IN these days when we are trying to raise “artists,” as we do chickens, by a process akin to incubation, we regard it as an anomaly if one emerges to eminence from surroundings which, according to our system, do not seem congenial. And people have expressed surprise that Warner, the child of a New England Methodist minister, brought up in a community which had no artistic inclinations, should have made up his mind to become a sculptor before he had ever seen a statue. But the history of art is full of such surprises; and the thoughts of youth are ever like the wind, “which bloweth where it listeth; thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” The greater and more beautiful surprise is that the boy had foundation of character on which to nourish the flowers of his imagination, and that when in after years they were matured, it was found that he had kept them so choicely select, that their fragrance was not unlike that of the flowers which in old time bloomed on the hills of Hellas. Something of the old Greek spirit had been revived in this son of Connecticut: intellectual stability, moral balance and spiritual serenity. Presently we shall consider how these qualities became translated into terms of art in his work—into a feeling for form, monumental rather than picturesque, a rhythmical and harmonious reserve, a peculiar sensitiveness to the significance of the essential facts in the design—but at the moment let us note how they affected his early conduct.

By the time that he left school at the age of nineteen, the desire of being a sculptor had so grown upon him as to press for a decision. Accordingly he arranged for himself a test. He would attempt a bust of his father, and thus determine once and for all the “to be or not to be” of his ambition. So, in ignorance of the easier way by which sculptors proceed, he bought some plaster of Paris, converted it into a block, and set to work with a knife. His only notion of art was to produce a good likeness, and in this he succeeded. The bust was exhibited and commended at the State Fair, and Warner felt that his cherished wish was justified. But the deliberation which had characterised the choice of a profession was followed by an equal seriousness in determining the means of attaining it. He could not have known that sculpture in America at that time was in a poor way; he had, in fact, no acquaintance even with the mediocre kinds of statue; but the old-fashioned, New England conscience within him viewed the matter very earnestly. Already he felt a reverence for the work to which he was to devote his life, and that the best of preparations must be made. He would seek it in Paris. But he had no funds nor could his father spare them, so he quietly laid aside his longings and proceeded to earn the necessary money. Mastering the trade of telegraph operator, he pursued it for six years, not, as may be supposed, without some ultimate benefit to the facility and delicacy of his manipulation. At length, with his savings of $1,500 he started for Paris. This was in 1869, when he was twenty-five years of age.

Arriving in the great city without introduction, friends or knowledge of the language, he made his way to the Louvre. Here were students busy copying; fellows such as he meant to be, and he was drawn toward them, wandering from easel to easel, until upon the woodwork of one he espied a name, “Arthur Wilson.” He ventured to address the owner and tell him of his quest, and was directed to a studio occupied by two young sculptors, an American and an Englishman. With them he studied for nine months, until, through the influence of United States Minister Washburne, he was admitted to the École des Beaux Arts. Here he worked in the studio of FranÇois Jouffroy, where he had the benefit of associating with such artists as FalguiÈre, an older pupil of the master, and with FalguiÈre’s pupil, MerciÉ, a man of his own age. Both of these artists had broken away from the master’s severely academic style and were tempering their own with the life and movement of the new naturalistic tendencies. Warner also in modelling from nature incurred the old master’s strictures, because his sturdy individualism refused to lend itself to conventional methods; but, on the other hand, his studies from the antique were commended. In time, however, his funds were exhausted, and, having to find employment, he entered as an ordinary workman the studio of Carpeaux, the strongest decorative sculptor in France since Rude, whose pupil he had been. Warner’s ability was recognised by the master, and he received the great compliment of an invitation to remain and study in the studio. But he declined, being eager by this time to return home.

The years of studentship had been diversified by the thrilling events of the Siege of Paris and the Commune. Warner in his own country had experienced the war-fever, and, eager to join the Army of the Republic as a drummer-boy, had been dissuaded by his father, who during the stormy days of the Civil War carried him off to a quiet spot among the Vermont hills, that he might continue his studies. So, when the empire fell and a republic was established, he regarded the action of the Germans in continuing the war as an attack upon liberty, and enlisted with many of his comrades in the Foreign Legion. But his duties were confined to mounting guard upon the fortifications.

