CHAPTER 6
Every society leaves a record of its achievements in three books: the book of its deeds, the book of its words, and the book of its art. Of these the most significant—and certainly the most enduring—will be the book of its art. This was the opinion of nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin. The art of the Gilded Age has become the principal guide to American culture in the late nineteenth century. Historian, philosopher—and, it must be admitted, snob—Henry Adams was accurate in his forecast of 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that some day people would “talk about [architects Richard Morris] Hunt and [Henry Hobson] Richardson, [artists John] La Farge and [Augustus] St-Gaudens, [architects Daniel] Burnham and [Charles] McKim, and Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires [have been] otherwise forgotten.”
The technology of the Gilded Age underwent continuous expansion and transformation, but it is its art that has been its most enduring memorial. This does not mean that all or most of the art survived permanently. Many paintings and art objects were discarded or destroyed. Many buildings were exhausted with use, abandoned, and demolished. But art and architecture were central to the culture by way of public buildings, photographs, and exhibitions—even by later controversies surrounding preservation.
This upward-looking photograph of an elaborate room in the Marsden J. Perry House in Providence, Rhode Island, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, makes the most of its opulent character, deploying the ornately molded ceiling and cornices, embossed wallpaper, and Georgian-style door as a background that, surprisingly, enhances the crystal chandelier and gold baroque mirror. (Library of Congress.)
The Centennial of 1876 not only awakened Americans to the potential of the Industrial Revolution but it also rekindled their interest in previous cultures. The vast displays of paintings, sculptures, and photographs in Philadelphia alerted them to the origins of American culture in other nations. For many artists and scholars there followed an American Renaissance comparable to the Italian Renaissance of 1420-1580.
At the same time, the Italian Renaissance itself, first identified in the 1840s, came to be more widely appreciated through the research and interpretation of various scholars, including the Britons Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds and the Swiss Jakob Burckhardt. Throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s various American scholars—in particular Charles C. Perkins, William James Stillman, and James M. Hoppin—brought the Italian Renaissance into closer focus for a generation of Americans through monographs and articles in such popular magazines as Scribner’s. American artists who had studied in Europe at various art schools in Paris—notably the Ecole des Beaux Arts—and in Dusseldorf, Munich, the Hague, and London—where the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in vogue—began to return home in the 1870s and 1880s with works of the Italian Renaissance deeply etched into their artistic consciousness.
The art of the Gilded Age was to play a crucial role in promoting nationalism, especially when profound industrial and economic changes were causing social upheaval. In the Craftsman of October 1904 Charles M. Shean, president of the National Society of Mural Painters, predicted how “the future great art of this Republic, so far as it is expressed in painting, will find its complete and full development on the walls of our public buildings . . . and it will be primarily a recording art,” in which the subjects should commemorate “the growth of the state from the scattered and struggling colonies of the Atlantic seaboard to the Imperial Republic stretching from ocean to ocean.”
The American Renaissance extended beyond distinguished paintings by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer to all the visual arts: sculpture and stained glass, murals and tapestries, architecture and landscape design. Many American artists aspired to become as multitalented as their distinguished Italian predecessors. Architect Stanford White not only designed buildings but also furniture, jewelry, and magazine covers. Artist John La Farge not only painted pictures but also designed stained glass windows and wrote criticism. In sum, American architects, painters, sculptors, and craftsmen of the Gilded Age believed they were capturing for the United States the spirit of the Italian Renaissance.
The First Period
In their American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (1979) art historian Richard Guy Wilson and decorative art specialist Dianne H. Pilgrim distinguish two principal periods in the American Renaissance. The first was the prelude—from the mid-1870s, after the depression of 1873 had abated —to the mid-1880s. The second period was from approximately 1886 to 1917.
In the initial period the foundations of the American Renaissance were laid. Patterns of collaboration were established between artists and architects as was a network of scholarly and critical organizations to promote their achievements. Moreover, it was in this initial period that the American Renaissance was first identified in the journal Californian in July 1880. It was further encouraged academically by new periodicals such as The American Architect and Building News (1876), The Art Amateur: Devoted to the Cultivation of the Art of the Household (1879), and The Art Review (1879), and artistically by new societies such as the Art Students League of New York (1875), the Society of American Artists (1877), the New York Etching Club (1878), and the Architectural League of New York (1881).
