BORN in Urbana, Ohio, in 1830, Ward is still an active force among American sculptors. His career connects the past with the present, spanning the long interval like a bridge: one pier, embedded in the old condition of things when American sculptors first began to make America the scene and inspiration of their art, its arch mounting above the indifference to, and ignorance of, things artistic which prevailed before the influence of European art began to be felt here, and its other pier firmly incorporated into the new order. And there is additional fitness in the simile, for Ward’s career has presented the logical reasonableness of an architectural structure; built up of character, stout as granite, shaped by experience and tempered by local necessities; a structure modified by practical as well as by esthetic considerations, which has been invaluable in its day and embodies some features of permanent worth among others that time has superseded. For the architect of his own life cannot proceed like the builder of a material bridge—establish simultaneously his hither and nether pier, and then by ingenious underpinning support the weight of the arch until he reaches the keystone, which finally locks all into a compact whole. He can but start with good, firm basis of intention, hew the stones as faithfully as he knows and set them in cement of honest endeavour, lifting his arch by personal force, while the force of gravity, acting outside himself, gradually determines the direction of its curve. He will be shrewder than most if he guesses when he has reached the keystone—generally will only discern it after long years by looking back; and when he gains the farther bank of the stream and once more has the firm ground beneath his feet, if he turns round to view the work he will be conscious of parts which disturb the symmetry of the whole: here a bit of inferior craftsmanship which his later knowledge detects, there some result of untoward circumstances. He is happy if his life presents a constancy of purpose and has been of service to his fellows.

Such happiness may fairly be enjoyed by Ward. His share in establishing the National Sculpture Society, of which he has been president since its foundation, would alone entitle him to the permanent consideration of his colleagues, while to the sum total of American sculpture he has made some very notable contributions. That his work includes examples which fall short in artistic conception and in technical skill, is undeniable. They are the result partly of the circumstances of his development and partly of his own determined, straightforward character; a combination of meager artistic experiences at the start and of a predisposition to the objective point of view.

One imagines that he has always been powerfully attracted to the facts of things: the facts of American life and the facts of the subjects which he has portrayed in his art. If there was any fiber of transcendentalism in his mind—and few of us are altogether without some vision of what is beyond the bounds of actual experience—it took the form of speculating upon the future of American civilisation, which facts have subsequently indorsed, or, if it entered into his feeling toward his subject, made him realise something of the spirit embedded in the fact, as in his early statue representing the Negro breaking loose his fetters. But the various theories concerning art which study in Paris might have taught him, and which in a measure are the shibboleth of people whose faith in facts has dwindled, and, unless reallied to actual facts, are but “vacant chaff well meant for grain,” he had no means of learning in his youth, and throughout his manhood, I suspect, has had little patience with. Still at the bottom of all theories is the principle that it is not in the subject but in the manner of presenting it that a work of art is proclaimed; that technique and motive should be indissolubly wedded—to their mutual perfection if each is choice, and, if either is inferior, to a mutual loss. This was not recognised in America in Ward’s youth, nor until much later; and none of his work, it is probably true to say, reveals that particular kind of craftsmanlike facility which distinguishes the work of the sculptor who has been trained abroad, and by the side of this more accomplished modelling Ward’s statues often appear crude. But if they lack the stylistic quality, the best of them have a force which more than compensates. It results from a strong feeling for design, the general accumulative effect of the whole composition, which itself results from a strong antecedent feeling for form. The latter seems to characterise all self-taught students, whether sculptors or painters; and, although, as their experience broadens, there may be increased subtlety of expression, the primary characteristic of their work will continue to be a very strong sense and enjoyment of the structural facts of the figure or landscape, and most frequently in their simplest and directest manifestations. And in the case of sculpture this is an especially valuable gift of vision, since the most sculptural quality in sculpture is unquestionably that of form: its solidity, stability and natural grace or dignity of movement. It is precisely in these particulars that some of our foreign-taught sculptors, while easily excelling Ward in refinements of detail, fall short of him.

As a boy he had been devoted to fashioning with his fingers, and, at the age of nineteen, entered the studio of Henry Kirke Brown. The latter, after practising as a sculptor at Albany, had spent some five years in Europe, chiefly in Italy; but, feeling strongly that an American should occupy himself with American subjects, and to that end should work in his own country, resisted the tendency among sculptors of that day to join the American colony in Rome or Florence. He therefore returned and engaged upon the equestrian statue of Washington, now in Union Square, New York. Ward assisted him in the work and gained thereby a fine experience of what makes for nobility in design. He must have profited also by companionship with a man of such large and generous mind. But his stay in the studio was short, and for the rest he has been the architect of his own career.