When, in 1872, Warner returned to New York it was to suffer the hard experience of disillusionment. In Paris he had found art occupying a prominent position in the public and private life of the community, artists honoured and encouraged by the State and his own ability acknowledged by some of the masters of his craft. He returned to his native country to find a prevailing ignorance concerning art; to find the trained artist competing for jobs with the commercial stonecutter and metal-worker, the competitions decided more by political favoritism and wire-pulling than by artistic merit; to find, indeed, that he was transplanting the delicate growth of his ideals from a congenial soil to what was, artistically speaking, very much of an arid and howling wilderness. These words are scarcely too strong to express the conditions of the field of art in this country more than a quarter of a century ago, before the Centennial Exhibition had sounded the tocsin of an improved taste; before the students of art had begun to return in numbers from the foreign schools, and schools of art in this country had been put upon a better basis; before the importation of all sorts of works of art from Europe and the East, and the travel of our own people abroad had become so extensive; before the spread of interest and knowledge which all these causes operated to produce. Even now the slime of politics is very apt to foul the fair working of competitions, and it is often difficult for a sculptor, unless he is at the very top of his profession, to secure a public commission without some degree of wire-pulling. But in 1872, when the factories kept on hand a stock of military statues, complete in every particular except the number of the regiment—which was riveted on to suit the requirements of the intending purchasing committee—the outlook for an unknown artist with high ideals, clean of purpose, who reverenced his profession as his life, was dark indeed. Warner held hunger and despair at arm’s length for four years, and

then decided that he had better return to his trade of telegraph operator.

So he wrote to Mr. Plant, the president of the Southern Express Company, with whom he had previously been employed, asking for a position. This gentleman, however, learning the circumstances of the case, met them with a commission for a portrait-bust of himself, followed by one of Mrs. Plant. About this time, too, Warner made the acquaintance of Mr. Daniel Cottier, who had recently opened a gallery for the display of the objects of art which he was importing, and now invited the sculptor to make an exhibition of his works. This proved to be the turning-point of his affairs; commissions began to come in with increasing frequency, until he was fully engaged upon a number of important works. He was elected a full member of the National Academy, and was one of the original group of painters and sculptors who founded the Society of American Artists.

In the too short period left to him before his sudden death in 1896, which resulted from a bicycle accident in Central Park, New York, he produced a variety of works of high merit. They comprise portrait-busts, among the best of which are those of Daniel Cottier, Alden Weir, W. C. Brownell and Miss Maud Morgan; three heroic statues, representing, respectively: Governor Buckingham of Connecticut, William Lloyd Garrison and General Devens; fountains for Union Square, New York, and for Portland, Oregon; many medallion portraits, including some of Indian Chiefs; ideal subjects, “Twilight,” “The Dancing Nymph” and “Diana”; an alto-relievo of “Cupid and Psyche” and one of the sets of bronze doors for the Library of Congress at Washington. In all these works, covering so wide a range of motive, there is present a union of monumental feeling with extreme sensitiveness, which gives them in a marked degree the sculpturesque character and invests them with a singular individuality.

I shall never forget the impression made on me by a memorial exhibition, held in 1897, of a considerable number of his busts and medallions and of the “Psyche.” It may sound a little incongruous, but they suggested the impression that a highly bred, finely trained race-horse makes upon the imagination; an intensity of force and suppleness, nothing superfluous, everything expressive of its function, the whole an embodiment of keen vitality, of power and grace. There was a similarly high-bred feeling in these heads, the sign-manual of an unusually keen perception of facts and of a most refined sensibility in the rendering of them. I doubt if anywhere in modern art, except in that of Rodin, will you find busts of such vital power. They exhibit the same regard for the structural significance of the head; something more than the suggestion of form and bulk—a rich, strong, jubilant recognition of these facts as the ones of peculiar interest to the sculptor, offering him the opportunity of indulging his especial delight. They exhibit also, as do Rodin’s, the same delicately precise handling of details: like the obligato which a musician composes upon his basic theme, yet with a different range of motive. Warner’s work does not reveal the psychological analysis of Rodin’s; the penetrating, almost troublous intensity of his bust of Dalou, for example. He is scarcely less keen or subtle in his analysis than the French master, but studies the ripple of flesh above the muscles, the tremor or fold of an eyelid, the curves of nose or mouth, the disposition of the hair, with a pure delight in their expressional force or grace. He views the head as a type rather than as an individuality, and seeks to extract from it the essence of its character. It is in this respect, among others, that he shows himself to be imbued with the kind of spirit that animated the Greeks. As compared with Rodin, whose vision grasps the complexities of modern emotion and the underlying sadness of an age that has come late in time and whose energy is enclosed in a frail web of nerves, Warner is a child-man, with a man’s reserve and poise, and a child’s unsophisticated eagerness of eye and its pure delight in beauty and the joy of living.

