Part 9

In the painting of pastoral scenes, with cattle, Peter Moran, of Philadelphia, probably shows the most originality and force; and Thomas Robinson, of Boston, has displayed exceptional vigor in painting the textures of cattle, but without much invention in composition. James Hart for the past twelve years has made a specialty of introducing groups of cattle into his idyllic landscapes. They are often well drawn and carefully painted, and are in general effect commendable, although, like most of our animal painters, Mr. Hart does not seem to have got at the character of the animal as Snyders, Morland, or Landseer would have done. Mr. Dolph has painted some creditable cats and pugs in combination with interiors; and two young artists, Messrs. George Inness, Jun., and J. Ogden Brown, have executed some promising cattle pieces.

Miss Bridges must be credited with developing a charming and original branch of art, of which thus far she seems to enjoy a monopoly. There is exquisite fancy, as well as capital art, in the method in which, with water-colors, she composes stalks of grain or wild-flowers in combination with field birds, meadow-larks, linnets, bobolinks, sparrows, or sand-pipers, balancing on the apex of a wavering stalk, or flying over the wheat or by the sands of the sea-beat shore.

Mr. Frank Rogers, who is still a very young man, takes especial interest in painting dogs, although not intending to confine himself to that branch of animal life, and has already achieved considerable success in his attempts to represent canine traits. He has trained several dogs to pose for him for ten to fifteen minutes at once. In the decided ability and success already shown by Mr. Rogers we can see that it is now possible for our artists, availing themselves of influences already at work here, combined with an intense love of nature and the ideal, to do strong original work without devoting half their lives to foreign study, and thus carry on to a higher stage the national art for which so many clamor unreasonably, not considering that new schools of art are not born in a day, nor evolved without the conditions which have invariably prepared the way for the national art of other people. Art travels by no royal road.

Our continent is not so plentifully stocked with wild beasts and game as some parts of the Old World, but we yet have the panther and the bison, although now fast fading into a mere traditionary existence before the rifle of the pioneer. R. M. Shurtleff has a pleasant fancy for catamounts and deer, and has been a careful student of their habits, of which the results appear in dramatic bits of the wild life of the woods introduced into effective paintings of forest scenery; "A Race for Life" is the title of a weird, savage, and powerful composition by this artist, representing a flock of ravening wolves pursuing their victim over fields of frozen snow, behind which the low red sun is setting; and A. F. Tait has also devoted his life to rescuing from oblivion species which are rapidly becoming extinct, unless our game-laws are better enforced than they have been hitherto. There is often too finished a touch to the style of Mr. Tait, which deprives it of the force it might otherwise have; but he has, on the other hand, painted both game and domestic animals with remarkable truth, and he brings to the subject an inventive fancy that greatly adds to the variety and interest of his works. We might add in this connection an allusion to the ingenious carvings of Alexander Pope, a young artist who not only cuts out groups of game from a block of wood with much cleverness, but also truthfully colors the grouse and teal his skilful knife carves out of pine.

There is a branch of art which latterly has attracted much attention in this country. We refer to still-life. George H. Hall, who is also known as a _genre_ painter, justly earned a reputation years ago for effective painting of fruit and flowers, in which he has hitherto had few equals in this country; and M. J. Heade has devoted his attention successfully to the rendering of the wonderful gorgeousness of tropical vegetation. The ideal flower-painting of Mr. Lafarge we have already mentioned. Miss Robbins, of Boston, is at present one of the most prominent artists we have in this department. She composes with great taste, and lays on her colors with superb effect. Some of her paintings suggest the rich, massive coloring of Van Huysams. Messrs. Seavey, of Boston, Way, of Baltimore, and Lambdin, of Philadelphia, have produced some interesting results in this direction; and Miss Dillon and Mrs. Henshaw must be credited with some very beautiful floral compositions. The list of ladies who have been measurably successful in realistic flower-painting is very large, and indicates the strong tendency toward decorative art in the country, which must result ere long in a distinctly national type of that branch of æesthetic culture.

In arriving at the close of the second period of American painting, we are encouraged by abundant evidences of a healthy activity. While some phases of our art, after a growth of half a century, are passing through a transition period, and new methods and theories are grafting themselves upon the old, there is everywhere apparent a deeper appreciation of the supreme importance of the ideal, and a gathering of forces for a new advance against the strongholds of the materialism that wars against the culture of the ideal, combined with a rapidly spreading consciousness on the part of the people of the ethical importance of art, and a disposition to co-operate in its healthful development. At the same time new influences are entering into the national culture of æsthetics, and branches which have hitherto received little attention from our artists are coming rapidly into prominence, suggesting that we are about entering upon a third stage of American art.

