IN this country, as elsewhere, prior to the establishment of the French SociÉtÉ des Amis de la Medaille, medal-making had sunk to a department of trade; or, if something artistic were attempted, there was a divorce between the designing and engraving. A sculptor or painter, with no practical knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of the cutting process, would be commissioned to produce the design, while its execution in the die was turned over to a more or less skilled operative. The barrenness of the result may be seen in the majority of medals produced during many years.

Recognising that the work of the medallist had been and should be a special department of art, with very individual qualities of exquisite expression, the National Academy two years ago established a class in Coin and Medal Designing and put it in charge of Victor D. Brenner.

Ten years previously the latter had arrived in New York, an expert die-sinker and engraver; now he had just returned from studying under Roty in Paris. The story of his progress from artisan to artist is not without a touch of romance.

To the student of personal accomplishment there is always a particular satisfaction in the contrast between hard and strait beginnings and the ultimate success. He forgets, as the artist himself perhaps does when the sweets of victory are on his tongue, the long weariness of the previous struggle, and is philosophically persuaded that the pain of parturition must necessarily precede the birth of art as of life. However that may be, Brenner has had his share of privations; and it is well for him that he encountered them early and surmounted them before the enthusiasm of youth dwindled.

He was born in 1871 at Shavly, in the north-west of Russia, and from his sixth to his thirteenth year attended the Hebrew school. After three years of apprenticeship to his father, who was a general mechanic and seal-cutter, with considerable talent in carving, the youth, now sixteen years old, travelled through the neighbouring towns, making seals. Then he worked for a jewelry engraver in Riga, and subsequently migrated to Mittau, where he found employment in a rubber stamp and type foundry, cutting dies and illustrations for advertisements. In 1889 he established himself in Kowno as a jewelry engraver and seal-cutter. By this time he had saved nearly enough to pay his passage to New York, and the following year he reached our shores. He was then scarcely nineteen, without friends, knowledge of the language or ready funds. For a while he sold matches on Fulton Street, and then graduated to the superior opportunities of a sweat-shop in Brooklyn. He was rescued from this by an advertisement through which he found employment with a jewelry firm. Meanwhile his acquaintance with the language and with the local conditions was improving, and it was not long before he obtained a position as seal-cutter. Then followed an engagement with Mr. H. Popper as die-cutter and jewelry engraver, during which he came to the notice of Professor S. H. Oetinger, the numismatist, whose collection of medals seems to have awakened in the young man a longing to be himself an artist. In 1891 he first learned to handle clay at the Cooper Union night class, but attended only for a month, and it was not until 1896 that he studied drawing under Ward in the night class of the Academy of Design.

Meanwhile, in 1893, he had started for himself in business, working for jewelry and silversmith firms; steadily improving his financial conditions, but becoming more and more impatient under the restraints which the exigencies of trade placed upon his desire to be an artist. I should judge that these years of material comfortableness may have been really more trying to him than the previous lean years. Then, work and food and lodging seemed the only desirable things; now he was in labour with a desire that exceeded all others. He had tasted of the sweets of beauty and become conscious of having something beautiful within himself, might he but learn how to express it; and all the while the Gallios of trade “cared for none of those things.”

This period of probation at length came to an end in 1898, by which time he had saved sufficient money for study in Paris. A little time before, in connection with a medal for the Convention of Charities and Corrections, he had made the acquaintance of Mr. Samuel P. Avery. But the latter had for some time been acquainted with him, keeping watch over his progress and secretly helping him to commissions. Of the value and encouragement of Mr. Avery’s friendship Brenner speaks with warm gratitude. Through him he obtained an introduction to Mr. George A. Lucas, who befriended him in Paris and introduced him to Roty, furnishing him with commissions while he was still studying in the latter’s atelier. This he entered after preliminary studentship in the

Julien school, and became the assistant as well as pupil of the master. His progress was rapid, and examples of his work are already to be found in the Paris Mint, Munich Glyptothek, Vienna Numismatic Society, the Metropolitan Museum and the Numismatic Society, New York.

Up to the present time Brenner’s best work has been portrait-plaques and the heads upon the obverse of medals. In designs which involve a decorative treatment he has been less happy. As might be expected of one whose period of study has been so short, he is weak in composition and freehand drawing, nor does he display much inventiveness of fancy. On the other hand, he has an extraordinarily direct vision, quickened by experience in so exacting an occupation as die-cutting, and, moreover, a very mobile sympathy. The latter helps him to be interested at once in his subject, and with so much affection and reverence for the personality that his portrayal exhibits a very unusual degree of intimacy.

Among the best of his portraits are those of William Maxwell Evarts, J. Sanford Saltus and George Aloysius Lucas, whom I place in one group; and those of M. VadÉ, Edward D. Fulde and M. Lacour in another. The reasonableness of the separation is to be found in the difference of motive, respectively, illustrated in the modelling; the more distinctively sculptural as compared with the painter-like method.

For in all low-relief work one will find the artist to be showing a preference either for form and the structural character of the subject, or for its colour qualities, represented by delicate variations in the planes, which produce a corresponding warmth of delicate light and shade; in a word, he feels his subject either in the round or in the flat. Which you yourself will prefer is a question of your point of view. Among brother artists who are painters there will probably be a verdict in favour of the second group, since it represents more closely what they themselves strive for, and are therefore partial to. And its pictorial quality may equally recommend it also to general approbation. For, indeed, such a portrait as that of M. VadÉ is unquestionably fascinating. There is in it scarce any resort to lines, the modelling being effected almost entirely by planes, at once broad and subtle, full of a sense of colour and giving an expression of dreaminess to the face. Yet, if one compares this portrait with either of the three included in the former group, it is to find in the latter a compensating virility of expression, a greater dignity of structure and of character.

It is not usual to find these two very opposite motives of technique united in one artist. But in Brenner’s case it seems to result from an absence of all artistic parti pris, and from the freshness of interest with which he attacks each subject, so that the latter itself reveals to him the more appropriate manner of presenting it. In the portrait shown in the accompanying illustration the two motives seem to be combined.