Sculpture

Through Jefferson 's hands, our American sculpture first received those rich streams of influence, realism and idealism, both so necessary in any living national art. For realism and idealism, however often misnamed or overpraised or discredited, each after the other, will continue to shape the artist's interpretation of his vision of life. Today, when in our literature books as fundamentally unlike as Maria Chapdelaine and Babbitt run their race side by side as popular favorites, we cannot doubt the hold of either classicism or naturalism on our lives and times.

Sculpture, though an art manifestly answering one of the earliest religious needs of primitive man, (and indeed the very first of all the arts to fall under the ban of the censor) is an art much hindered and abridged during large pioneer movements. Thus the Mayflower, that greatly accommodating vessel, may have brought over Elder Brewster's chest or some fair Priscilla's spinning-wheel, but we may be sure that never a statue came out of her hold. Neither architecture nor painting suffered quite as much as sculpture in that historic sea-change of the early seventeenth century. As the turtle carries his house on his back, so the architect, in a sense, may carry his home in his pocket. The drawings and inherited traditions of cabinetmakers, carpenters, and architects supplied our colonists with excellent models for furniture, for mansions, for churches, for state-houses. Such models were not slavishly followed. They were adapted, often with great originality and skill, sometimes with creative genius.

The colonists' sense of form gratified itself in these directions, since the time was not ripe for sculpture. Diligent in fostering both foreign importations and local industry, the more prosperous of our forefathers had good houses, good furniture, good silver, good clothes, and even good paintings long before they had any good sculpture. Statues, unlike chocolatepots and meeting-houses, cannot, even when all materials are given, be magically called into existence from a sheaf of plans and specifications placed in the hands of competent artisans. A considerable body of sculpture in permanent form implies a background of orderly civilization, well developed on its industrial side. The marble quarry and the bronze foundry do not spring up over-night in mushroom growth. They are the foster-children of slow time. We are called an inventive, craftsmanlike people, but it was not until the year 1847 that the first casting of a bronze statue was accomplished in our country.

Yes, the main impediment in early American art was spiritual rather than material. When we see to-day in some lonely, half-forgotten New England village a spacious, noblydesigned, admirably-built meetinghouse, capping the very crest of a high rock-ribbed hill of exceeding difficulty, (the church at Acworth will serve as an example) we uncover our heads before the efforts of our fathers to erect a house of prayer. The spirit moved them. Nothing less would have sufficed in what they (lid and suffered. The obstacles in their path were many and great, but being material, were surmounted. In our early strivings toward sculpture, the obstacles were both spiritual and material, and generally speaking, the obstacles won the day.