It is not probable that any critic who greatly valued his reputation, or who had any serious reputation to value, would take quite this tone; but, leaving out of consideration the impressionistic and ultra-modern criticism which ignores Raphael altogether, it is instructive to note the way in which a critic so steeped in Italian art as Mr. Berenson approaches the fallen prince. The artist who used to be considered the greatest of draughtsmen he will hardly admit to be a draughtsman at all, ranking him far below Pollaiuolo and positively speaking of him as "a poor creature, most docile and patient." As a colorist and a manipulator of paint, he places him with Sebastiano del Piombo—that is, among the mediocrities. Almost the only serious merit, from his point of view, which he will allow him is a mastery in the rendering of space, shared in nearly equal measure by Perugino, as, to some extent, by nearly all the painters of the Umbrian school. For, while he admits that Raphael was the greatest master of composition that Europe has produced, he evidently thinks of composition, as do so many other moderns, as a matter of relatively little importance.

It is not Raphael's popularity that is in question; that is, perhaps, as great as ever it was. His works, in one form or another of reproduction, from the finest carbon print to the cheapest lithograph, are still to be found, in the humblest homes as in the most splendid, in nearly every quarter of the globe. That popularity was always based on what Berenson calls the "illustrative" qualities of Raphael's work, on the beauty of his women, the majesty of his men; on his ability to tell a story as we like it told and to picture a world that we wish might be real. One may not be prepared to consider these illustrative qualities so negligible as do many modern critics, or to echo Mr. Berenson's phrase about "that which in art ... is so unimportant as what ... we call beauty." One might point out that the greatest artists, from Phidias to Rembrandt, have occupied themselves with illustration, and that to formulate the ideals of a race and an epoch is no mean task. But, for the moment, we may neglect all that, our present inquiry being why an artist, once counted the greatest of all, is no longer considered very significant by those who measure by purely artistic standards rather than by that of illustrative success and consequent popularity.

We may also leave out of our present consideration Raphael's achievement in the suggestion of space. It is a very real quality and a high one. It has doubtless always been an important element in the enjoyability of Raphael's art, as it is almost the only enjoyable element, for many of us, in the art of Perugino. But it is an element that has only very recently been clearly perceived to exist. If it was enjoyed by the artists and critics, from Raphael's day almost to our own, they were unconscious of the fact, and the probability is that we enjoy it more than they did. It will not account for the estimation in which they held Raphael, and still less will it account for the relative lack of interest in him to-day.

In truth the reason why many modern critics and painters almost dislike Raphael is the very reason for which he was so greatly revered. Coming in the nick of time, at the close of an epoch of investigation, himself a man of wide culture and quick intellect but of no special originality or emotional power, he learned from all his predecessors what they had to teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which were suited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style which was immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression of lofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder of classicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him was to confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really care for his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic ideal retained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with the definitive turning of modern art into the paths of romanticism and naturalism that revolt became possible.

But when the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably became unjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art the test of that of others—who had erected what, with him, was a spontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. It confounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored by them, began to find the master himself a bore.

For, eclectic as he was by nature, and founder as he was of the academic regime, the "grand style" of Raphael was yet a new and personal contribution to art. He drew from many sources, but the principle of combination was his own. His originality was in that mastery of composition which no one has ever denied him, but which is very differently rated as a quality of art by different temperaments. Almost everything specifically Raphaelesque in his work is the offspring of that power of design in which he is still the unapproached master. Modern criticism is right in denying that he was a draughtsman, if by draughtsman is meant one deeply preoccupied with form and structure for its own sake. His distinction was to invest the human figure with such forms as should best fit it to play its part in a scheme of monumental composition. The "style" of his draperies, so much and so justly admired, is composition of draperies. He was not a colorist as Titian was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter—he was just so much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the greatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works is entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition, and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its predestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawn like Michelangelo or painted like Hals—certainly, when he once understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.

Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardiniere." Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a host of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and all grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing of fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality proper to himself. But, apparently, it answered its purpose. It freed him from preoccupation with the work of others. When his great opportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera della Segnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at his command to give him no further trouble. He could concentrate himself on the essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirely appropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design. It was the work for which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirably in it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill such spaces so perfectly again.

There are fourteen important compositions in the room. The decoration of the ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma's decorative framework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy, more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not to be improved on. If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings which were to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work. There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphael himself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room was made to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its division into the four great fields of learning: divinity, philosophy (including science), poetry, and law. In reality, the question is of little importance. There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence, to be mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have a perfectly free hand, as we know he did not later. Whoever thought of the subjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a way as to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decoration in the world. Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallions and four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figure compositions. In the circles, each directly above one of the great wall spaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects with the stories of "The Fall of Man," "Apollo and Marsyas," and "The Judgment of Solomon," and with that figure, leaning over a celestial globe, which must be meant for Science. All of these panels are on curved surfaces, and Raphael's decorative instinct led him, on this account and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, to suppress all distance, placing his figures against a background of simulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane. There is, therefore, no possible question of "space composition" here. These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in two dimensions—upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, the invention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines. It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect.

