Art

THE establishment of Art Museums in New York and Boston constitutes, let us hope, the first step in the direction of a satisfactory development of the fine arts in this country. Among these it is to painting that we have probably to look for the greatest achievements in the approaching century. The history of this art in America has been a peculiar one. There are not wanting instances of genius bursting up spontaneously from the rugged soil of the Colonies or the early States ; the sense of beauty, and the instinct to express its perceptions pictorially, exist abundantly among us. But none of our native painters have been able to find nourishment for their artistic faculties in this hemisphere. Europe draws them like a magnet; and West and Copley are regularly included in the British school of the last century. Stuart is in reality an English painter ; and it is impossible to suppose that Allston could have left us the riches he did, without long and renewed foreign study. Those who stand highest in our traditions, then, belong virtually to the art of other lands. Nor have we yet succeeded in obviating this anomalous condition. The men of the most aspiring and delicate genius still escape to France, or England, or Italy, as of old. Our academies apparently possess insufficient means for even the immediate ends of the best minds ; and there is no doubt that increased facilities for instruction in technicalities will greatly assist in checking this exodus of genius. But here is not the solution of the difficulty. Neither academies nor museums alone can wholly bring about the desired change, though both can assist, and the latter especially. It is not that our artists refuse to stay with us, if we but give them the slightest encouragement. On the contrary, we believe there are many instances of painters who, pecuniary necessities apart, would prefer to dedicate their art to the honor of their own country, and of men who remain here at the expense of their better artistic possibilities abroad. But they want a social atmosphere favorable to artistic growth, and a solid and appreciative support. The avenues to the future greatness in art of this country must be paved with gold. Wealth is indeed already scattered before the advancing divinity, but not always wisely. Government patronage, in a country where the people profess to govern, should do a great deal in this emergency. But unfortunately “ the people ” are content to pay a great deal for the privilege of sounding again and again this watchword, and leave the governing power meantime to expend vast sums upon works which, by unworthy representation, rather injure the aspect of art, the acquisition of anything valuable being chiefly a matter of chance. It is therefore to co-operative agency that we have to look for help. Under this head fall the new Museums of Art. These institutions are calculated to organize wealth and taste in the community, and thus, while gathering materials for the artist’s study, to engage the popular interest, thereby stimulating such general movements as can alone insure the advancement of painting to a thorough success in this country.

The New York Metropolitan Museum has brought together an extremely useful gallery of pictures. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, on the other hand, has recently put on exhibition at the Athenæum a collection embracing something over five hundred objects of art, the chief strength of which lies in its specimens of the keramic art, and the art of sculpture, including under this term carved wooden furniture and some fine Italian medals of the fifteenth century, as well as a brief series of plastercasts from reliefs in marble by several Italian sculptors, from Orcagna to Benvenuto Cellini. About a half-dozen only of pictures are displayed. Thus it will be seen that the Boston Museum begins its work with materials which will make its influence upon painting rather more indirect than that of the Metropolitan Museum. But it has secured, in the pottery from Cyprus, and the admirable loan collection from T. G. Appleton, Esq., of Græco-Italian fictile vases, objects which it will perhaps be more difficult to obtain hereafter ; while, with proper means and due effort, opportunities will no doubt be found to gradually render complete the pictorial department. In its present state, however, the collection contains illustrations greater in variety than that of the Metropolitan Museum, and if not so complete in respect of painting, it will still justify the chairman of the committee on the Museum, in styling it “ an artistic microcosm, well calculated to teach the visitor something of the character and quality of the art-industry of many nations during a long period of the world’s history.” The Appleton collection exhibits, besides three small vases from the prehistoric inhabitants of Southern Italy, very perfect and interesting amphoræ, together with a variety of mixers, pitchers, saucers, and perfume-bottles, from the four epochs of the art intervening between the prehistoric period and the first century before Christ. The trustees are also fortunate in the possession of a large Gobelin tapestry executed in the seventeenth century. The design represents France crowned by victory, and, with its gorgeous scarlet and indigo blue melting through the somewhat faded fabric, and its border of flowers and fruits, through the maze of which peeps an occasional parrot, will open to the uninitiated eye a pleasurable view into this kind of artistic activity.