V.

_SCULPTURE IN AMERICA._

It is a generally conceded fact that since the death of Michael Angelo the art of sculpture has made little progress in the expression of the ideal. It has rather indicated, until recently, a lack of steadiness of purpose, and a want of freshness and intellectual grasp that place the plastic art of the last three centuries in a lower rank than that of the Classic and the Middle Ages. It is, therefore, a matter of surprise that in a people apparently so unideal as our own, and engaged in struggling to win for itself a right to exist among the wilds of a new world, that we find that so much evidence has already been shown of an appreciation for sculpture. It is true that we have not yet produced any masterpieces that can rank with those of antiquity; but, on the other hand, some of our plastic art compares favorably with the best that has been created in modern times.

But what might have been expected under the circumstances has proved to be the case. Originality has been the exception and not the rule, even with our best sculptors. Naturally led to study the antique in Europe, and also to master there the technical elements of the art of sculpture, owing to the entire absence of facilities for art education here, it was only to be expected that they would at first yield to the art influences whose guidance they sought. It was not their fault that, until recently, those influences were conventional, and based upon a false perception of the principles of art.

Some of our most successful sculptors have never been abroad, or at least have not systematically placed themselves under the tuition of a foreign master; while a number of them have indicated in their tendencies a natural sympathy with the later movement of modern sculpture, which is rather in the direction of allegory, portraiture, and _genre_ suggested by domestic life. When the ancients represented Venus or Jove in marble, they sculptured a being in whose actual existence they believed, and thus a profound reverence inspired the work of the master. When the sculptor of the Middle Ages carved the deeds of the Saviour, or the saints, or represented the Last Judgment, he was moved by deep love or reverential awe, and an unquestioning belief in the events he was commemorating. But when the sculptor of this century undertakes to revive classical subjects and modes of thought, he encounters an insurmountable obstacle at the outset, which checks all progress, and relegates his art to a secondary rank, without even the benefit of a doubt in his favor. The laws and limitations of mind make it impossible for an art to be of the first order which depends upon the imitation of other art. It is only by copying nature directly, under the inspirations of its own age and country, that a school of art has the slightest chance of immortality. Thorwaldsen, the greatest sculptor since Michael Angelo, exemplified this truth to a remarkable degree. Moved by a realization of classic art which no other modern sculptor except Flaxman has approached, we yet find his classical subjects inferior to those allegorical subjects in which he gave expression to the impulses of his own times. A slowly dawning consciousness that art cannot by any force of will or free agency escape from these limitations of growth is becoming at last evident in recent sculpture, especially in the emotional and sometimes sensational sculpture of France. Lacking repose, it is yet fresh and original, and is destined by continued self-assertion to reach a high rank.

It is in imitations of the antique or in allegory, and portraiture, that our sculpture has exerted its best efforts, until within a few years. General Washington has also proved a sort of Jupiter Tonans to our sculptors. Elevated to a semi-apotheosis by the people, he has hitherto been the most prominent subject of the plastic art of the West, and has thus afforded a fair standard of comparison between the merits of different artists, since very few of them but have tried their hand with the national hero. As regards popular appreciation or pecuniary reward, it must be admitted that our sculptors have relatively little cause for complaint.

The art of sculpture was by no means unknown here when the white man first stepped foot on our shores. The pipe-stone quarries of the West are an evidence of what had already been attempted by the aboriginal savages. Tobacco, so much maligned by certain zealous philanthropists, was at least an innocent cause of some of the earliest attempts at sculpture made on this continent. The writer has in his possession an Indian pipe carved out of flint, which represents a man sitting with hands clasped across his knees. Simple as it is, it indicates good skill in stone-carving, and considerable observation of race characteristics and anatomy. Evidences of great technical skill in the plastic arts, but with an unformed perception of beauty, are being constantly discovered among the relics of the extinct Mound-builders of the West and South.