The "Poetry" (Pl. 11) is the most beautiful of the medallions, but they are all much alike: a draped female figure in the middle, seated to give it scale, large enough to fill the height of the circle amply but without crowding, and winged putti, bearing inscribed tablets, on either side. There are other ways of filling a circle acceptably, as Botticelli had shown and as Raphael was to show again in more than one tondo, but for their situation, marking the principal axes of the room, there is no way so adequate as this. As Mr. Blashfield has said, speaking from experience: "When a modern painter has a medallion to fill and has tried one arrangement after another, he inevitably realizes that it is Raphael who has found the best ordering that could be found; and the modern painter builds upon his lines, laid down so distinctly that the greater the practice of the artist the more complete becomes his realization of Raphael's comprehension of essentials in composition." Not only so, but the modern painter finds as inevitably that, accepting this ordering as the best, even then he cannot add another figure to these four. He may, perhaps, draw it better in detail or give more character to the head, but he cannot capture that felicity of spacing, that absoluteness of balance, that variety and vivacity combined with monumental repose. The more his nature and training have made him a designer the more certainly he feels, before that single medallion of Poetry, that he is in the presence of the inimitable master of design.



If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is only because the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may be filled is almost infinite. Composition more masterly than that of the "Judgment of Solomon" (Pl. 12), for instance, you will find nowhere; so much is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft, and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The dead child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle, herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother, and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of the picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid formality of the "Adam and Eve," and you will have some notion of the meaning of this gift of design.



But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which are Raphael's greatest triumphs—the most perfect pieces of monumental decoration in the world. On the two longer walls, nearly unbroken lunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two great compositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens." The "Disputa" (Pl. 13), the earlier of the two, has the more connection with the art of the past. The use of gilded relief in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which existed in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transform the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper part is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the attitudes and the spacing. In the lower part the variety becomes almost infinite, yet there is never a jar—not a line or a fold of drapery that mars the supreme order of the whole. Besides the uncounted cherubs which float among the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of the saints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures in the picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seem gathered about the altar with its sacred wafer—the tiny circle which is the focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of all regards, as it is the central mystery of Catholic dogma.



Opposite, in the "School of Athens" (Pl. 14), the treatment is different but equally successful. The hieratic majesty of the "Disputa" was here unnecessary, but a tranquil and spacious dignity was to be attained, and it is attained through the use of vertical and horizontal lines—the lines of stability and repose, while the bounding curve is echoed again and again in the diminishing arches of the imagined vaulting. The figures, fewer in number than in the "Disputa" and confined to the lower half of the composition, are ranged in two long lines across the picture; but the nearer line is broken in the centre and the two figures on the steps, serving as connecting-links between the two ranks, give to the whole something of that semicircular grouping so noticeable in the companion picture. The bas-reliefs upon the architecture and the great statues of Apollo and Minerva above them draw the eye upward at the sides, and this movement is intensified by the arrangement of the lateral groups of figures. By these means the counter curve to the arch above, the one fixed necessity, apparently, of the lunette, is established. It is more evident in the perspective curve of the painted dome. Cover this line with a bit of paper, or substitute for it a straight lintel like that seen beyond, and you will be surprised to find how much of the beauty of the picture has disappeared. The grouping of the figures themselves, the way they are played about into clumps or separated to give greater importance, by isolation, to a particular head, is even more beyond praise than in the "Disputa." The whole design has but one fault, and that is an afterthought. In the cartoon the disproportioned bulk of Heraclitus, thrust into the foreground and writing in an impossible attitude on a desk in impossible perspective, is not to be found. It is such a blot upon the picture that one cannot believe that Raphael added it of his own motion; rather it must have been placed there at the dictation of some meddling cardinal or learned humanist who, knowing nothing of art, could not see why any vacant space should not be filled with any figure whose presence seemed to him historically desirable. One is tempted to suspect even, so clumsy is the figure and so out of scale with its neighbors, that the master refused to disfigure his work himself and left the task to one of his apprentices. If it had been done by one of them, say Giulio Romano, after the picture was entirely completed and at the time of the "Incendio del' Borgo," it could not be more out of keeping.



Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which these openings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularly in the "Disputa," where the bits of parapet which play an important part at either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, were suggested solely by the presence of this door. In the end walls the openings, large windows much higher than the doors, become of such importance that the whole nature of the problem is changed. It is the pierced lunette that is to be dealt with, and Raphael has dealt with it in two entirely different ways. One wall is symmetrical, the window in the middle, and on that wall he painted the "Parnassus" (Pl. 15), Apollo and the Muses in the centre with groups of poets a little lower on either side and other groups filling the spaces to right and left of the window head. At first sight the design seems less symmetrical and formal than the others, with a lyrical freedom befitting the subject, but in reality it is no less perfect in its ponderation. The group of trees above Apollo and the reclining figures either side of him accent the centrality of his position. From this point the line of heads rises in either direction to the figures of Homer and of the Muse whose back is turned to the spectator, and the perpendicularity of these two figures carries upward into the arch the vertical lines of the window. From this point the lateral masses of foliage take up the drooping curve and unite it to the arch, and this curve is strongly reinforced by the building up toward either side of the foreground groups and by the disposition of the arms of Sappho and of the poets immediately behind her, while, to disguise its formality, it is contradicted by the long line of Sappho's body, which echoes that of the bearded poet immediately to the right of the window and gives a sweep to the left to the whole lower part of the composition. It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem, and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays its necessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse who stands highest on the left and establishing one of a number of subsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderful design.



The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and here Raphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separate picture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated cornice across at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmental lunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" (Pl. 16), which seems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative design that even Raphael ever created—the most perfect piece of design, therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of falling curves from end to end, are beyond description—the reader must study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were not his attention called to it—the ingenious way in which the whole composition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of the wall may be minimized. Draw an imaginary straight line from the boss in the soffit of the arch through the middle of the Janus-head of Prudence. It will accurately bisect the central group, composed of this figure and her two attendant genii, will pass through her elevated left knee, the centre of a system of curves, and the other end of it will strike the top of the post or mullion that divides the window opening into two parts.



