ADDRESS AT CORCORAN

» ART GALLERY
by

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

 
   

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EMORY UNIVERSITY

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* Address of President Roosevelt at

the Corcoran Art Gallery, at the
Saint Gaudens Exhibition, on Tues-

day evening, December 15, 1908

 

Washington

Government Printing Office
1908

 
 
Address of President Roosevelt at
the Corcoran Art Gallery, at the
Saint Gaudens Exhibition, on Tues-

day evening, December 15, 1908

 

Washington
Government Printing Office
1908

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Address

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Augustus Saint Gaudens was a very
great sculptor. This makes all the world
his debtor; but ina peculiar sense it makes
his countrymen his debtors. In any na-
tion those citizens who possess the pride
in their nationality, without which they can
not claim to be good citizens, must feel a
particular satisfaction in the deeds of every

man who adds to the sum of worthy na-

(x)

 
 

   

tional achievement. The great nations of
antiquity, of the middle ages, and of modern
times were and are great in each several
case, not only because of the collective
achievements of each people as a whole,
but because of the sum of the achieve-
ments of the men of special eminence; and
this whether they excelled in war craft or
Statecraft, as roadmakers or cathedral
builders, ds Men) Of letters, men of art oT
men of science. The field of effort is

almost limitless; and preeminent success

 
  
  

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in any part of it is not only a good thing
for humanity as a whole, but should be es-
pecially prized by the nation to which the
man achieving the success belongs.
Particularly should this be so with us
in America. As is natural, we have won
our greatest success, im ihe ficld of an
abounding material achievement; we have
conquered a continent; we have laced it
with railways; we have dotted it with
cities. Quite unconsciously, and as a

mere incident to this industrial growth, we

 

 
 

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have produced some really marvelous
artistic effects. Take, for instance, the
sight offered the man who travels on the
railroad from Pittsburg through the line
of iron and steel towns which stretch
along the Monongahela. I shall never
forget a journey I thus made a year
or so ago. The morning was misty,
with showers of rain. The flames from
the pipes and doors of the blast fur-
naces flickered red through the haze.

The huge chimneys and machinery were
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of strange and monstrous shapes. From

the funnels the smoke came saffron, orange,
green, and blue, like a landscape of Tur-
ner’s. What a chance for an artist of real
genius! Again, some day people will
realize that one effect of the ‘‘sky-scrapers”’
in New York, of the massing of buildings
of enormous size and height on an island
pheraunded by waterways, has been to
produce a city of singularly imposing
type and of unexampled picturesqueness.

A great artist will yet arise to bring before

 

 
 

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our eyes the powerful irregular sky-line of
the great city at sunset, or in the noonday
brightness, and, above all, at night, when
the lights flash from the dark, moun-
tainous mass of buildings, from the stately
bridges that span the East River, and
from the myriad craft that blaze as they
ply to and fro across the waters.

But this is incidental. Our success in
the field of pure art, as in the fields of
pure literature and pure science, has been

behind the success we have achieved in
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providing, by the practical application of
art and science, for bodily comfort, bodily
welfare, and for the extraordinary indus-
trial mechanism which forms the frame-
work and skeleton of our modern civiliza-
tion. The twilight of letters continues;
but much is now being done in the field
of art; and Saint Gaudens was an artist
who can hardly be placed too high.

Before touching on his larger feats, a
word as to something of less, but yet of

real importance. Saint Gaudens gave us

 
 

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for the first time a beautiful coinage, a
coinage worthy of this country, a coinage
not yet properly appreciated, but up to
which both the official and the popular
mind will in the end grow. The first few
thousands of the Saint Gaudens gold
coins are, I believe, more beautiful than
any coins since the days of the Greeks,
and they achieve their striking beauty
because Saint Gaudens not only possessed
a perfect mastery in the physical address

of his craft, but also a daring and
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original imagination. His full length
figure of Liberty holding the torch
is his own conception. His flying
eagle and standing eagle are each in its
own way equally good. His head of
Liberty is not only a strikingly beautiful
head, but characteristically and typically
American in that for the headdress he
has used one of the few really typical,
and at the same time really beautiful,
pieces of wearing gear ever produced

independently on this continent—the bon-

 
 

10
net of eagle plumes. The comments so
frequently made upon this eagle-feather
headdress illustrate curiously the exceed-
ingly conventional character of much of
our criticism and the frequent inability to
understand originality until it has won its
place. Most of the criticism was based
upon the assumption that only an Indian
could wear a feather headdress, and that
the head of Liberty ought to have a Phry-
gian cap, or Greek helmet, or some classic

equivalent. Now, of course, this was non-
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sense. There is no more reason why a
feather headdress should always be held
to denote an Indian than why a Phrygian
cap should always be held to denote a
Phrygian. The Indian in his own way
finely symbolizes freedom and a life of
liberty. It is idle to insist that the head
or figure of Liberty shall only appear in
the hackneyed and conventional trappings
which conventional and unoriginal minds
have gradually grown to ascribe to her.