Despite any consensus among artists about the purposes and direction of the American Renaissance, the influences upon artists in this period were many and diverse—although, for the most part, within a European tradition. Artists were also inspired by the art of Colonial America, brought into perspective by different scholarly works by Moses Coit Tyler, S. W. G. Robinson, and others. The mingling of Italian techniques and Colonial styles resulted in such paintings as George H. Broughton’s Puritans Going to Church (1867) and Thomas Eakins’s William Rush Carving the Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1877). In sculpture the mix can be seen in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze statue of Dean Samuel Chapin, The Puritan (first erected in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1881), and Daniel Chester French’s The Minute Man, commissioned by Concord, Massachusetts, for the Centennial Exhibition. The Minute Man was partly inspired by an ancient statue usually known as Apollo of the Belvedere, a Roman copy of a Greek original of the fourth century, B.C., attributed to Leochares.
Another feature of the early years of the American Renaissance was successful collaboration on buildings between artists. There was an artistic consensus that the grandest achievements of the American Renaissance—such as its world’s fairs and city plans, as well as major public buildings—must be through collaborative efforts if the result were ever to equal the artistic unity of Rome at the height of the Italian Renaissance. Beginning with architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s Trinity Church (1872-77) in Boston, both European and American artists working in the United States attempted to create unified decorative schemes in churches.
Moreover, it was in this initial period that many artists and scholars, such as English craftsman William Morris and American expatriate painter James Abbott MacNeill Whistler, nourished public interest in interior design. In the later 1870s the term “interior decorator” first came into use. Both Charles Locke Eastlake, a promoter of the English Arts and Crafts movement, in his Hints on Household Taste (London, 1868; New York 1872), and the American Clarence Cook, in The House Beautiful (1877), encouraged balanced and unified decorative schemes among home owners.
The most successful interior designer was Louis Comfort Tiffany, a painter stimulated and challenged by the idea of creating a total environment. Along with Samuel Colman (whose specialties were fabrics, wallpapers, and color schemes), Lockwood de Forest (whose specialty was wood and carving), and Candace Thurber Wheeler (whose specialties were textiles and embroidery), Tiffany formed the firm of Associated Artists (1879-1907) in which each artist was to concentrate on his or her specialty while recognizing the supremacy of the overall design. Tiffany and his associates became widely known through a commission from President Chester A. Arthur to modernize and remodel parts of the White House (1882). They were artistic entrepreneurs ready to take advantage of the commercial boom attending decorative art and give it focus.
Tiffany’s special forte was stained glass. Awarded a patent for opal or opalescent glass in February 1881, Tiffany soon became the most inventive of all glass makers, using different forms of glass, shells, and semiprecious stones. Stained glass proved a particularly attractive medium for women artists such as Helen Maitland Armstrong, Lydia Field Emmett, and Rosina Emmett Sherwood. The oldest glass-making company in the United States was the J. and R. Lamb Studios, founded in New York in 1857. It became widely known after winning two gold medals at the Paris Exposition of 1900 for a window, Religion Enthroned.
Artistic and commercial developments in such decorative arts as wallpaper, tile, ceramics, and silverware were also striking. In particular, tiles became fashionable for all sorts of city houses. Inspired by English models, particularly Minton tiles from Derbyshire, England, American artists began to expand the number of American styles and the uses to which they could be put. Embellished tiles were inset in the faces of clocks, stoves, and furniture. The so-called Tile Club in New York (1877–87) was an association of thirty artists who saw how lucrative this art form could be.
John Singer Sargent (1856–192.5), debonair and supreme portrait painter of famous and wealthy American and European subjects, shown in languid pose with cigar and cane. Sargent’s superb draughtsmanship, seemingly impulsive brushstrokes, and dazzling palette of sharp contrasts distilled the essence of privileged lives at the turn of the century in work that became ever more daring and experimental. (Library of Congress.)