At last, after long waiting, Ward’s statue of Shakespeare has been set up in the New York Central Park, and it is time to look at it with a critical eye : to judge how near the artist has come to doing what he set out to do, to measure the degree in which the work is likely to satisfy the world, ready enough and willing, no doubt, to see Shakespeare embodied, if it might be, but evidently unwilling to commit herself to an almost impossible experiment. At last, however, here it is ; and young America, with the enthusiasm, the consciousness of strength, and the rashness that belong to youth, has done and dared the dangerous task, and has crowned Shakespeare with high festival in his proudest public place, before France, or Germany, or even England has so much as begun to talk about a statue to him. No doubt, the purpose did the country honor, and, fortunately for us all, those whose earnest love for Shakespeare gave us the statue, found a man to make it as earnest as themselves.

Mr. Ward’s previous works had not very clearly pointed him out as the man best fitted to make a statue of the ideal Shakespeare. His work had been not at all “ideal,” but decidedly “realistic.” His first statue — that of Simon Kenton, a figure offered, just before the outbreak of the war, to the legislature of his native State of Ohio for a place in the rotunda of the capitol, and not accepted in that moment of confusion and huge war appropriations — was the first statute made by an American that gave promise of a brighter day. It embodied his Western feeling for the pioneer ; not the pioneer of Cooper and the sentimentalists, but the real pioneer whom Ward had seen and loved, to whose race he belonged. In its intention it was worthy to be placed by the side of the St. George of Donatello : it was as simple, as direct, as manly as that. It had not the ideal charm, nor the trace of that influence that all the Italian Renaissance work borrowed from the air in which it grew, but it was marked with high-breeding in its simplicity and its repose. Some day it must be put into marble, for the State of Ohio cannot afford to let such a statue, so produced, remain forever an unfulfilled possibility. “The Freedman” was Ward’s first attempt at an ideal figure, and was a disappointment to those who had not discriminated. “ The Freedman ” is well modelled, and the motive is expressed with sufficient clearness, but perhaps it would not be in the power of any sculptor to express that particular motive with simplicity. If Ward had been asked to make a statue of a particular negro doing a certain thing, we believe no man in our day would have been likely to perform the task better than he. But this figure is not real, it is an allegory, and Ward showed in it, what he has since showed in his “ Genius of Insurance,” that the making of allegories is not what he was born for. But, then, we may safely ask, who in our time could have done it better ? To embody an allegory, whether in painting, sculpture, or poetry, needs strong faith ; it never has been done, and never can be done, to order. Ward only failed where almost every man since the fifteenth century has failed. We wish he had not tried, and we wish too that there were some redemption in his failure. Then came the “Soldier of the Seventh Regiment”; and that being a subject to kill the ideal in any man’s mind, if once it had entered it, Ward made little of it beyond a good-looking young man, the type of a regiment of goodlooking men. Made as it was, however, just at the close of the war, one naturally looked in it for a type of something more heroic, and looked for what Ward probably never tried to put there. A Joseph Curtis, a Winthrop, a Lowell, a Shaw, either one of these splendid types of the part played in the war by the young men of America, would have been a worthier subject, and might have produced a statue into which the sculptor could have put something of himself. We do not reckon it a piece of good fortune for Mr. Ward that this work of his has been set up in the Central Park.

With the exhibition, in the plaster, of the “Indian Hunter,” Ward’s fame may be said to have become national. Up to this time he had produced nothing that could give him a place apart. Few people out of the circle of his friends had ever seen the “ Simon Kenton,” and, with all its merit, that was a youthful work, more valuable for the promise in it than for the performance. But the “Indian Hunter” was ripe fruit. Evidently, the man that made it was one of those that knew. It met all demands, and was the ideal in reality. The poet was pleased, the matter-of-fact man content, the child excited. Here was the living Indian of the West brought before us by one who had known him intimately, and behold ! — he was the Indian of our imagination !