A fragment remains of his student work, a study for a high-relief in which an Indian is represented breaking and burning his arrows—an episode of the voyage of Hendrik Hudson. One cannot help noticing the naÏvetÉ of the composition, the simple intention of representing the action just as it might have happened; the apparent unconsciousness that any academic considerations were involved. It, no doubt, represents the attitude of his mind at that time, and to a very considerable extent prefigures the lines along which his development was to proceed. Thus a year or two later, while he was working in Washington and executing busts of many leading men of the time, and the whole country began to seethe with passion over the slave question, Ward’s contribution to it is “The Freedman.” It shows simply a Negro, in an entirely natural pose, who has put forth his strength and is looking very quietly at the broken fetters. The whole gist of the matter is thus embodied in a most terse and direct fashion, without rodomontade or sentimentality, but solely as an objective fact into which there is no intrusion of the sculptor’s personal feeling. But of his personal point of view toward his art there is abundant testimony. This figure, which was never reproduced larger than statuette size, but in that form had a wide popularity, proves how keen and true was Ward’s instinct for the sculpturesque qualities of sculpture and for the limit to which it is safe to go in the interpretation of sentiment. The latter is simply enforced by the action of the figure.

In order that he might have opportunities of studying form in the freedom of movement, he visited the western frontier and lived for a while among the Indians. A statue of this period is “The Indian Hunter,” which now stands in bronze in Central Park, New York. Again it is a strikingly vivid realisation of actual facts; of the racial characteristics of both the man and his dog, and of their respective kinds of movement: the man’s, stealthy and powerfully controlled; the dog’s, more keen and alert and needing to be checked. Again, too, one feels, I think, the absence of any preconceived theories of technique, so that the group has something of a primitive, almost barbarous feeling; which, however, seems strangely appropriate to the subject.

Yet it is easy to understand that for a young sculptor, so resolutely facing natural facts and untrained in academic teaching of what is right and what is wrong, a table of doctrines which may easily lead to dry formalism, but which yet holds many directions and warnings of value, there will be shoals ahead. The actual may readily drift into the commonplace; and that some of Ward’s portrait-statues should be of small account was to be expected from the circumstances of his self-wrought development and peculiar personal point of view. They were the stepping-stones by which he gradually rose to higher things. For the thing to be noticed is that he eventually reached the power that is exhibited in such works as the “Greeley,” “Washington,” “Lafayette,” “General Thomas,” and in that masterpiece, the “Beecher” statue, by following with undeviating persistence the promptings of his youth; only that with matured experience came a clearer discrimination of the salient facts, and a deeper understanding of what they truly signified. In a word, he reached beyond the fact to its significance.

It may be mainly the significance of clothes, as in that remarkable statue of “Lafayette” at Burlington, Vermont, in which he represents the hero of two revolutions as a middle-aged dandy. I cannot say whether he saw behind Lafayette’s support of liberty, as Carlyle did, but at any rate the figure has simply the easy dignity of a well-bred man, whose embonpoint has modified but

not effaced his debonair demeanour and whose clothes set gracefully to his person. Yet the person is unmistakably enforced. The man is not lost in the millinery, as one may have noticed in some costume statues; and it is in this respect that Ward has shown his true appreciation of the significance of clothes. They not only envelop the figure as naturally as a skin, and with no hindrance to the imagining of the body inside them, but they adapt themselves completely to the character of the man as shown in the pose of the body and expression of the head. They have been reduced, in fact, to an abstraction corresponding to the sculptor’s conception of the man.

In the “Washington” statue, which stands upon the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building in Wall Street, the sculptor had the advantage of a picturesque costume, and he has treated it with the same masterful ease. Yet on this occasion our attention is not divided between the significance of the clothes and that of the figure. The latter represents Washington in the ceremony of taking the oath of office in 1789, an event which happened near the spot now occupied by the statue. The pose is entirely free from heroics: that of a noble, true-hearted gentleman, conscious of the dignity and responsibility of the occasion. One could have wished that the legs were planted more squarely on the ground, as it would have increased the statuesque assertiveness of the figure; but it is quite possible that the sculptor intentionally avoided this, in the desire to suggest that it was at the call of duty and not of personal ambition that Washington accepted office. So he has taken the weight off the right foot and advanced it slightly, thus giving a pliant, curving motion to the body, and with it a touch of hesitancy to the pose. Backed by the classic faÇade of the Sub-Treasury Building the statue is very happily placed, and amid the turmoil of the neighbourhood strikes a note which is refreshingly true and noble.