The Second Period
The second, or mature, period of the American Renaissance—from around 1886 until American military intervention in World War I in 1917—was characterized by what Richard Guy Wilson terms “scientific eclecticism.” Creative artists now based their work on a scholarly study of classical models, rather than the romantic, freer interpretations of the 1870s and early 1880s. Art in this period was also shaped by the artists’ own deepening sense of public responsibility. Many of its singular achievements were in public buildings: the White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition and the Boston Public Library. In this mature period, ornamentation on great public buildings was inspired, first, by earlier decoration on private houses and religious buildings, and second by the sort of integral and cohesive designs seen in public buildings at various world’s fairs.
Institutions founded in this period devoted to the advancement of art included: the National Sculpture Society (1893), the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects (1894), and the National Society of Mural Painters (1895). Among the new institutions devoted to study were the American Academy in Rome (1897; originally, the American School of Architecture in Rome, 1894) and the American School of Classical Studies, Rome (1895). In addition, numerous municipal institutions were founded to promote civic art, notably in New York (1893), Cincinnati (1894), and Chicago (1899).
In this second period the American Renaissance became more avowedly nationalistic, appropriating the symbols and images of previous civilizations to create a pageant in which the United States was presented as the culmination of history for an age that believed in progress. Artists and their patrons conceived of a new civilization with public buildings and monuments modeled on the columned temples of Greece and the triumphal arches of Rome, adorned with sculptures and murals depicting heroes in various virtuous endeavors. One such was the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn (1889–92), designed by architects John H. Duncan and McKim, Mead and White, with sculptures by Frederick MacMonnies and bas-reliefs by Thomas Eakins, together giving the appearance of a national Valhalla in this cenotaph to the Republic’s fallen heroes.
America’s deepening sense of nationalism was itself being nurtured by the establishment of various institutions to conserve the American past: the American Historical Association (1882); the Daughters of the American Revolution (1890); and the Colonial Dames (1890).
The American Renaissance also became an expression of American imperialism for a period in which public opinion saw America’s destiny come to a climax with the creation of an American empire overseas. Architect Stanford White justified importing many art treasures to decorate grand houses by saying, “In the past, dominant nations had always plundered works of art from their predecessors; . . . America was taking a leading place among nations and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.” Furthermore, the spirit of cosmopolitanism extended to interest in the arts of the Pacific islands, including Japan. It was the London International Exposition of 1861, the prototype of all great industrial expositions, which had first introduced Japanese art to the public in the West and made it popular. Works by Whistler and McKim disclose their fascination with Japanese prints. In addition, American scholars James Jackson Jarves and Edward S. Morse produced various studies of Asian art.
As to interior design, not since the heyday of the Venetian Republic had successful commercial families indulged themselves in such ostentatious displays of art as did the entrepreneurs of the later Gilded Age. To enrich their homes and give society notice of their new status, robber barons acquired paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts of great value. The sophistication they could not achieve within themselves by education, they could amass for themselves by possession. The absolute distinction was ownership of a unique object. Ironically, many entrepreneurs who claimed such unique distinction were those whose very wealth came from factories that produced objects, including art objects, that were mass produced.
In art, as in architecture, this was a period of eclecticism in which patrons placed Chinese vases, Gobelin tapestries, Louis XIII mantels, Venetian ceilings, and polar bear hearth rugs alongside one another in the same room—as was the case in the Entry Hall of the H. W. Poor house (1899-1901) in New York. Yet we can discern something of the shift within the American Renaissance to a more exact and distilled classical style by comparing the lavish decorations and lush Victorian detail of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s design for Chester Arthur’s White House in 1882 with those of McKim, Mead and White for Theodore Roosevelt in 1902–3. Not only did Roosevelt want a clear distinction between the first floor, reserved for official functions, and upper floors, reserved for the first family, but his designers also opted for simpler, eighteenth-century-style gilt and white furniture in order to emphasize clarity and classicism.
Nevertheless, the second period of the American Renaissance was also marked by ever greater profusion in the decorative arts and with an experimentation based on a more exact understanding of the models. The growing bourgeoisie of the great cities now wanted to enjoy a wide choice of decorative arts in their own homes. Artists and their companies were ready to supply this demand. Among Louis Comfort Tiffany’s associates, perhaps the most skillful was Candace Wheeler, who invented the “American Tapestry.” Many affluent patrons were willing to pay high prices for Wheeler’s superior finished products. Tapestry making had no entrenched tradition in the United States and Wheeler, knowing that contemporary efforts were too stark and easily perishable, decided to experiment with materials other than the traditional wool and canvas. Since dust and moths destroyed wool, she used silk for the woof and warp of the canvas. She had the face of the canvas covered with embroidery silk that passed under the warp and was sewn into the woof. The needle served as a shuttle, carrying the threads, a process she described as “needle weaving.” The finished tapestry had a delicate but durable picture.
