American Masters of Sculpture: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Sculptors and of Some Phases of Sculpture in AmericaCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
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American Masters of Sculpture: Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Sculptors and of Some Phases of Sculpture in America
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Sculptors -- United States
For Borglum’s work reveals in a remarkable degree the sentiment which
comes of intimate, habitual companionship. He does not, on the one hand,
invest his animals with any quasi-human sentimentality, or, on the
other, look at them from the outside standpoint of the hunter or
otherwise observant student. He has entered into the actual sentient
part which they play in the life they share with man. Hence the
sentiment that his work reveals is most poignantly affecting. I doubt,
indeed, if any sculptor of animals has ever represented with such
fidelity and convincingness their intelligence and emotions. Note, for
example, some of the phases of character-building in which he represents
the bronco. Here it is full-grown, though still untamed, but quiet as a
lamb, resting its muzzle on its dam’s back. It has not yet come in
contact with the disciplining force of man. Now it is confronted with a
saddle that lies upon the ground and recoils with a mixture of trembling
and curiosity. There it has been rounded up and thrown, at first
struggling with impotent fury, then stretched in utter exhaustion. Later
the saddle is on its back, and it is pitting its strength and cunning
against the knowledge and endurance of man; then finally tamed, and
coöperating with man in the taming of other horses, or sharing the night
watch, or meeting with him the mortal peril of the blizzard.
But Borglum’s power of stimulating our imagination includes in some
cases even a suggestion of the environment of the figures, as, for
instance, in the marble group of a mare and foal caught in a snowstorm.
The little one is unconscious of danger, content as it noses close up to
the mother’s side for shelter; but the gesture of the latter is full of
solicitude and anxiety. In the swish of her tail and the droop and
stiffening of the hind quarters, we are made to realise the force of the
blizzard; while, is it the little mass of piled-up snow, or the
whiteness of the marble, or the intensity of the sculptor’s imagination,
that conveys to our own a sense of white, snowy desolation all around
the two poor creatures? It is seldom in modern sculpture that one will
find an expression of sentiment so unaffected and affecting.
And the other notable element in his work is its rendering of movement.
It matters not what kind of movement--impetuous dash, sudden arrest of
action, alert repose, the vicious fling of body and heels as the beast
prepares to turn a somersault, the limp of pain, the submission of
exhaustion, the supple step to music in the circus, the pause of doubt,
the spasm of baffled rage--each and all and others are represented with
an intimacy of knowledge and an instinctive certainty of method. He
knows his subject so well and realises in his mind so vividly the
impression which he seeks to interpret, that all pettiness of
observation is swallowed up in a large
[Illustration: TAMED
By Solon Hannibal Borglum]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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