This single room, the Camera della Segnatura, marks the brief blossoming time of Raphael's art, an art consummate in science yet full of a freshness and spontaneity—the dew still upon it—as wonderful as its learning. The master himself could not duplicate it. He tried for Venetian warmth of color in the "Mass of Bolsena" (Pl. 17) and experimented with tricks of illumination in the "Deliverance of Peter" (Pl. 18), and in these two compositions, struck out new and admirable ways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of the solitary figure of the pope against the compact group of seven figures—a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen in order to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation and by the greater mass of his supporting group below—is a triumph of arrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, the necessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawn diagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the window head, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while the great curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In the symmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the space into three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen through the grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, an acceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last of the Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as a composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in the way of sketches.



Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In 1514 he painted the "Sibyls" (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in a frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did. Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the story of Cupid and Psyche—works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom and variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaulting with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was a bold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed in the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved for Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. One may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is nothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informal order—the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure, rather than of a stately chamber—but it is decoration the most consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative design that the world has seen.



It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming illustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas," might be allowed to sink comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But there is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the portrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been great portrait-painters as well, although—perhaps because—there is little resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for success in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied with relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of type and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them and with nothing else—an individuality to be presented with all it contains, neither more nor less—to be rendered entirely, and without flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami," in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)—the original of which the picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica—has a beauty of surface and of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.



Raphael's portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify a great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank that used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is, after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in which that quality is held. It was because composition was to him a comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little of Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and critics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known that design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always appreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his own art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country, mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any time since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest in decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again with something of its ancient splendor.

But design is something more than the essential quality of mural decoration—it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thing in art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone, and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, the architect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualities which are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it most sharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call Frans Hals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistry by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we no longer call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of the greatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting.



V

TWO WAYS OF PAINTING

Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The Hermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, working for himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what he really cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the moderns and, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Not that he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with the broken touch or the division of tones—his method is as direct as that of Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind—a bending of all his energies to the vivid realization of the effect of the scene rendered as one might perceive it in the first flash of vision if one came upon it unexpectedly. This picture is better than Sorolla—it is better than almost any one. It is perhaps the most astonishing realization of the modern ideal, the most accomplished transcript of the actual appearance of nature, that has yet been produced. It is because of its great merit, because of its extraordinary success in what it attempts, that it leads one to the serious consideration of the nature of the attempt and of the gain and loss involved in the choice that modern art has made.

The picture is exactly square—the choice of this form is, of itself, typically modern in its unexpectedness—and represents a bit of rough wood interior under intense sunlight. The light is studied for its brilliancy rather than for its warmth, and if the picture has a fault, granted the point of view of the painter, it is in a certain coldness of color; but such conditions of glaring and almost colorless light do exist in nature. One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine or larch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted and lichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that is all. The conviction of truth is instantaneous—it is an actual bit of nature, just as the painter found it. One is there on that ragged hillside, half dazzled by the moving spots of light, as if set down there suddenly, with no time to adjust one's vision. Gradually one's eyes clear and one is aware, first of a haggard human head with tangled beard and unkempt hair, then of an emaciated body. There is a man in the wood! And then—did they betray themselves by some slight movement?—there are a couple of slender antelopes who were but now invisible and who melt into their surroundings again at the slightest inattention. It is like a pictorial demonstration of protective coloring in men and animals.



Now, almost any one can see how superbly all this is rendered. Any one can marvel at and admire the free and instantaneous handling, the web of slashing and apparently meaningless brush strokes which, at a given distance, take their places by a kind of magic and are the things they represent. But it takes a painter to know how justly it is observed. In these days no painter, whatever may be his deepest convictions, can escape the occasional desire to be modern; and most of us have attempted, at one time or another, the actual study of the human figure in the open air. We have taken our model into a walled garden or a deep wood or the rocky ravine of a brook and have set ourselves seriously to find out what a naked man or woman really looks like in the setting of outdoor nature. And we have found just what Sargent has painted. The human figure, as a figure, has ceased to exist. Line and structure and all that we have most cared for have disappeared. Even the color of flesh has ceased to count, and the most radiant blond skin of the fairest woman has become an insignificant pinkish spot no more important than a stone and not half so important as a flower. Humanity is absorbed into the landscape.

Obviously, there are two courses open to the painter. If he is a modern by feeling and by training, full of curiosity and of the scientific temper, caring more for the investigation of the aspects of nature and the rendering of natural light and atmosphere than for the telling of a story or the construction of a decoration, he will, if he is able enough, treat his matter much as Sargent has treated it. The figure will become, for him, only an incident in the landscape. It will be important only as a thing of another texture and another color, valuable for the different way in which it receives the light and reflects the sky, just as rocks and foliage and water and bare earth are valuable. For to the true Impressionist light and atmosphere are the only realities, and objects exist only to provide surfaces for the play of light and atmosphere. He will abandon all attempt at rendering the material and physical significance of the human form and will still less concern himself with its spiritual significance. He will gain a great vividness of illusion, and he may console himself for what he loses with the reflection that he has expressed the true relation of man to the universe—that he has expressed either man's insignificance or man's oneness with nature, according as his temper is pessimistic or optimistic.