So far as we know, the “ Indian Hunter” belongs to Ward and nature. We have seen it stated somewhere that “ the pose is said to be borrowed,” We do not think it just to a man like Ward to make such an assertion in such a way. Either say outright who charges that the pose is borrowed, and from what it is borrowed, or, say nothing. Mr. Ward, who is frankness itself, and, as everybody who knows him knows, very candid in talk about his own work, never hinted at any other figure as having suggested his statue; and without pretending to an exhaustive knowledge of the world of art, we will venture to deny that there is any such figure in existence. Mr. Ward has never been in Europe, and as our collections of casts from the antique sculpture — for we have no originals — include only the famous statues, where could he have found an original that with his intimate knowledge of Indians would have seemed to him worth borrowing ? The truth is, the attitude of the “Indian Hunter,” being precisely the attitude which Ward had himself seen the Indians take in hunting, belongs to his statue by right, and we are very sure its originality will never be seriously questioned. The same, too, with the muscles, which, we are told, are not Indian muscles. But ought not the work of an earnest, studious man, which represents a subject he is familiar with by actual experience, and in which he takes a lively interest, to be trusted rather than the criticism of persons who do not profess to have had his opportunities, and who have not the motive and the cue that he had, to hold the mirror up to nature ? Certain it is, that the “ Indian Hunter ” is full of life and purpose, and in all sincerity, having seen whatever has been done by the men of our time, we know not one that could bear away the palm from it for elegance, for truth, for fire, or for technical execution.

It was to be expected that the Shakespeare would be roughly handled, for, in truth, what subject could be chosen outside the range of the so-called sacred subjects, that should challenge like this ? And the difficulty is not far to seek ; it shows itself as soon as the subject is named. Is it the ideal Shakespeare or the real Shakespeare that the artist is to give us ? Is it the ideal author of the body of poetry we call “ Shakespeare,” or is it the native of Stratford, William Shakespeare by name, upon whom, for lack of a better, we have fathered all this splendid progeny ? Now, those who had studied Ward’s work from the beginning ought to have known that the ideal Shakespeare was beyond his reach, as it was beyond the reach of any man that lives, or of any man that ever did live. The limited service Ward tried to render us was this : to make, by the aid of the Stratford bust, the Chandos portrait, and the German mask, a figure that should represent the man William Shakespeare,— a figure upon which it might be agreeable to look, and looking, conjure up all that is connected in our minds with that name, all that we know of the plays and poems by our own experience ; a statue that should resemble the real man Shakespeare, who, if he did not himself write all that is set down to him, wrote some of it, and was the friend of the best men of his time, and was at least reckoned worthy, by one of the wisest and greatest among his companions, of words so warm and tender as these : “ I did love the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.”

