nature. Not that such awe is unknown to-day in the world of art. Indeed, our herald brings vigorously upon the scene one of the major problems that still perplex the American sculptor in his work. I mean the problem of likenesses, those “strong representations of real life,” as Abigail Adams would say.

II

A strong representation of real life was exactly what Thomas Jefferson wanted for the State Capitol of Virginia when he induced the great French sculptor Houdon to “leave the statues of Kings unfinished,” and to cross the Atlantic to take casts, measurements, and artistic cognizance of the person of George Washington, in order to create that marble portrait statue still holding its own in the good top light of the Rotunda at Richmond. To cross the Atlantic, what an adventure for a home-keeping Frenchman in the eighteenth century! Yet in the year 1785, there must have been uneasiness at home as well as abroad for Monsieur Houdon, so soon to become le citoyen Houdon. In the midst of our early Republican simplicities, there had been talk of an equestrian statue also. Justified in the hope of obtaining the commission equestrian as well as the commission pedestrian, Houdon accordingly spends a fortnight at Mount Vernon, taking casts, and “forming the General’s bust in plaister.” Later, however, the project of the equestrian statue is dropped, to Houdon’s natural regret.

“We shall regulate the article of expense as œconomically as we can with justice to the wishes of the world,” writes Jefferson to Governor Harrison, concerning the standing statue. “We are agreed in one circumstance, that the size shall be precisely that of life.” Jefferson gives patriotic reasons for that decision as to size; he adds with excellent artistic judgment, “We are sensible that the eye alone considered will not be quite as well satisfied.” A generation later, writing from Monticello in regard to the statue of Washington that the legislature of North Carolina desires to order, he declares that this work should be somewhat larger than life. A strict realism no longer delights him. With true Jeffersonian divination of popular currents, he leans now toward the pseudo-classic ideal already dominant in European studios. As to the costume chosen, he finds that “every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman.... Our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect.” In short, “Old Canova of Rome” is the artist North Carolina should employ. It is pleasant to note that just as Houdon, having “solemnly and feelingly protested against the inadequacy of the price, evidently undertook the work from motives of reputation alone,” so too Canova is “animated with ardent zeal to prove himself worthy of so great a subject.” Thus happily are begun those steadfastly continued artistic relations between the United States and the two European countries in which art prospers as the light and livelihood of the people.

Washington himself, when the Houdon portrait statue is projected, plays an admirably discreet part in the art criticism of the moment. He writes to Jefferson, on August 1, 1786:

“In answer to your obliging enquiries respecting the dress, attitude, etc., which I would wish to have given to the statue in question, I have only to observe that, not having sufficient knowledge in the art of sculpture to oppose my judgment to the taste of Connoisseurs, I do not desire to dictate in the matter.”

How unlike the home life of William Hohenzollern! And how often the thoughtful sculptor of to-day has wished that Washington’s simple dignity in admitting an insufficiency of “knowledge in the art of sculpture” might be pondered and taken to heart by those of us who are not qualified “to dictate in the matter”! In this our free country of the self-elected critic, the temple of art is at all hours invaded by those who cheerily announce that “they do not know much,” but who nevertheless follow the example of William II rather than of our first President.

All the Jefferson correspondence respecting these two statues of Washington is of vital interest to the student of our art history. Our young Republic, in its early strivings toward art, was fortunate in having an adviser as well-advised as the master of Monticello. It was Thomas Jefferson who guided inquiring state legislatures, now toward Houdon, the powerful French realist, and again toward Canova, the distinguished Italian idealist. Through Jefferson’s hands, our American sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and idealism, however often misnamed or over-praised or discredited, each after the other, will continue to shape the artist’s interpretation of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either classicism or naturalism on our lives and times. Gilbert Murray, in his notes on the Hippolytus, writes that its matchless closing scene “proves the ultimate falseness of the distinction between classical and romantic. The highest poetry has the beauty of both.”