A great artist with the boldness of genius

 
 

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could see that the American Liberty
should, if possible, have something distinc-
tively American about her; and it was an
addition to the sum of the art of all nations
that this particular figure of Liberty should
not be a mere slavish copy of all other
figures of Liberty. So Saint Gaudens put
the American Liberty in an American head-
dress. Up to the time of this coin the
most beautiful American coin was the small
gold coin which carried the Indian’s head

with the feather headdress, and we now
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again have the smaller gold coinage with
the Indian’s head: but Saint Gaudens’s
was the head of Liberty, the head of the
American Liberty, and it was eminently
fitting that such a head should carry a
very beautiful and a purely and character-

istically American headdress.

So much for the Saint Gaudens coins.
In dealing with his larger work I can, of
course, speak only as a layman. But the
work of avery great artist must be judged

by the impression it makes not only upon

 
 

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other artists but also upon laymen. I
know well the danger of passing judgment
about the great men of the present, for any
such judgment must be made with full
knowledge that it may be falsified when
things are seen through the perspective of
the ages, Vet Tican mot. but hazard ja
guess that Saint Gaudens’s works will
stand in the forefront among the master-
pieces of the sculptors of the greatest
petiods and) the oreatest peoples’) Hie

worked among his own people, and his

 
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work was of his own time; but yet it
was of all time, for in his subject he ever
seized and portrayed that which was
undying. His genius had that lofty qual-
ity of insight which enables a man to see
to the root of things, to discard all trap-
pings that are not essential, and to grasp
close at hand in the present the beauty
and majesty which in most men’s eyes are
dimmed until distance has softened the
harsh angles and blotted out the trivial

and the unlovely. He had, furthermore,

 
 

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that peculiar kind of genius in which a
soaring imagination is held in check by a
self-mastery which eliminates all risk of
the fantastic and the overstrained. He
knew when to give the most complete
rein to this imagination. He also knew
when to turn to the men and women
about him, and to produce his great effects
by portraying them as they actually were—
and yet as a little more than they seemed

to all but the most clear-sighted, because

 

——
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under his hand the soul within appeared,
no less than the man’s physical being.

Take his extraordinary statue of Gen-
eral Sherman. There never was a more
typically democratic general than gaunt,
grizzled old Tecumseh Sherman, homely
and simple in all his ways, and yet with
the courage of tempered steel. When I
heard that Saint Gaudens intended to have
this typically modern democratic soldier

portrayed as riding on horseback with the

 
 

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horse led by a winged Victory, I did not

believe it possible that even Saint Gaudens
could succeed. I was afraid we should
have another of the innumerable examples
- of that folly which in one form puts Wash-
ington in a toga, or Louis XIV, with his
peruke, in a Roman corselet; the folly
which in another form portrays Graces,
Muses, or Angels, obviously unreal and
irrelevant, disporting themselves around
an obviously fleshly hero. But Saint Gau-

dens, greatly daring, produced a wonder-

=>

 

 
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ful work of art. His Victory is one of
the finest figures of its kind, and the plain,
grim, rugged old soldier riding alongside
is so wrought that, in addition to the Gen-
eral, whom all men knew, those who look
upon the statue must also see the soul of
the man himsels and the soul of the
people whose high and eager hope dwelt
in him when he marched to battle.

In the figure on the Adams grave, and

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im the figure called ‘Silence’ there. was

nothing to hamper the play of the artist’s

 
 

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thought, and he produced two striking cre-
ations of pure imagination. The strange,
shrouded, sitting woman, the draped
woman who stands, impress the beholder
with thoughts he can not fathom, with the
weird awe of unearthly things; of that
horizon ever surrounding mankind, where
the shadowy and the unreal veil from
view whatever there is beyond, whether
of splendor or of gloom.

In Farragut, on the other hand, we see

the fighting admiral as he stood on his

 

 
21
quarterdeck, the master of men, the man
who feared neither the open death above
nor the hidden death beneath; who fear-
lessly tried wood against iron, and flung
the black ships against the forts; but who
had the power and the foresight, as well
as the courage, that compelled events to
do his bidding. His Farragut statue is
Farragut himself; and, in addition, it is
the statue of the great sea captain of all

times and of any age.

 
 

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Greatest of allis his Lincoln. Lincoln
was the plain tman of the people, the
people’s President; homely, gaunt, un-
gainly; and this homely figure, clad in
ill-fitting clothes of the ugly modern type,
held one ol the lotticst souls twat ever
burned within the breast of mankind. It
is Saint Gaudens’s peculiar quality that,
without abating one jot of the truthfulness
of portrayal of the man’s outside aspect,
yet makes that outside aspect of little

weight because of what is shown of the

 

 
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soul within. We look at Saint Gaudens’s
mighty statue of mighty Lincoln, and
we are stirred to awe and wonder and
devotion for the great man who, in
strength and sorrow, bore the people's
burdens through the four years of our
direst need, and then, standing as high
priest between the horns of the altar,
poured out his own lifeblood for the
nation whose life he had saved.

In this quality of showing the soul

Saint Gaudens’s figures are more impres-

 
 

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sive than the most beautiful figures that
have come down from the art of ancient
Greece; for their unequaled beauty is of
the form merely, and Saint Gaudens’s is
of the spirit within.

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Syracuse,

—— Syracuse,
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= Syracuse,
Syracuse, N. Y
Syracuse, N. Y.
SA
Syracuse, N. Y.
Stockton, Calif

 

 

 

 

 

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