The spirit of American sculpture

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 fi...

Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston, Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T...

A curious fact about our contemporary criticism of art and literature is this: that a criticism which constantly declares itself to be courageous in all ways, and which really h...

An unpublished satiric drawing of the ’eighties shows a family of American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus. With one exception, they are dumb with awe....

As originally planned, the title of the following chapter was The Statue and the Bust, and the Wart Well Lost. For I have often felt (and who has not?) that the Cromwellian fort...

Our forefathers’ first fond national desire in sculpture was for an equestrian statue of Washington, by Houdon; a wish never to be fulfilled. The Congressional impulse of 1783 w...

How summarize an art that shows us sculptured form, not in the faithful four-square roundness of fact, but in a subtly chosen and poetic projection of fact? For the manifestatio...

Visitors were standing by the fountain in the garden of a sculptor; and some one was asking him what in his opinion was the most beautiful material to model in. The questioner p...

Akin to the faculty for creating garden sculpture is the gift for designing those “small bronzes” in which American connoisseurs are now taking a happy interest. The general pub...

Other gifts besides those commonly acknowledged as the artist’s peculiar possession are needful if the advancement of art and the status of the artist are to be fitly assured. T...

Sometimes we talk as if the present state of things were a sort of terminus; as if by many roads we had at last reached Rome. Would it not be wiser to look upon the Olympian Was...