Cut glass ornaments had also become a symbol of social prestige. The luminous and exquisitely crafted surfaces of cut glass seemed to reflect the intricate patterns of social grace underpinning upper-class society. The principal inspirations were Venetian glass and Art Nouveau. Such masterpieces as the Vase (circa 1885) in the form of a drinking horn by the New England Glass Company (1818–88) were widely admired. People did not necessarily want copies of famous objects, but rather individual cut glass ornaments of their own to show that they were part of America’s prosperous middle class.
The William Kissam Vanderbilt House (1877–1881), a mansion on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, New York, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) in the style of a chateau of Francois Ier of France and built of Caen stone specially imported from France. Of all three major Vanderbilt houses in New York, it was the most academically correct as a modern version of a historical style. (Library of Congress.)
Art and Patronage
Art on a grand scale could not have existed without great patronage. Above all others, the Vanderbilt family were the quintessential American patrons of art and architecture in the Gilded Age and beyond. Before World War I they built seventeen large houses, each costing more than $1 million, with one—Biltmore, the George Washington Vanderbilt house at Asheville, North Carolina (1888-95)—costing $5 million. We can sense the artistic competition between three branches of the Vander-bilt family and, also, their sureness of purpose in creating an architectural triptych to the power of accumulated wealth when we recall that their famous New York houses were all commissioned in 1878 and that final plans for all three were filed on the same day—December 8, 1879.
From 1879 to 1881 William Henry Vanderbilt had architects Charles B. Atwood and the Herter Brothers (circa 1865-1900) build an Italian-ate mansion in New York on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets. In keeping with popular taste, individual rooms in the mansion were decorated in different styles—Italian Renaissance, Louis XIV, and so on, and genuine antiques were mixed with reproductions. The atrium extended the full height of the building and its imposing marble columns and huge mantel were in red African marble. The mosaic floor was covered by an outsize carpet of Oriental design made in England. The fireplace, adorned with bronze ornamentation, was flanked by figures of Pomona, copies of originals created by Germain Pilon in the sixteenth century. The William Henry Vanderbilt house became widely known through a publication in ten volumes—six on the house and four on the paintings–Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (1883–84), by Earl Shinn (Edward Strahan). Here was a building whose primary function was to be admired in a catalog.
Between 1878 and 1881 William Henry’s son, William Kissam Vanderbilt, commissioned architect Richard Morris Hunt to build a mansion in the style of the chateaux of Francois Ier of France on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street. From 1878 to 1882 George B. Post built a chateau in the style of Henri IV between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets for another of William Henry’s sons, Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Within his grand design Post allowed his contributing artists considerable freedom. The result, according to contemporary critic Mary Gay Humphreys in “The Vanderbilt House,” for The Art Amateur of May 1883, was “the most important example of decorative work yet attempted in this country.” Its special features were the dining and watercolor rooms by John La Farge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The dining room was forty-five feet long. The walls were paneled in oak and embossed leather. The coffered ceiling had twenty panels of which six were in opalescent glass studded with jewels. The oak beams were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. At the corners were mahogany panels with scenes of Apollo and cupids in repousse bronze. At the door were carved panels of green marble representing Hospilitas and Amicitia, decorated in iridescent ivory, metal, and mother-of-pearl. When the house was remodeled in 1895, the decorations were moved to a billiard room.
Such mansions as these also reflected shifts in architectural taste. In the first period of the American Renaissance grand houses such as the H. A. C. Taylor house (1883-86) in Newport, Rhode Island, by McKim, Mead and White, were in Georgian style. The three Vanderbilt houses in New York built in the late 1870s and early 1880s were in a French or Italian style that we may characterize as transitional within the American Renaissance. Finally, the Henry Villard houses (1882–85), also in New York on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street, and also by McKim, Mead and White were in an imperial style, but this time the architects were working within the tradition of the High Renaissance, specifically, the Palazzo Cancellería, Rome (circa 1485–95).
