With the dawn of our national consciousness just after the dark hours of the Revolution, a natural human love for the likeness, strengthened by a generous surrender to hero-worship, is already arousing in us a longing for an art that will express our patriotic emotions. If achievement alone be considered, there is surely a great gulf fixed between Patience Wright and Jean Antoine Houdon. But the same sincere passion fires Quakeress and _citoyen_; their common aim is a strong representation of real life, transfigured by the flame of the spirit burning in the lamp of clay. It is recorded that an overpowering sense of Washington’s greatness sometimes actually impeded those artists who aspired to reveal him, body and soul, to posterity. Posterity then is fortunate because our fathers received from Houdon’s genius not only the Washington statue, but also seven noble portrait busts, those of Franklin, Paul Jones, Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, Fulton, and Joel Barlow, to mention them in the order of their creation, from 1778 to 1803. These virile interpretations of character were not lost in the ins and outs of our Atlantic coast-line. Even to this day, some one or other of them often reappears in public view, to excite interest, admiration, and controversy. But in the early nineteenth century, as is shown by Jefferson’s counsel to the North Carolina legislature, Conova, rather than Houdon, has become the name to conjure with. Even in portraiture, realism has given way to pseudo-classicism, long before Greenough arrives on the stage with his Washington as the Olympian Zeus, a colossal half-draped marble figure designed for a shrine within the Capitol. [Illustration: BUST OF WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON BY JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON] CHAPTER II OUR BLITHE BEGINNING DAYS I Alive and kicking; better than we now realize, the old phrase fits our young American art of the early nineteenth century. In Boston, Mr. Bulfinch is packing his triangles and T-squares for a journey to Washington, where he is to remain twelve years as Latrobe’s successor as architect of the Capitol. In New York, morning-star young art-students are passionately performing their historic ritual of fighting the janitor and founding new movements; even Colonel Trumbull is defied; hence, in 1825, our National Academy of Design. In Philadelphia, harmony presides over the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But in Washington, what commotion! Restorations are to be made after the fires of the British; there are new excavations, new aspirations. There’s sculptor’s work here for many a year. Bronze doors must be created, in the supposed manner of Ghiberti; pediments must be populated; and what is a dome without its colossal figure of Freedom? Greenough and Crawford and Randolph Rogers are the sculptors of the hour. And always Hiram Powers, somewhat apart from the Washington bustle.