It seems to us that Ward has well accomplished what he set out to do; and if he has felt, as no doubt he has, and makes us feel too, the limitations of his own nature, we must not make it a point against him : another man would have made us feel his limitations, and we should have been no better off. We are told that the statue is six and a half of its heads in height ; and that this ratio would have “ made an old Greek faint” ; and another writer, or, as is most likely, the same writer in another place, makes the statement that Mr. Ward’s statue is six and a half heads in length, while the “ Apollo Belvedere ” is eight, and adds : “ It is difficult to conceive what purpose the artist could have had in view in this radical departure from all received canons of proportion, when he could have had no knowledge of his original to warrant it.” Now it would be easy to show that the best authorities are in dispute as to the whole subject of the proportions of the human figure ; that though there was, most likely, some law which the Greeks, whether working in Greece or in Italy, followed in making their statues, yet we do not know what the law was, nor has it ever been satisfactorily educed from the most careful measurements of the famous statues. The measurements themselves vary, and even those statues whose height is the same vary materially in the proportions of the other divisions of the body. Vitruvius, it is true, tells us that the figure, according to the famous canon of the sculptor Polycletus, now lost, was eight heads high, yet the actual statues all fall short of that in measurement. Vitruvius, who was an architect and knew nothing practically of sculpture, gives a very confused account of the canon, and as to measuring by the head, any one who attempts it practically will acknowledge how impossible it is to obtain accuracy. Beside, even if the ancients as a rule followed this canon of Polycletus, yet there were orthodox and heterodox ; and several sculptors — Lysippus chief among them — tried his hand at improving upon it. The tendency in the developement of art seems to have been, to lengthen the lower limbs, and it is to be observed that the same thing took place in painting and sculpture in the late Renaissance in France and Italy. But we see it plainly enough in the “ Apollo Belvedere,” a late Roman work made of Carrara marble in the time of Nero, though probably by a Greek sculptor, in the “Huntress Diana” of the Louvre, and in the lately discovered “ Athlete using the Strigil ” by Lysippus, now in the Vatican. Now with all this confusion, uncertainty, and disagreement, it is going out of the way to take Mr. Ward to task for not obeying a law whose terms no one knows, and by which, even as guessed at, or interpreted, sculptors of our day are not bound, and do not pretend to be bound. But the objection seems downright silly when we reflect that Ward had not the intention to make an ideally perfect human figure, but a characteristic human one, and that he must have taken the head — all he had — for a scale and standard of the body, and made the body such a one as he thought this head would naturally belong to.

We do not wish to take the attitude of a champion of Ward, whose work is his best defence. But justice to him can only be done by trying to find out what was his intention in any particular work, what seems to be his aim in his work generally, and then looking searchingly to discover how near he has hit his mark. All who know the private history of this statue of Shakespeare know that Ward has given the best study he is capable of to reconciling the known portraits, and that he believes in the German mask as a veritable mask taken from the dead face of Shakespeare. Now when he came to model this head, he must put it upon a trunk and legs that seemed to him made to support it and be controlled by it; probably it never entered into his mind to compare it with the Apollo, or the Faun, or the Antinous, or to apply to it any scale whatever but the scale of proportions he always carries in his eye, —as every man, by fate, and not by reason, carries his own. He tried to make the parts of his figure correspond to each other, and it is whether or not he has succeeded in doing this that we must question, not whether he has put an Apollo into doublet and hose.

Certainly, the statue is not free from a suspicion that the sculptor saw too much of Edwin Booth while modelling the figure, and fixing its attitude. Probably it is not well that it should remind us of Hamlet, as he enters, reading. But, after seeing the statue many times, and studying it long, we do not find this impression gaining ground ; it cannot last when our regards are constantly drawn to the head, where all traces of any known person are quite lost in the individual characteristics that make up Mr. Ward’s “ Shakespeare.” The drapery is well managed on the whole, though we could have wished that the cloak had not been caught up on the arm, but suffered to hang as it would. It is this, more than anything in the pose, which gives the ever so slightly theatrical look to the figure. But drapery has, once or twice, troubled Mr. Ward. The “ Indian Hunter ” should in a strict adherence to facts have been stark naked ; the original model was so, for Mr. Ward, and others who know Indians as well as he, never saw an Indian hunting in any other state than naked; but a fear of prudes, male and female, made him present the Indian with the fur fig-leaf which at present covers his loins. However, the fur fig-leaf is perhaps better than a tin one, and we suppose it must have come to that. In the “ Seventh Regiment Soldier,” too, there seemed no good reason for turning up the corner of the overcoat skirt, and there was no reason but the conventional advice of somebody to break the lines a little, no matter whether logically or not. And now we have this Elizabethan cloak, which seems to have been as much in Mr. Ward’s way as it is in Shakespeare’s: neither of them knows what to do with it.

But, after all these drawbacks, there remains to us in this statue an impression of so much manliness, sincerity, and rightthinking in the sculptor of it, and of so much beauty and strength in the lines and masses, of so much lightness in the poise, with the pleasant sense, not of motion, but of a motion arrested and soon to begin again, we cannot but acknowledge that the excellences of the work outweigh its faults by far, and that it must be long before any sculptor will give us a more satisfactory Shakespeare than this of Ward’s.