The Villard original interiors, based on French rather than Italian Renaissance design, boasted work by the usual cast of characters—John La Farge (murals), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (red Verona marble fireplace), Maitland Armstrong (mosaic vaulted ceilings), and Louis Comfort Tiffany (leaded glass windows). However, the Villard houses, with their imposing, unified facade and gracious courtyard were later dwarfed by the Helmsley Palace, a modernist skyscraper hotel that acquired them. The houses became the Palace’s frontispiece but the hotel’s very presence enveloped the original buildings it preserved, even as its particular style of interior design overwhelmed the reception rooms it had restored to public use.
Since it was the patrons of the late nineteenth century who held the keys to artistic success, designers and architects fully understood that they must be satisfied with the plans. Architects often submitted two different presentations for significant commissions. In 1892 Richard Morris Hunt prepared two different facades for the Breakers (1894), the Newport summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. One, which Hunt preferred, was in the style of a French chateau; the other, for which Cornelius Vanderbilt II opted, was based on a palazzo of northern Italian design, although, at the Vanderbilts’ request, a third story was added to the original design.
Such grand American houses were designed for great receptions, of which the most notable was the housewarming of William Kissam Van-derbilt on Fifth Avenue. William Kissam and his wife, the former Alva Smith, gave a costume ball there costing $75,000. He appeared as the due de Guise, Alva as a Venetian princess. Cornelius II came as Louis XVI and his wife as an electric lamp, wearing not incandescent bulbs but iridescent diamonds. The highlight of the evening was a hobbyhorse quadrille. The guests donned hunting pink and danced wearing hobbyhorses made of real horsehair.
It seemed that everyone on the way up in high society wanted to ingratiate themselves with Alva Smith Vanderbilt. She was a vivacious southern belle who built houses so extravagant that everyone wanted to visit them and who threw parties so dazzling that everyone wanted to attend. The most courageous of all Vanderbilt hostesses and a woman who acted for herself, when Alva sued William Kissam for divorce, in defiance of convention, it was for adultery. When she gave parties with her second husband, G. H. P. Belmont, it was to ridicule the conventions of polite society that she hosted a dinner for a chimpanzee. When Belmont died, she became an ardent feminist, an outspoken advocate of women’s suffrage.
Yet the brilliant and widely reported parties in the magnificent houses of the Vanderbilts and others encouraged dissatisfaction among hundreds of thousands of workers across the land who were being exploited by industrial entrepreneurs with low wages. Artisans knew that their arduous toil profited only a privileged few. An article for the Atlantic Monthly in 1878 noted how workers were coming to regard “works of art and instruments of high culture, with all the possessions and surroundings of people of wealth and refinement, as causes and symbols of the laborer’s poverty and degradation, and therefore as things to be hated.”
Of course the rich, as they approach the end of their mortal lives, can never be sure what lies ahead any more than can the rest of mankind. Just as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald has a character in one of his short stories, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), try and bribe God by offering him the colossal, mountainous diamond on which the family fortune is based if only He will avert sure ruin, so robber barons and their families in the Gilded Age had qualms about their own affluence amid want. A spirit of noblesse oblige pervaded the families of certain entrepreneurs who came to believe it was their moral duty to found such major cultural institutions as museums, libraries, and opera houses. This was certainly the role that John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie cast for themselves when they founded educational institutions. Even Cornelius Vanderbilt was prompted by his second wife to make a gift of $1 million to the Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (1872), in Nashville, Tennessee, which became Vanderbilt University in 1873 and opened in 1875—an act of philanthropy that was otherwise out of character. The Metropolitan Opera, New York, was also conceived by the Vanderbilt family and their associates and opened at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, in 1883. Appropriately enough for a house that was to become known as the “Diamond Horseshoe,” the first work was Gounod’s Faust, with its famous jewel song. It was not sung in the original French but in Italian, thus giving rise to wordplay about the “foul song from Just.”
