Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915 : San Francisco, Calif.)
This garden is one of the best things in the truly wonderful floral show
at the Exposition. The flowers are massed as we always dream of seeing
them in the fields,--a dream never quite so well realized before. The
areas of the court in the Exposition's opening weeks were solid fields
of daffodils, thick as growing wheat, with here and there a blood-red
poppy, set to accent the yellow gold of the mass. Other flowers have now
replaced these in an equal blaze of color. Here, too, are free, wild
clumps of trees and shrubs, close set, with straggling outposts among
the flowers, as natural as those bordering grain fields in California
valleys.
It is a summery court, lacking but one thing to make it ideally perfect.
It ought to have crickets and cicadas in it, to rasp away as the warm
afternoons turn into evening, and tree hylas to make throaty music in
the still, rich-lighted night.
The statuary goes well with the court. There is a pretty, summery grace
about the flower girls designed by Calder for the niches above the
colonnade, and in the figures of Edgar Walter's central fountain. Here
on the fountain are Beauty and the Beast, Beauty clad in a summer hat
and nothing else, the Beast clothed in ugliness. (p. 100.) Never mind
the story. This is Beauty, and Beauty needs no story. Four airy pipers,
suggestive at least of the song of the cicada on long, hot afternoons,
support the fountain figure. Around the basin of the pool is carved in
low relief a cylindrical frieze of tiger, lion and bear, and, wonder of
wonders, Hanuman, the Monkey King of Hindoo mythology, leading the bear
with one hand and prodding the lion with the other.
Before the court The Pioneer sits his horse, a thin, sinewy, nervous
figure; old, too,--as old as that frontier which has at last moved
round the world. (See p. 87.) The statue, which is by Solon Borglum, is
immensely expressive of that hard, efficient type of frontiersmen who,
scarcely civilized, yet found civilization always dogging their
footsteps as they moved through the wilderness and crossed the deserts.
He is, indeed, the forerunner of civilization, sent forward to break
ground for new states. This group is offset against that other fine
historical sculpture, The End of the Trail, placed before the Court of
Palms. As representatives of the conquering and the conquered race, the
two must be studied together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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