If, on the other hand, the painter is one to whom the figure as a figure means much; one to whom line and bulk and modelling are the principal means of expression, and who cares for the structure and stress of bone and muscle; if the glow and softness of flesh appeal strongly to him; above all, if he has the human point of view and thinks of his figures as people engaged in certain actions, having certain characters, experiencing certain states of mind and body; then he will give up the struggle with the truths of aspect that seem so vital to the painter of the other type and, by a frank use of conventions, will seek to increase the importance of his figure at the expense of its surroundings. He will give it firmer lines and clearer edges, will strengthen its light and shade, will dwell upon its structure or its movement and expression. He will so compose his landscape as to subordinate it to his figure and will make its lines echo and accentuate that figure's action or repose. When he has accomplished his task he will have painted not man insignificant before nature but man dominating nature.

For an example of this way of representing man's relation to the world about him, let us take Titian's "Saint Jerome" (Pl. 22)—a picture somewhat similar to Sargent's in subject and in the relative size of the figure and its surroundings. Titian has here given more importance to the landscape than was common in his day. He also has meant, as Sargent has, to make a great deal of the wilderness to which his saint has retired, and to make his saint a lonely human being in a savage place. But the saint and his emotion is, after all, what interests Titian most, and the wildness of nature is valuable to him mainly for its sympathy with this emotion. He wants to give a single powerful feeling and to give it with the utmost dramatic force—to give it theatrically even, one might admit of this particular picture; for it is by no means so favorable an example of Titian's method, or of the older methods of art in general, as is Sargent's "Hermit" of the modern way of seeing and painting. To attain this end he simplifies and arranges everything. He lowers the pitch of his coloring to a sombre glow and concentrates the little light upon his kneeling figure. He spends all his knowledge on so drawing and modelling that figure as to make you feel to the utmost its bulk and reality and the strain upon its muscles and tendons, and he so places everything else on his canvas as to intensify its action and expression. The gaze of the saint is fixed upon a crucifix high on the right of the picture, and the book behind him, the lines of the rocks, the masses of the foliage, even the general formation of the ground, are so disposed as to echo and reinforce the great diagonal. There is a splendid energy of invention in the drawing of the tree stems, but the effect is clear and simple with nothing of Sargent's dazzle and confusion. As for the lion, he is a mere necessary mark of identification, and Titian has taken no interest in him.



Now, it is evident that there is not nearly so much literal truth to the appearance of nature in this picture as in Sargent's. It is not only that it would never have occurred to Titian to try to paint the glittering spottiness of sunlight splashing through leafage, or to attempt to raise his key of light to something like that of nature, at the cost of fulness of color. It is not merely that he translates and simplifies and neglects certain truths that the world had not yet learned to see. He deliberately and intentionally falsifies. He knew as well as we do that a natural landscape would not arrange itself in such lines and masses for the purpose of throwing out the figure and of enhancing its emotion. But to him natural facts were but so much material, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of his purpose. He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great deal more interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of his time. If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, he would have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessary to give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman's means of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size and importance of the figure, and would have reduced the landscape to a barely intelligible symbol. Had he been a linealist, like Botticelli, he would have eliminated modelling almost altogether, would have concentrated his attention upon the edges of things, and would have reduced his picture to a flat pattern in which the beauty and expressiveness of the lines should be almost the only attraction.

For all art is an exchange of gain against loss—you cannot have Sargent's truth of impression and Titian's truth of emotion in the same picture, nor Michelangelo's beauty of structure with Botticelli's beauty of line. To be a successful artist is to know what you want and to get it at any necessary sacrifice, though the greatest artists maintain a noble balance and sacrifice no more than is necessary. And if a painter of to-day is like-minded with these older masters he will have to express himself much in their manner. He will have to make, with his eyes open, the sacrifices which they made, more or less unconsciously, and to deny a whole range of truths with which his fellows are occupied that he may express clearly and forcibly the few truths which he has chosen.

All truths are good, and all ways of painting are legitimate that are necessary to the expression of any truth. I am not here concerned to show that one way is better than another or one set of truths more important than another set of truths. For the present I am desirous only of showing why there is more than one way—of explaining the necessity of different methods for the expression of different individualities and different ways of envisaging nature and art. But a little while ago it was the modern or impressionistic manner that needed explanation. It was new, it was revolutionary, and it was misunderstood and disliked. A generation of critics has been busy in explaining it, a generation of artists has been busy in practising it, and now the balance has turned the other way. The pressure of conformity is upon the other side, and it is the older methods that need justification and explanation. The prejudices of the workers and the writers have gradually and naturally become the prejudices of at least a part of the public, and it has become necessary to show that the small minority of artists who still follow the old roads do so not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolid conservatism, still less from mere wilful caprice, but from necessity, because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wish to go. No more magnificent demonstration of the qualities possible to the purely modern methods of painting has been made than this brilliant little picture of Sargent's. All the more is it a demonstration of the qualities impossible to these methods. If such qualities have any permanent value and interest for the modern world it is a gain for art that some painters should try to keep alive the methods that render possible their attainment.



VI

THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

In the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this: "John Smith, American school; The Empty Jug" or what-not. In such entries little more than a bare statement of nationality is intended. John Smith is an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement is meant to convey. But the question occurs: Have we an American school in a more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certain traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other countries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French school and an English school?

Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere such distinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, in those days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, the Florentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view, their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions—each little town had a school with something characteristic that separated its painters from those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every one knows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is only broad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures are singularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell an English picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture from either. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school with some reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak of an American school? Does a room full of American pictures have a different look from a room full of pictures by artists of any other nationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have a something in common that makes them kin and a something different that distinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think the answer must be in the affirmative.