And this strain of the Greek temperament in sculpture is a very different thing from the motive of the so-called “classic” school. The latter drew its primary inspiration from Roman sculpture, in a search for something supposedly heroic, that would fit the genius of the new republicanism which had arisen out of the chaos of the Revolution. It was at first grandiloquent, but, growing senile, fell to babbling of the abstract beauty of line and form, always without direct reference to nature and gradually with the increased formalism that grew from the perpetuation of certain arbitrary rules and precedents. Such “classic” statues, when they are the work of a master, have their beauty, but it is inert, without the thrill of life; when the work of a mere practitioner, they are unspeakably jejune and paltry. Both kinds are alike in their divorce from nature-study, from the inspiration which it gives to an intimate appreciation of line and form. They will not show the fluidity of line, the delicate surprises of curve, the infinite subtleties of modelling that invite caress, the texture and quality of flesh, nor the mingling of firm and supple in the form, the pliant movement adjusted to the action of the figure—in a word, the stir of life within the material. Warner gives us this sensation and with so choice an instinct for the exact point at which the naturalism should melt into plastic immobility, with a love so keen and unalloyed for the manifestations of nature and in a spirit so seriously jocund, that we recognise, as I have said, his affinity with the old Greek ideal.

We may trace it also in his feeling for the monumental rather than for the picturesque; for those qualities in sculpture which belong to it preËminently, as opposed to those which it derives by analogy from painting. It appears in the alto-relievo, “Cupid and Psyche,” most conspicuously, because the subject might have been treated differently. The modern sculptor, working from the background to the front plane by repeated superlayers of clay, can introduce a variety of subtly differentiated planes, and may become absorbed in this composition of light and shade, producing an effect which we can describe as full of colour and which is exceedingly beautiful. The artist of old time, however, graving the marble, wood or metal, started with the form of the figures under his hand, absorbed himself in them and regarded the open spaces of his composition, when he reached them, simply as a background. Instead of a quasi-pictorial subtlety of light and shade he strove for a purely sculptural tangibility of modelled form. It is this insistence upon form which is so conspicuous in the “Psyche”; in the contrast between the child’s podgy softness and the maiden’s long, lithe, firm figure.

This principle, applied to decoration, is most successfully represented in the artist’s last completed work, the bronze doors of the Library of Congress. In the lunette-shaped spaces above the doors the figures are in very high relief, and the background is modelled with forms of mountains and clouds, producing an effect of great richness, while upon each valve of the door is a single figure in low relief; the flesh parts having an emphasis of roundness, the draperies being flattened, yet amply indicating the dignity of the form beneath. The left-hand figure with the lyre (how I wish that it were possible to reproduce it here!) is supremely beautiful in its poise between life and art, in its exquisite rhythm of lines and in the alternate ebb and flow of the planes of surface.

But it was in his rendering of the nude that Warner exhibited the loveliest qualities of his art. He viewed it, as one views a flower, with single vision for its exquisite abstract beauty. Flower-like and fragrant, the “Psyche,” the “Dancing Nymph” and “Diana,” have the quivering sensibility of contour that one finds in the free growth of nature; united, however, to a firmness of texture and strength of structure and to a conscious play of movement, responding to the play of spirit, which in their perfect alliance are only to be found in the human form. The spirit which animates these figures is, of course, the sculptor’s, and it reveals itself most choicely in the serenity of the “Diana,” in the suspense between absolute repose and projected movement. For the figure seems about to rise; the carriage of the head and body alike suggest the activity inherent in the languor. One may believe that in the precision of beauty displayed in this statue, in the complete adjustment, that is to say, of every one of its qualities of beauty to the supreme idea of discovering that imaginary line upon which life merges into art, the mobile into the immobile, Warner reached most nearly his ideal. For in his busts and heroic statues, as in the fountains and decorative subjects, he was more or less constrained to a point of view. But in his nudes, and particularly in this one, the product of his maturity, he could work in the full liberty of his imagination. And the latter is found to be the ideal expression of those qualities of character which I have already attributed to him: intellectual stability, moral balance and spiritual serenity.

The singularly choice discretion which governed Warner’s appreciation of form is shown equally in his Portland fountain: a circular bowl with broad, flat brim, supported upon a rectangular pedestal and balanced by two caryatides. The design is almost severely simple, yet tempered with a grace of fitness in every detail, so chaste and noble as to produce an impression of perfect repose. It has, indeed, just that suggestion of being firmly rooted, of strong growth upward and of natural spread at the top, which exactly befits its architectural character, while in the contour and details it is as delicate as a lily.

We have traced this feeling for the monumental side of sculpture in Warner’s reliefs, where it is revealed in the thoroughly plastic treatment of form, so that it quivers on the edge between immobility and life; in his fountain, that presents a conspicuous immobility quickened with animation, and in his busts, wherein the form

DIANA

By Olin Levi Warner