The Art Of Augustus Saint–gaudens

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS AT WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 15TH, 1908.

My only justification for appearing here to say a few words in honor of the illustrious artist you are met to commemorate is the fact that Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Ireland and of an Irish mother. I will not dispute with my friend and colleague the Ambassador of France how much of his artistic genius is due to Ireland, and whether it bears the stamp of the Gallo-Roman branch or of the Gaelic branch of the Celtic race. But all of it that can be deemed possibly attributable to Ireland I am going to claim for Ireland, and that for a special reason. Ireland has, as all the world knows, given to the British Isles, and also to this country, a great number of men famous in literature, famous in science, famous in war, famous in government. What would you have done in the United States without Irishmen to manage your affairs of State ? But in proportion to the genius her children have shown in other directions, Ireland has given to the Fine Arts, as even her admirers must admit, comparatively few men of first-rate eminence, and this is the more remarkable because the ancient Celtic work of the churches and monumental crosses of Ireland is full of richness and beauty. So desiring to secure for my island all the artistic honours possible, I must claim Saint-Gaudens for it. I had intended to have dwelt upon the inspiration which he derived in his early years in Dublin from the picturesque and romantic scenery which surrounds that ancient city, but, unfortunately, I committed the fault — unpardonable in a man with some experience in these matters, and a fault which I hereby warn you against — of trying to verify my facts by reference to the original authorities, and I found that Saint-Gaudens quitted Dublin at the age of six months. So I must fall back upon that native quality which he drew from his Irish mother.

I will not attempt, after what has been said by previous speakers, and especially after that analysis of his genius, at once vigorous and delicate, which was given by the President of the United States, to fix the place which Saint-Gaudens holds among those who have adorned the splendid art of sculpture, an art which has, ever since the great Italian masters died out nearly four centuries ago, held in the field of mod-em achievement a place that seems small when we compare it with that supremacy yielded to it in the artistic production of the ancient world, and which it almost regained in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among those men who stand preeminent in sculpture since the death of Michael Angelo, the highest renown seems to have fallen to the Italian Canova and the Icelander Thorwaldson, and it came to these two not so much through any new creative quality they revealed in plastic work or any personal originality that shone out in their own conceptions, as by the fact that they reproduced the kind of beauty and the type of artistic thought which inspired the art of the Greeks. Thus admirable as is the genius of both, they seem to us to be revivifying, so far as moderns can, the manner of Greece rather than to have renewed those traditions of the grand style of the Renaissance whose latest expressions are to be found in the marvellous figures of the Laurentian chapel at Florence and in those which stand around the tomb of the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck.

Without venturing into the dangerous field of theorizing about art or attempting to indicate the elements that go to the making of its highest forms, I suppose we may all agree in thinking that there are in sculpture three more or less distinctive kinds of excellence. There is the excellence which consists in the faithful reproduction of nature; there is the excellence in which we admire pure beauty of form and line ; and there is the excellence which makes its special appeal to the imagination of the beholder be-cause it proceeds from the imagination of the artist himself. When he has the power of speaking to our intellect and emotions straight out of his own mind, he enables us to realize not only how the subject presented itself to his thought, but what was really the deepest and most essential thing in his subject itself. If the subject be a person, he reveals the innermost nature of the man portrayed. If it is a scene, he brings out the true and permanent meaning it will have for the long Hereafter. To possess any one of these excellences in high measure is to be great. To possess all three in such measure is to attain perfection. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, we may probably agree, stood preëminent in the third. His highest gift was his power of imaginative conception. As all the great men that have left their mark in the world of affairs have been great by combining the power of thinking with energy, promptitude, and courage in action, so all the men that have been great in the fields of literature and art have been great by combining the power of thinking with the power of feeling, that is, the capacity of receiving and giving out an emotional impression. Now what most strikes us in Saint-Gaudens' works is that, whatever else we find, we find an intense and profound power of thinking combined with an equal power of feeling. Look around upon these works in this room. Does he not seem to you, whenever he approached a subject, be it a man or an incident, to have sat down and meditated, slowly and patiently, until he had discovered for himself exactly what lay at the foundation of the man's character or what it was that struck the deepest chord of human nature in the incident ? Then, pervaded by this thought, he set himself to represent and ex-press that which belonged to the man or to the incident, and he did express it with an unerring accuracy and a rarely equalled power. This accuracy was due to his possessing, along with high ideals, a patience that grudged no pains. He kept some of his works for years in his studio after others had thought them complete, touching and retouching them till they were brought nearer to the standard of perfection he had set up. One of his disciples remembers a day when in modelling an arm for a figure he moulded and threw away more than twenty attempts to get in the clay exactly the shape and contour he desired.

Think of any one of his greatest works. Look at that noble statue of President Lincoln in the park at Chicago, in which the grandeur of the man transforms and triumphs over all those difficulties and defects which the figure and the clothing presented and which might have appeared inconsistent with Hellenic ideas of beauty and grace.

Think of that solemn and majestic figure of Sorrow in the Rock Creek Cemetery here at Washington which seems by mere form and posture to have succeeded in expressing what has seldom been expressed by sculptor or painter, though the greatest masters of music have been able to express it through sound. It touches us like a requiem by Mozart or one of those pieces of Chopin in which the very soul of sadness seems to speak through the chords.

Think of that infinitely pathetic figure of the young hero of New England, Robert Shaw, as you see him in the bas-relief on the border of Boston Common — the young hero of New England riding calmly to his fate at the head of his soldiers, soldiers of another race just delivered from slavery. The shadow of death rests already upon him.

Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra).

When you think of works like those, in which the loftiest imagination has been accompanied with the most finished grace of execution, you feel how great a genius it has been the privilege of your age to possess in the artist whose memory we have met to honour.

The danger or the weakness which is sometimes found to accompany this power of imaginative expression is that it is apt to lapse into something extravagant or sensational. Nothing was farther from Saint-Gaudens. In that respect he had the balance and self-restraint, as well as the fine sense of beauty and measure, which belonged to his Greek masters. It is by that, we may believe, — by the power of imaginative conception and expression, combined with calmness and self-restraint, — that he will live in the admiring memory of all who love and prize art in every country. Most of all will he live in America, which did not, in-deed, give him birth, but which received him as a child, which helped him, which cherished him, which recognized his gifts as though he had been one of her own children, which gave him those noble subjects from her own history with which his name will always be associated. He deserves to be remembered forever among you as one of the artistic glories of your country.