We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can no longer be said that our American painters are mere reflections of their European masters. Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been some truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific examples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of Gerome? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its technic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from the Impressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia. We have painters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have other countries—the school of Whistler is international—and, after all, Whistler was an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting and the painting of other countries are to-day no greater than the resemblances between the painting of any two of those countries. And I think the differences between American painting and that of other countries are quite as great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings of any two of those countries.

Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has been out-lived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned to paint but had nothing to say with our painting, that we produced admirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of our landscape-painting. Whatever may be the final estimation of the works of Inness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they produced pictures—things conceived and worked out to give one definite and complete impression; things in which what was presented and what was eliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things in which accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or no part. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, his work was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was a great and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely and definitely composed—a quality which at once removes from the category of mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapid productions. And our landscape-painters of to-day are equally painters of pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, too conventionally painters of pictures—too much occupied with composition and tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness of observation—while our briskest and most original observers have, many of them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshest observations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it is remarkable.

No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitely pictorial quality of American landscape-painting, but these exhibitions do less justice to the achievement of our figure-painters. The principal reason for this is that many of our most serious figure-painters have been so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldom appears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done is so scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existence and, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of the defects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, of course, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, is hardly ever "exhibited," in the ordinary sense, in the centres where it is produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almost all that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. The public of our American exhibitions knows only vaguely and by hearsay what our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that such work is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot be seen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions—people who can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections of sketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions of the Architectural League, where, alone, our mural painters can show anything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in which American figure-painting is held. Such work as was done by the late John La Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray and Simmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of the word, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch or study—the mere bit of good painting—than is the finest easel picture.

But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure-painting is being done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the name of pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unless he is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school of the seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing a number of others toward the production of thoroughly thought-out and executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-painters as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.

The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or students learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are a school producing work differing in character from that of other schools and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.

If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains for consideration: What are the characteristics of the American school of painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that has certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the schools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned. This characteristic has, undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when the madness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, when anything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effort of all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the "shackles of tradition." Here is a new people in the blessed state of having no traditions to shake off and from whom, therefore, some peppery wildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold, they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things the others have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion of thoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashion of lovely color, and the old fashion of sound and beautiful workmanship.

This conservatism of American painting, however, is not of the kind that still marks so much of the painting of England. Excepting exceptions, English painting is somewhat stolidly staying where it was. America's conservatism is ardent, determined, living. It is not standing still; it is going somewhere as rapidly as possible—it might, perhaps, be more truly called not conservatism but reaction. We have, of course, our ultramodernists, but their audacities are mild compared to those of the French or German models they imitate. We have, even more of course, the followers of the easiest way—the practitioners of current and accepted methods who are alike everywhere. But our most original and most distinguished painters, those who give the tone to our exhibitions and the national accent to our school, are almost all engaged in trying to get back one or another of the qualities that marked the great art of the past. They have gone back of the art of the day and are retying the knots that should bind together the art of all ages.

This tendency shows itself strongly even in those whose work seems, at first sight, most purely naturalistic or impressionistic. Among those of our painters who have adopted and retained the impressionist technic, with its hatching of broken colors, the two most notable are Mr. Hassam and Mr. Weir. But Mr. Hassam, at his best, is a designer with a sense of balance and of classic grace almost equal to that of Corot, and he often uses the impressionist method to express otherwise the delicate shimmer of thin foliage that Corot loved. Nay, so little is he a pure naturalist, he cannot resist letting the white sides of naked nymphs gleam among his tree trunks—he cannot refrain from the artist's immemorial dream of Arcady. As for Mr. Weir, surely nothing could be more unlike the instantaneousness of true impressionism than his long-brooded-over, subtle-toned, infinitely sensitive art.

There is little dreaminess in the work of Mr. Tarbell and the growing number of his followers. Theirs is almost a pure naturalism, a "making it like." Yet, notably in the work of Mr. Tarbell himself, and to some extent in that of the others, there is an elegance of arrangement, a thoroughness in the notation of gradations of light, a beauty and a charm that were learned of no modern. Their art is an effort to bring back the artistic quality of the most artistic naturalism ever practised, that of Vermeer of Delft.

Others of our artists are going still further back in the history of art for a part of their inspiration. Mr. Brush has always been a linealist and a student of form, but his earlier canvases, admirable as they were, were those of a docile pupil of Gerome applying the thoroughness of Gerome's method to a new range of subjects and painting the American Indian as Gerome had painted the modern Egyptian. In recent years each new picture of his has shown more clearly the influence of the early Italians—each has been more nearly a symphony of pure line.

Even in purely technical matters our painters have been experimenting backward, trying to recover lost technical beauties. The last pictures of Louis Loeb were underpainted throughout in monochrome, the final colors being applied in glazes and rubbings, and to-day a number of others, landscape and figure painters, are attempting to restore and master this, the pure Venetian method, while still others, among them Emil Carlsen, are reviving the use of tempera.

But it is in our mural painting even more than elsewhere that the conservative or reactionary tendency of American painting is most clearly marked. John La Farge was always himself, but when the general movement in mural painting began in this country with the Chicago World's Fair and the subsequent decoration of the Library of Congress, the rest of us were much under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes. Even then the design was not his, but was founded on earlier examples of decorative composition, but his pale tones were everywhere. Little by little the study of the past has taught us better. American mural painting has grown steadily more monumental in design, and at the same time it has grown richer and fuller in color. To-day, while it is not less but more personal and original than it was, it has more kinship with the noble achievements of Raphael and Veronese than has any other modern work extant.