III

Returning to the Quaker lady who speaks our prologue, and conning once more the tale of her works in all their brisk naïveté, the sympathetic student will easily evoke the difficult conditions under which sculpture first reared its head in our country. Sculpture, though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs of primitive man, (and indeed the very first of all the arts to fall under the ban of the censor) is an art much hindered and abridged during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster’s chest or some fair Priscilla’s spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back, so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The drawings and inherited traditions of cabinet-makers, carpenters, and architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture, for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and skill, sometimes with creative genius.

The colonists’ sense of form gratified itself in these directions, since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes, and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture. Statues, unlike chocolate-pots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was accomplished in our country. The statue was of the Boston astronomer, Dr. Bowditch, and by the English sculptor, Ball Hughes. The original bronze cast was not a wholly successful piece of work; it was long ago replaced by a bronze from a French foundry. But those familiar with the difficulties of the situation will recall Dr. Johnson’s observation about the dog walking on his hind legs. “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

IV

However, we need not harp too long and too mournfully on the physical impediments in our sculptural start. Enormous as these were, they were less mighty than the spiritual obstacles set up by time and place. First of all, it is to be remembered that the European world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was moving on in a mild, manifest, not necessarily permanent decline in creative power as shown through the graphic arts. The waves of that decline reached even our own stern coast. It is safe to say that had the American colonists’ hour coincided with an hour of large renascence in art throughout Europe, our forefathers, whether Cavalier or Roundhead, would earlier have found room for art as a need and a natural expression of the freer life they sought. As for the distinctively Puritan view, that view too often (though perhaps not as often as we now think) denied and persecuted beauty in the fierce Puritan concentration upon holiness. It is true that art, in its blither and more genial guise, slips away from the society of the sour-visaged. But it is also true that a great tragic expression in art sometimes bursts uncontrollably from peoples or persons with minds exacerbated by long fortitudes. We learn this from the Belgian sculptor Meunier brooding over his brothers of the Black Country, from the Serbian sculptor Mestrovic immortalizing in stone his country’s stern legends, from the poet Dante treading his Inferno. But the Florentine and the Serbian and the Belgian produced their art under their native skies. They were not torn up by the roots to live in a strange land.

Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten New England village a spacious, nobly-designed, admirably-built meeting-house, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would have sufficed in what they did and suffered. The obstacles in their path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day. We had no noteworthy early native sculpture, largely because we lacked the passion to create it. That passion was not dead, but it lay dormant during the long wintry season that preceded the spring of our national consciousness.

In the mean time, men and women died, and had their humble carved slate headstones; ships put out to sea, glorying in their robust wooden figure-heads of American make. Benjamin West’s legendary adventure with his cat’s-fur brushes and his Amerind colors and his baby sister’s likeness no doubt had its sculptural counterpart in the creative endeavor of many an unknown fire-side whittler. These obscure dramas of artistic effort counted; though meagre and lowly, they were not in vain; they made for craftsmanship, art’s helper. Referring to more important matters, we do not forget William Rush’s full-length statue of Washington, hewn from wood, or his soldierly self-portrait, carved from a pine log; or the early efforts, in portraiture, of Dixey, in New Jersey, of Augur in Connecticut; of John Frazee, that young stone-cutter to whom we owe the first marble portrait bust chiseled in the United States, as late as the year 1824. We remember also the Browere life-masks, created by a secret process, and useful still as historic data.

