Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
I don’t mind making three or four. The man must be on his feet.
Except for that every action of the body is changeable.... In the
work I do in my studio I keep my small model in clay and do not
cast it in plaster in order not to be bound by it. If it is in
plaster it cannot be changed.... I am anxious to keep it as
flexible as possible, and to keep in mind that the big figure is
the sole thing and the permanent thing....
There was more correspondence and eventually Gutzon invited the
committee to come and look at the life-size model. In the fall of the
year the party arrived--Colonel P. M. Pearsall, Mrs. Charles Aycock, the
widow, and Judge Frank Daniels, Josephus’ brother. After suggesting some
slight changes they expressed complete satisfaction and went home. The
sculptor was on the point of casting the statue in plaster when he got a
telegram from Dr. Poe, who had been unavoidably detained. Poe, who had
learned his lesson about models, begged Gutzon to delay the casting till
he could get to Stamford. Nobody had told him what work it is to keep a
heroic-size clay figure moist for an indefinite time. For the next three
weeks Gutzon had little else to occupy his time.
Dr. Poe and a new committee were more critical than the first group had
been. Dr. Poe shook his head and announced that for one thing the model
was underweight. Aycock, he said, had weighed at least fifty pounds more
than the sculptor allowed. The rest of the committee agreed.
Gutzon had acquired patience. It was not serious, he said. He would
adjust the governor’s proportions. Sleeping quarters were engaged at a
hotel for the committee. And for three days Dr. Poe and his friends sat
around the studio while Borglum added to the governor’s girth. For this
work Judge Daniels was a voluntary model. In the end everybody was
pleased. Dr. Poe declared that “The result is a _distinguished
success_.”
The memorial was unveiled on March 15, 1924, a year later. Dr. Alderman
and Josephus Daniels made the chief speeches. Thousands of the
governor’s old friends attended, together with a crowd of school
children. It was a grand affair.
* * * * *
The Sheridan equestrian statue, which stands at the beginning of
Sheridan Road in Chicago, came out of this same period and was one of
the sculptor’s favorites. The technical perfection of it gratified him.
He used to say of the horse, rearing with his front feet off the ground,
that he could see the play of the muscles under the skin--and that is
very likely true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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