And this brings us to the second characteristic of the American school of painting: it is rapidly becoming a school of color. We have still plenty of painters who work in the blackish or chalky or muddy and opaque tones of modern art, but I think we have more men who produce rich and powerful color and more men who produce subtle and delicate color than any other modern school. The experiments in reviving old technical methods have been undertaken for the sake of purity and luminosity of color and have largely succeeded. The pictures of Mr. Tarbell are far more colored than those of the European painter whose work is, in some ways, most analogous to his, M. Joseph Bail. Mr. Hassam's color is always sparkling and brilliant, Mr. Dewing's delicate and charming, Mr. Weir's subtle and harmonious and sometimes very full. Even Mr. Brush's linear arrangements are clothed in sombre but often richly harmonious tones, and the decorative use of powerful color is the main reliance of such painters as Hugo Ballin. But the note of color runs through the school and one hardly needs to name individual men. Whether our landscapists glaze and scumble with the tonalists, or use some modification of the impressionist hatching, it is for the sake of color; and even our most forthright and dashing wielders of the big brush often achieve a surprising power of resonant coloring.

Power, fulness, and beauty of coloring are hardly modern qualities. Much as impressionism has been praised for restoring color to a colorless art, its result has been, too often, to substitute whitishness for blackishness. Color has characterized no modern painting since that of Delacroix and Millet as it characterizes much of the best American painting. The love for and the success in color of our school is, after all, a part of its conservatism.

It may seem an odd way of praising a modern school to call it the least modern of any. It would be an odd way of praising that school if its lack of modernness were a mere matter of lagging behind or of standing still and marking time. But if the "march of progress" has been down-hill—if the path that is trod leads into a swamp or over a precipice—then there may be most hopefulness for those who can 'bout face and march the other way. I have, elsewhere in this volume, given at some length some of my reasons for thinking that modern art has been following a false route and is in danger of perishing in the bog or falling over the cliff. If it is so we may congratulate ourselves that those of our painters who are still following the rest of the world have not so nearly reached the end of the road, and that those who are more independent have discovered in time what that end is and have turned back.

It is because it is least that of to-day that I believe our art may be that of to-morrow—it is because it is, of all art now going, that which has most connection with the past that I hope the art of America may prove to be the art of the future.



VII

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS[C]

[C] Address delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on February 22, 1908. Now revised and enlarged.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of March, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. His childhood and youth were passed in the city of New York, as was a great part of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelong associations had stamped him indelibly an American. The greater part of his work was done in America; almost all of it was done for America; and I do not think it is fancy that sees in his art the expression of a distinctively American spirit. Yet from his mixed French and Irish blood he may well have derived that mingling of the Latin sense of form with a Celtic depth of sentiment which was so markedly characteristic of his genius.

His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from the little town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town of Saint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and its name. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was one of several children born to this couple and not the only artist among them, for his younger brother Louis also attained some reputation as a sculptor, though his entire lack of ambition prevented his achieving all that was expected of him by those who knew his delicate talent. The boy Augustus attended the public schools of New York and received there all the formal education he ever had; but at thirteen it was necessary for him to face the problem of earning his living. His artistic proclivities were probably already well marked, and to give them some scope, while assuring him a regular trade at which money could be earned, he was apprenticed in the good old way to a cameo cutter named Louis Avet, said to be the first man to cut stone cameos in the United States. Thus it came about that the greatest of American sculptors had much such a practical apprenticeship as a Florentine of the fifteenth century might have had. He himself always spoke of it as "one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him" and attributed much of his success to the habit of faithful labor acquired at this time. Probably, also, the habit of thinking in terms of relief, fostered by years of work at this ancient art, was not without influence in the moulding of his talent.

His relations with Avet lasted from 1861 to 1864, when his master quarrelled with him and abruptly dismissed him from his shop. The boy was already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered an injustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce them to send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for him in the person of a shell-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and with him Saint-Gaudens remained three years. During his six years' apprenticeship under his two masters the youth showed already that energy and power of will that made him what he was. He meant to be something more than an artisan, and he spent his evenings in the classes, first of the Cooper Union, afterward of the National Academy of Design, in the hard study of drawing, the true foundation of all the fine arts. It was one of the elements of his superiority in his profession that he could draw as few sculptors can, and he always felt that he owed an especial debt to the Cooper Union, which he was glad to repay when he modelled the statue of its venerable founder. Of the other institution by whose freely given instruction he had profited, the National Academy of Design, he became one of the most honored members. By 1867, when he was nineteen years old, he had saved a little money and was master of a trade that could be relied on to bring in more, and he determined to go to Paris and begin the serious study of sculpture. He worked, for a time, at the Petite Ecole, and entered the studio of Jouffroy in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1868, remaining until 1870. During this time, and afterward, he was self-supporting, working half his time at cameo cutting until his efforts at sculpture on a larger scale began to bring in an income.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place for the carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went to Rome, where his associates were the French prizemen of the day, of whom Mercie was one. He remained there until 1874, except for a visit to New York in the winter of 1872-3 for the purpose of modelling a bust of Senator Evarts, and one or two other busts, which were put into marble upon his return to Rome. In those Roman days he executed his first statue, a "Hiawatha," one of his few studies of the nude, and a "Silence," a not very characteristic draped figure which yet fills with some impressiveness her niche at the head of the grand stairway of the Masonic Temple on Twenty-fourth Street.