Interesting and emphatic as are the personalities of all these early workers, that of William Rush is by far the most significant. In literal truth, Patience Wright was merely our first sculptress, whose work must bear the implications of frailty lent by that name. But William Rush was our first sculptor. In his youth he was a soldier of the Revolution, and in later life he was long a member of the Council of Philadelphia; his career as artist and as citizen won respect for the early art life of our country. Born in Philadelphia in 1756, he was twenty-nine when Houdon sojourned in that town. Having been apprenticed when very young, Rush was already well-known as a carver of ships’ figure-heads, work in which he continued to be successful throughout his long and busy life. His theory and practice in wood-carving conformed to Michelangelo’s Gothic creed, somewhat outworn among sculptors, but of late restored to respect. William Rush earnestly believed that the carver should see his vision in the block, and realize its image by hewing away the superfluous shell. He was modern enough at times to stand by while directing a workman to chop here and cut there and slice somewhere else, so that he himself could save his own energy for keeping his vision clear. Of his Spirit of the Schuylkill, originally in wood but since translated into bronze and still standing over its basin in Fairmount Park, the chronicles of its day declared that “no greater piece of art was to be found in all the world.” The present age will hardly consider this draped figure the equal, say, of the Maidens of the Erechtheum. Yet the work, with its companion pieces, the Schuylkill in Chains and the Schuylkill Released, has its own vigorous archaic classicism which modern students may well ponder. Rush was one of the planners and founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After this was finally established in 1805, our first American art organization, he was one of its directors until his death. As a many-sided man of action and of counsel, of intelligence and of culture, he sums up the best to be found in the varied characters of our pioneer artists, personages worthy of our deepest respect.

We shall be too quick despairers if we brood over the fact that most of their works show Yankee ingenuity rather than Promethean fire. The inventive spirit is part of our pioneer heritage; it reappears rather often in our art history. Robert Fulton, as Mr. Isham reminds us in his story of American painting, was a promising pupil in Benjamin West’s London studio. “From there he went to Paris, where he remained seven years, painting easel pictures, and also the first panorama seen there, whose memory is still preserved in the name of the Passage des Panoramas.” Morse is yet another classic example of American genius serving both art and science. One of the later pupils of West, he had not only painted vigorous and important pictures but had also played a striking part in the founding of our National Academy of Design before he finally “wreaked his genius” on his invention of the telegraph. Hiram Powers, sculptor of the Greek Slave, in youth acquired merit from the clock-work devices by which he enhanced the moving charms of the wax figures he modeled for a museum in Cincinnati. Today, in our journalistic canvassings of popular opinion as to contemporary American greatness, we find that in the public mind, Edison’s name leads all the rest. The prickly palm of greatness is awarded not to a teacher, to a publicist, to a writer, to a political leader, or to an artist in any guise whatever, but to an inventor. Inventive genius thus claims our highest admiration; inventive genius may indeed be our highest national characteristic. If so, it is worth while (and not in the least “devastating”) to consider whether the same inventiveness that animates the early art-forms of William Rush’s followers does not also contribute something to the very sophisticated creations of our gifted and fortunately well-trained young sculptors with the dernier cri from Crete in their minds and at their finger-tips.

The story of American sculpture cannot be told under a parable of a chain with equally strong links throughout. One thinks rather of a slender thread, which may be fastened to a cord, which will draw up a strong rope, which will in turn attach itself to a powerful cable. If early Yankee ingenuity is that slender thread, let us thank God for it, and hope for better things.

V

With the dawn of our national consciousness just after the dark hours of the Revolution, a natural human love for the likeness, strengthened by a generous surrender to hero-worship, is already arousing in us a longing for an art that will express our patriotic emotions. If achievement alone be considered, there is surely a great gulf fixed between Patience Wright and Jean Antoine Houdon. But the same sincere passion fires Quakeress and citoyen; their common aim is a strong representation of real life, transfigured by the flame of the spirit burning in the lamp of clay. It is recorded that an overpowering sense of Washington’s greatness sometimes actually impeded those artists who aspired to reveal him, body and soul, to posterity. Posterity then is fortunate because our fathers received from Houdon’s genius not only the Washington statue, but also seven noble portrait busts, those of Franklin, Paul Jones, Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, Fulton, and Joel Barlow, to mention them in the order of their creation, from 1778 to 1803. These virile interpretations of character were not lost in the ins and outs of our Atlantic coast-line. Even to this day, some one or other of them often reappears in public view, to excite interest, admiration, and controversy. But in the early nineteenth century, as is shown by Jefferson’s counsel to the North Carolina legislature, Conova, rather than Houdon, has become the name to conjure with. Even in portraiture, realism has given way to pseudo-classicism, long before Greenough arrives on the stage with his Washington as the Olympian Zeus, a colossal half-draped marble figure designed for a shrine within the Capitol.