Before the Revolution, however, excepting in the carving of figure-heads, plastic art, unlike painting, seems to have been hardly known in the United States. And so little sign was there of its dawn that John Trumbull declared to Frazee, as late as 1816, that sculpture "would not be wanted here for a century." But even then the careful observer might have noticed indications that a genius for glyptic art was awakening in the new republic. In the early part of the last century Deacon Drowne made a vane for Faneuil Hall, and one for the Province House, in Boston, which appear to have gained him great repute in his day in New England. The latter work, although turning with the wind on an iron spindle, was a life-size statue of an Indian sachem holding a bow and arrow in the act of aiming. It was hollow, and of copper, and would seem, from the impression it made, to have been a work of some merit. Somewhat later, Patience Wright, of Bordentown, New Jersey, displayed considerable cleverness in modelling miniature wax heads in relief, and by this process succeeded in making likenesses of Washington and Franklin, among the celebrities of her time. William Rush, who was born some twenty years before the Revolution, had also shown already that even in ship-carving the sculptor may find scope for fancy and skill, as Matthew Pratt, in the previous generation, had proved that even in the painting of signs genius can find vent for its inspirations. Rush was undoubtedly a man of genius; for, although all the art education he ever had was confined to an apprenticeship with a ship-carver, his figure-heads of Indians or naval heroes added a singular merit to the beauty of the merchant marine which first carried our flag to the farthest seas, and the men-of-war that wrested victory in so many a hard-fought battle. Hush worked only in wood or clay; but original strength and talent, which under better circumstances might have achieved greater results, are evident in some of his portrait busts, and in a statue of a nymph at Fairmount. A bust of himself, carved out of a block of pine, is remarkable for a realistic force and character that entitle it to a permanent place in the records of American sculpture.

Sculpture, however, was much more backward in gaining a foothold in the country than the sister arts; for it was not until 1824 that the first portrait in marble by a native was executed--that of John Wells, by John Frazee, a stone-cutter, whose sole art education was obtained during an apprenticeship in a yard where rude monumental work was turned out for the bleak cemeteries in use before such sumptuous retreats as Greenwood and Mount Auburn were planned. There was a feeling after the ideal in the nature of this unassisted artist which enabled him to be potential in influencing younger artists; while his opportunities were unfavorable to the just development of his own abilities.

Rush began to model in clay in 1789, and at that time not one of the artists who have since given celebrity to our native sculpture had seen the light. Frazee was born in 1790; and Hezekiah Augur, of New Haven, in 1791. The latter was engaged in the grocery trade, and failing in that, took up modelling and wood-carving, without any guide except his natural instincts. Like many of our first sculptors, his efforts are interesting rather as evidences of what talent entirely uninstructed and untrained can accomplish, than for any intrinsic value in his work. Many of the artists who have succeeded him have also begun life in some trade or profession altogether at variance with the art to which they afterward consecrated their lives.

It was not till the year 1805, long after Copley, West, Malbone, Allston, and Stuart had demonstrated our capacity for pictorial art, that the genius of the country seemed inclined to allow us a plastic art of our own. In that year Hiram Powers was born, one of the best known sculptors of the century. The same year witnessed the birth of Horatio Greenough. In the remote wilds of Kentucky, still harried by the Indians, Hart was born in 1810; and Clevenger, Crawford, and Mills followed in 1812, 1813, and 1815--all artists of note, even if of unequal merits, and important as pioneers in the art rather than the creators of a great school of sculpture. Thus we see that without any apparent previous preparation a strong impulse toward glyptic art and the men to direct and give it strength simultaneously sprung up in the land. When one considers the disadvantages under which they labored, and that, so far as can be known, they were not even aided by any heredity of genius in this direction, criticism is tempered by surprise that they achieved the results they did, and that two of them at least--Powers and Crawford--succeeded in winning for themselves a European renown which made them almost the peers of some of the leading foreign sculptors of the age, who were born amidst the trophies of classic and Renaissance art.

Hiram Powers must always be assigned a commanding position in our Western art, even by those who are not enthusiastic admirers of his works. A farmer's boy of the Green Mountains, he early exchanged Vermont for the bustling streets of Cincinnati, where an ampler scope was offered to the aspiring energies of the founder of American sculpture. Like many of our sculptors, a turn for mechanics, characteristic of the inventive mind of the people, was combined in him with a capacity for art, and this, which at first found vent in a study of the inventions of the time, enabled him in maturer life to facilitate the means of art expression by valuable inventions. Palmer and several other American sculptors have also aided the art in a similar way. From modelling in wax, which aroused great local interest, young Powers proceeded to modelling in plaster, under the tuition of a German artist resident in Cincinnati, and, aided by the generous patronage of Mr. Longworth--to whose liberality toward our artists American art is greatly indebted--he soon received numerous commissions for portrait busts of some of our most notable public men, such as Webster, Jackson, Marshall, and Calhoun. Notwithstanding his lack of training and art associations, Powers executed some of these portraits with a vigor worthy of the subjects, and scarcely equalled by any of his subsequent work.