No less turmoil surrounds the Greeley monument in Newspaper Row and, outwardly at any rate, of a less savoury character. Moreover, its pedestal abuts upon a narrow sidewalk, and the figure, seated in an armchair, has the unhelpful background of a large plate-glass window. It is itself, too, of shambling build, uncouthly costumed, the large, round face, oddly fringed with a rim of whiskers. The legs are wide apart; one arm rests on the back of the chair, the other lies upon the thigh, its hand holding a sheet of paper; the round shoulders droop forward, and the head is inclined so as to bring into view the flat, dome-like skull. Yes, the whole composition is the very reverse of what we usually understand by statuesque, and thousands pass and repass it daily without any recognition, so occupied are they in threading their way through the swarm of loud-lunged sellers of chronic “specials.” Yet if you will step back into the roadway, at the risk of being demolished by trolley-cars or wagons full of mile-long rolls of paper, you cannot fail to be impressed by the very strangeness of the figure. How full of character it is! Sitting back almost in a heap, pondering some point, the figure yet suggests that it is about to rise and put its resolve into action, so remarkable is the mixture of downrightedness and alacrity. It is indeed a representation of character truly original and of a convincing force, that bears the stamp of genius. Let us place it in our respect alongside of Saint-Gaudens’s “Peter Cooper,” as equally a triumph of art over uncompromising material, and, indeed, along similar lines of unflinching acceptance of the actual facts of the problem, and of broad, ample sympathy with nobility, though it does not lie upon the surface.

For the convenience of analysing Ward’s methods I have ventured to regard these three statues as examples of the significance, respectively, of clothes, form and character. Not quite accurately, I admit, because the three motives unite in all in various proportions; but perhaps I am right in feeling a preponderance of the one in each. However that may be, we shall find a completely balanced union of all three in the Beecher monument. The sculptor had particularly in mind the episode of Henry Ward Beecher’s visit to England in 1863, on a special mission from President Lincoln, for the purpose of bringing to English public notice the true position of the North. He was met by noisy opposition, but bore it down by indomitable endurance and intellectual force. In the strongly marked, mobile features; in the intellectuality of the head, carried so resolutely above the broad chest; in the striking simplicity of the quiet, stalwart pose, no less than in the absence of all rhetorical gesture in the arms, which are suspended at the sides; even to such a detail as the right hand, not clenched aggressively or held in indecision, but with the fingers drawn up to the thumb, a gesture that mingles alertness with poise, the figure expresses character, rocklike will and mental preËminence. The Inverness cape serves to give increased weight and breadth to the form; one arm being restrained within its folds, the other free for a fling of action if the occasion require it. The figure bears down upon its pedestal, column-like, monumental in the highest degree. It is a portrait-statue of most extraordinary impressiveness.

The equestrian statue of General Thomas at Washington, District of Columbia, is a spirited and arresting composition. The rider presents a portrait study of considerable power, but the sculptor in his zeal for the actual has seized upon the fact that Thomas was not a practised horseman. He does not move in his seat with the motion of the horse, his bridle-hand lacks control, and the action of the horse’s head proclaims it. One may enjoy a detail so minute as that of the hand in the Beecher statue, because it is contributory to the total effect, and equally regret this insistence upon a personal peculiarity of the General, since the total effect is thereby diminished. Such a detail is local and insignificant, only to be appreciated by a few of his comrades; but the statue will endure and be judged for what it presents; a general and his horse—do they move as one? is the personal supremacy of the rider maintained?

The pedestal of the “Beecher” is embellished with figures. On one side a woman and on the other a little girl is depositing a wreath, and a boy is steadying the latter figure. They are well modelled in natural and graceful movement, but they impart a touch of sentimentality, so alien to Ward’s habit and, indeed, to the spirit of the statue, that I wonder whether they were not a concession to the wish of the subscribers. Figures again adorn the pedestal of the Garfield monument in Washington, and among them is to be found a most successful treatment of the nude. “The Student” is an admirable example of Ward’s knowledge of form and of his discretion in rendering it. His ability as a decorative sculptor was shown in the group of “Sea-horses and Victory” which crowned the temporary Naval Arch in 1899, though executed many years before. Equally pronounced were the joyous elevation of the forms against the sky and the harmonious unity of the whole as a mass. It proved that Ward’s management of composition was as thorough in a complicated group as in a single figure. He is now engaged upon the pediment for the recently erected Stock Exchange Building in New York. As I have seen only the model—and that has been subjected to various modifications—it would be premature to discuss it. But it bids fair to be a most memorable work, fitly crowning by its magnitude and importance a long and honourable career.