From 1875 to 1877 he had a studio in New York, where he seems to have executed some of his earliest portrait reliefs. During these years he came into contact with La Farge, for whom he turned painter and aided in the execution of the decorations of Trinity Church in Boston. It was at this time, also, that he received his first commissions for important public work, those for the Farragut statue in Madison Square, the Randall at Sailors' Snug Harbor, and the angels for Saint Thomas's Church. He had married Augusta F. Homer in 1877, and in that year, taking his bride and his commissions with him, he returned to Paris, feeling, as many another young Paris-bred artist has felt, that there only could such important works be properly carried out. The "Farragut" was completed and exhibited in the plaster at the Salon of 1880, and from that time his success was assured. For the rest of his life he was constantly busy, receiving almost more commissions for work of importance than it was possible for him to carry out. He returned to New York in 1880, and in 1881 he opened the studio in Thirty-sixth Street, where he remained for sixteen years and where so many of his greatest works were executed. From that studio came many of his exquisite portraits in relief, his caryatids and angelic figures, such as those for the Morgan tomb, so unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1882 (a fate since shared by the earlier angels of Saint Thomas's), the great statues of Lincoln and Chapin, the "Shaw Memorial," and the "Adams Memorial"; and in it was done all the preliminary work of the great equestrian monument to General Sherman.

It is in these years of his prime that he will ever be most fondly remembered by those—and they are many—who had the privilege of his friendship. Admittedly our foremost sculptor, and one of the founders of the Society of American Artists, he became at once a person of importance in the world of art; and as his brilliant career developed he established intimate relationships with an ever-widening circle of men in every walk of life, while no one who ever knew him well can have felt anything but an abiding affection for him. That long, white studio became a familiar meeting-place for all who were interested in any form of art; and the Sunday afternoon concerts that were held there for many years will be looked back to with regret as long as any of their auditors remain alive.

This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his residence in New York. In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish, N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt., and when he returned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an ill man, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode. He named it Aspet, after his father's birthplace, and there he erected two studios and finished his Sherman statue. In these studios were executed the second "Lincoln," the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much other work. The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lost work re-begun and carried to a conclusion. What can never be quite replaced were two portraits of himself. A study, of the head only, in the collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H. Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits of him done from life in his best years. The Metropolitan Museum possesses a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica, painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.

From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never recovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when his own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strength grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted assistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinary extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have been involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 he broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he ceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat from this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing the work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried from the house to the studio. The end came on the evening of August 3, 1907. He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure and lofty character. As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across the river from his home. An informal funeral service was held in his private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.

The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his lifetime. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies, and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But of all the honors he received there were two, one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued most highly: the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal affection felt for him by his friends. At the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts, composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a special diploma and medal of honor, "apart from and above all other awards," an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of the greatest sculptors of his time. On June 23, 1905, the artistic and literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fete and open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet. The beauty of this spectacle has become almost legendary. The altar with its columned canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl. 23) which is among the most charming of his minor works. He planned if he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a fitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he loved as his chosen home.

Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who ever came in contact with him—to any one, even, who ever saw his portrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man. That extraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small but piercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jaw and great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power—with power of intellect no less than of will. His lack of early education gave him a certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression. He was apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate himself in the comparison—indeed, a certain humility was strongly marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident also. When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing of talkers.



Underneath his humor and his gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven upon the "Sherman," and, though he did much other work while these were in progress, yet it was his constant revision, his ever-renewed striving for perfection that kept them so long achieving. The "Diana" of the Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely remodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and sympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will when the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing to him to inflict pain on any one. The conflict of these elements in his nature sometimes made his actions seem inconsistent and indecipherable even to those who knew him. He would be long-suffering, compromising, disinclined to strike; but when he was at last roused the blow would be as staggering as it was unexpected. It was as if he struck the harder to have done with it and to spare himself the pain of striking again.

It was his whole-hearted devotion to his art which caused his rare acts of self-assertion, and it was this same devotion, no less than his natural kindliness, that made him ever helpful to younger artists who showed any promise of future worth. Even in his last days of unspeakable suffering he would summon what was left of his old strength to give a word of criticism and advice, above all, a word of commendation, to any one who needed the one or had earned the other. The essential goodness of the man was most felt by those who stood nearest him, and most of all, perhaps, by his actual coworkers. He could command, as few have been able to do, the love and devotion of his assistants. To all who knew him the man himself seemed finer, rarer, sweeter than his work, and the gap he has left in their lives will be even more impossible to fill than his place in American art.

But the personality of an artist, though he be a great one, is for the memory of his private friends. It is only as it colors his art that it is of public interest. It is his art itself, his gift to the world, that the world cares for; it is of the kind and quality of that art, the nature and the degree of its greatness, that the world wishes to hear. Because the man was my friend I have wished to give some glimpse of the manner of man he was; because the artist was the greatest our country has produced I am to try to give some idea of his art, of the elements of its strength, and of the limitations which are as necessary as its qualities.

The time of Saint-Gaudens's study in Paris was a time of great importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France. The essential thing in this movement was the abandoning of the formal imitation of second-rate antiques and the substitution of the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance as a source of inspiration and of the direct study of nature as a means of self-expression. There had always been individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the pseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris. Many of the men destined to a brilliant part in the history of modern sculpture were trained in the atelier of Jouffroy. Falguiere and Saint-Marceau had but just left that studio when the young American entered it, and Mercie was his fellow student there. Dalou and Rodin have since made these men seem old-fashioned and academic, but they were then, and for many years afterward, the heads of the new school; and of this new school, so different from anything he had known in America, Saint-Gaudens inevitably became a part. His own pronounced individuality, and perhaps his comparative isolation during the years of his greatest productivity, gave his art a character of its own, unlike any other, but to the French school of sculpture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century he essentially belonged.