In 1837 Powers decided to go to Italy, whither Greenough had already preceded him, led thither, like many since, by superior art advantages and economical reasons, which still sway our sculptors at a time when it would seem that it would be more profitable, so far as native art is concerned, for them to remain here. Several of our sculptors have acknowledged to the writer that the time has come for their art to grow up under the home influences which are to regulate the art of the future, but that the question of economy forces them to live in Florence and Rome.

Residing in Florence until his death, Powers devoted his long career to the creation of many works of high finish, and occasionally of a merit comparing well with the works of an age whose plastic arts were conventional. Who has not seen the famous "Greek Slave," inspired by the enthusiasm for the Greeks struggling with the Turk for existence? The "Penseroso," "Fisher Boy," and "Proserpine" are also among the most pleasing works of this artist. The "California," a nude, symbolical female figure, is less satisfactory in conception, and is also open to criticism as to its proportions. In these works we see expressed the thoughts of an artist skilled in the technical requirements of the art, and moved by a lofty ideal, but marked by tender sentiment rather than force, and suggesting sometimes a dryness of style and a coldness or reticence of emotion inherited from the undemonstrative people of New England, as if when the artist was executing them the stern genius of Puritanism, jealous of the voluptuous or the passionate in art, had stood Mentor-like at his side and said, "There, that will do; beware lest your love of beauty lead you to forget that you are an American citizen, to whom duty, principle, example, are the watchwords of life." But sometimes genius proved superior to tradition even with Powers, as when he composed the two great ideal statues of Eve before and after the fall. By these noble works, inspired by true, untrammelled artistic feeling--which we must consider his best ideal compositions--he earned a rank very near to that of Gibson and Canova, and rendered his art worthy of lasting remembrance.

The art of Powers was best exemplified in his portrait busts. His imagination was not prolific or active, as one may infer from the following expressions of his own: "I could never satisfy myself with an ideal in a hurry. The human form is infinite. It is the image of God. I have found that, do my best, there was always a _better_ in nature. Once knowing this, I have hesitated and sought to find it, and this is the way to fame. One may fail with all his care and labor, but it is the only way. Not they who have produced the most, but they who have done the best, stand foremost in the end. I never felt that I had the power to charge a hundred statues. I exhaust myself on a few. This accounts for the fact that I found it necessary to give nearly a year's time, in all, to the model of your statue of 'Paradise Lost.'"

The early educational advantages of Horatio Greenough were superior to those of Powers; and as one of the first in our country to assert himself in marble, he won a name which we are reluctantly obliged to consider in excess of his merits as an artist. He impresses one as a man of intellectual force and culture, but without any special calling to sculpture. The work by which he will be known the longest is the Bunker Hill Monument, whose stately proportions he designed. Greenough executed a number of vigorous and striking busts, like those of Lafayette and Fenimore Cooper, which deserve favorable mention. But in venturing after ideal expression he cannot be said to have accomplished satisfactory results. The elaborate group called "The Rescue," on the portico of the Capitol at Washington, is ambitious, but leaves one to regret that so prominent a position could not have been more appropriately decorated.

Few statues have ever given rise to more conflicting criticisms than Greenough's "Washington" in the grounds of the Capitol. Colossal in size and on a massive throne, seated half nude and holding out a Roman sword in his left hand, some one has jocularly observed that the august hero of the republic seems to say, "Here is my sword; my clothes are in the Patent-office yonder." It certainly seems an absurdity in this age to represent so recent a character in a garb in which he was so rarely seen by the public, or so closely and incongruously to imitate the style of the antique. Benjamin West showed more originality and courage when, in the last century, and in defiance of the opinion of such men as Sir Joshua Reynolds, he dared to break loose from the conventional, and created a revolution in historical art by permitting General Wolfe to die in the clothes in which he went to battle. But in justice to Greenough, whose statue is in some respects meritorious and important, especially in the bass-reliefs on the elegant chair, it should be said that he never designed to have this statue placed in its present position, but under the dome of the Rotunda, where it would undoubtedly be far more impressive, and being sheltered from the winter snows, its nudity would be less incongruous.

Last year a sculptor died at Florence who was born in Kentucky nearly seventy years ago. His education was confined to three months in a district school, and his first occupation was chimney-building. James Hart, although successful in portraiture, was also an idealist, who, after settling in Italy, produced numerous pleasing works, like his "Angelina" and "Woman Triumphant." There is a delicate, winning sense of beauty and a refined emotional tendency in his art, which pleases while it fails to master us, because it was a facile fancy rather than a lofty imagination that conceived his creations.