Of course, his style was not formed in a moment. His "Hiawatha" seems, to-day, much such a piece of neo-classicism as was being produced by other men in the Rome of that time, and the "Silence," though somewhat more modern in accent, is an academic work such as might have been expected from a docile pupil of his master. The relief of angels for the reredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work which shows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with John La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character. It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without study from nature—a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal, the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the "Amor-Caritas." In each of these developments the work becomes less picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of decorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in the caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo—works of his last days, when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility of style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.

The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not, primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism is justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or not. It is, after all, only a matter of definition, and if we were forbidden to call his work sculpture at all and required to find another name for it, the important fact that it is art—art of the finest, the most exquisite, at times the most powerful—would in no wise be altered. Ghiberti went beyond the traditions of sculpture in relief, introduced perspective into his compositions, modelled trees and rocks and clouds and cast them in bronze, made pictures, if you like, instead of reliefs. Does any one care? Is it not enough that they are beautiful pictures? The gates of the Baptistry of Florence are still worthy, as the greatest sculptor since the Greeks thought them, to be the gates of paradise. A work of art remains a work of art, call it what you please, and a thing of beauty will be a joy forever, whether or not you can pigeonhole it in some ready-made category. After all, the critical pigeonholes are made for the things, not the things for the pigeonholes. The work is there, and if it does not fit your preconceived definition the fault is as likely to be in the definition as in the work itself.

And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest—free in an extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and technical brilliancy on the other. Never more than in our own day have these been the great temptations of an able artist: that he should in the absorption of study forget the end in the means and produce demonstrations of anatomy or of the laws of light rather than statues or pictures; or that he should, in the joy of exercising great talents, seem to say, "See how well I can do it!" and invent difficulties for the sake of triumphantly resolving them, becoming a virtuoso rather than a creator. Of the meaner temptation of mere sensationalism—the desire to attract attention by ugliness and eccentricity lest one should be unable to secure it by truth and beauty—one need not speak. It is the temptation of vulgar souls. But great and true artists have yielded, occasionally or habitually, to these other two; Saint-Gaudens never does. I know no work of his to which raw nature has been admitted, in which a piece of study has been allowed to remain as such without the moulding touch of art to subdue it to its place; and I know only one which has any spice of bravura—the Logan statue—and the bravura is there because the subject seemed to demand it, not because the artist wished it. The dash and glitter are those of "Black Jack Logan," not of Saint-Gaudens. The sculptor strove to render them as he strove to render higher qualities at other times, but they remain antipathetic to his nature, and the statue is one of the least satisfactory of his works. He is essentially the artist—the artificer of beauty—ever bent on the making of a lovely and significant thing; and the study of nature and the resources of his craft are but tools and are never allowed to become anything more.

If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation is well founded. Such marvels of rendering as Rodin could give us, before he lost himself in the effort to deserve that reputation as a profound thinker which has been thrust upon him, were not for Saint-Gaudens. The modelling of the morceau was not particularly his affair. The discrimination of hard and soft, of bone and muscle and integument, the expression of tension where a fleshy tissue is tightly drawn over the framework beneath, or of weight where it falls away from it—these were not the things that most compelled his interest or in which he was most successful. For the human figure as a figure, for the inherent beauty of its marvellous mechanism, he did not greatly care. The problems of bulk and mass and weight and movement which have occupied sculptors from the beginning were not especially his problems. It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that, after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the "Diana" of the tower—a purely decorative figure, designed for distant effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place because invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figures as the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure—of one of those artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure is all in all—drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the figure.



First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer, and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove for—the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending, persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his principal preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole, its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces, its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly charming in their arrangement—things which are so dependent on design for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and last—design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two—design properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space—but still design. This power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer, constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement while an experiment remains untried—this is what cost him years of labor. His first important statue, the "Farragut," is a masterpiece of restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design—a design, too, that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. In later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper feeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of composition as is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue of Sherman.

Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities: knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct—I mean that much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with actual form—a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of an object, it is the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to it—which must be added to it to make it art—it is the reproduction in another material of the actual forms of things. Something which shall answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It is the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most delicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is need in the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds. The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it deals only in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspect of objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, and its means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on the study of perspective and on the study of the way light falls upon objects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces by the varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in the round need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them, unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statue need not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form the foreshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in a disastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade, although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely upon it, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily have the true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture and drawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture—is really a kind of drawing—and this is why so few sculptors succeed in it.

It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind—the most delicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. As to the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any other material. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree and the same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. But for all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interior forms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmost subtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but the shadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface—they are produced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planes away from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle and tender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, and therefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of a sculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmanship. But as the light and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlike the true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can never imitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature. His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents—an art which can give neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth of aspect—an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. And success in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor's artistry—of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment of his material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact.

As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed, the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.

This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since the fifteenth century.

He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away, like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl. 25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"—a mastery which shows, in the result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it cost—is unsurpassed—I had almost said unequalled—in any work of any epoch.



Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this or that particular work in this long series. It can show no more than the composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship, the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of mystery and of suggestion—an art having affinities with that of painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the ancients understood it, the art of form per se, demands the nude figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness. A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing—no other who could have made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.