The dining room of the Anderson House in Washington, D.C., photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, with its heavy mix of inlaid marble floor, Flemish tapestries, and ornate ornaments and ceiling, is typical of upper-class taste at the close of the Gilded Age. The house was built between 1901 and 1905 to designs by Brown and Little as the home of diplomat Larz Anderson. In 1938 it became the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of male descendants of veterans of the Revolutionary War. (Library of Congress.)
Sweet Disposition
In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum in New York mounted Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection, an exhibition drawing together 450 items to celebrate one of the great art collections of the Gilded Age, that of Henry (“Harry”) Osborne Havemeyer, the rapacious sugar magnate, and his wife, Louisine. By their choice of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ornaments, curators Gary Tinterow and Alice Cooney Frelinghuy-sen captured the essence of art collections among the robber barons.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalog of the same name with a notable chronology by Susan Alyson Stein and appendix by Gretchen Wold, illustrated various central themes of the American Renaissance: First, that a grand house and its interior design should be specially commissioned to encourage indigenous but European-trained American artists working within a grand tradition of ennobling art. The Havemeyers loved to mix styles in their mansion on Fifth Avenue that drew from Celtic, Japanese, Chinese, Moorish, and Byzantine elements in a house that might, in terms of its general ensemble, be described as American fortress. They also liked to splash bright colors around the interior. They invited Louis Comfort Tiffany to decorate the rooms with stained glass windows and wall mosaics, using opalescent semiprecious stones. The overall effect of his mosaic centerpiece of two peacocks outstaring one another is curious, being both garish and lopsided, as the unevenly executed peacock bodies in darker hues, and their resplendent tails, are upstaged and outflanked by the overdecorated background.
Second, that such collections as the Havemeyers’ should be eclectic, comprehensive, and overwhelming. The way the Havemeyers acquired their paintings and sculptures was consonant with business ethics in the Gilded Age. They were, by turns, rapacious, discriminating, and partisan. The fiercely competitive Harry Havemeyer bought one of the greatest of all Rembrandts, the portrait of Herman Doomer, as well as an excellent selection of Rembrandt’s drawings. Havemeyer was indignant when Italian authorities prevented him from acquiring Botticelli’s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Like other robber baron families, the Havemeyers were interested in, and acquired, mediocre examples of Asian art, notably Japanese sword accoutrements, lacquer medicine boxes, and woodblock prints, as well as Chinese vases of the Qing dynasty. The Havemeyers’ greatest acquisitions were in the field of French art, notably works by the French impressionists Manet, Monet, and Degas, as well as by Gustave Courbet. However, all were placed at the service of a nouveau riche sensibility. Havemeyer failed in his bid to buy Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory (1855). This was fortunate for the preservation of a monumental canvas since eliminative Harry wanted to cut out the central part of the painting, depicting the artist and his nude model, supposedly on the noble premise that this was as much as he thought could be accommodated in his New York mansion. It was the depth of the Havemeyers’ holdings in works by nineteenth-century French artists that gives their entire collection a reputation in the field second only to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Moreover, it was the assistance given to the Havemeyers by their friend, the American impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, in this sphere that illustrates a third characteristic theme of industrial entrepreneurs working within the spirit of the American Renaissance. It was not primarily as painters that American women artists in the late nineteenth century most often excelled but rather as arbitrators, guardians, and collectors. Thus Louisine Havemeyer worked closely with Mary Cassatt to assemble the collection. It was Cassatt who convinced Louisine Havemeyer to acquire works by Degas at a time he was little known in the United States. Later, it would be women who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
Fourth, the Havemeyers and their ilk were not stooges to manipulative artists or connoisseurs. They had their own ideas about what they liked and would collect nothing later than postimpressionist paintings by Cezanne. Neverthless, they became obsessed by Corot’s figure paintings, rather than his more popular landscapes, and they became fascinated with Spanish art, notably El Greco and Goya, well before they were fashionable. The Havemeyers’ vanity and competitiveness, their curious mix of generosity and stinginess, of insight and ignorance also resulted in misjudgments about where best to apply their fortune. Thus of their sixteen supposed Goyas, only four turned out to be originals. This also indicates something of the level of art knowledge and insight that was available to them through the offices of such powerful dealers as Durand Ruel.
Fifth, and in the spirit of noblesse oblige of this generation of robber barons, as delineated by Carnegie and the Vanderbilts that distribution and dissemination should follow accumulation, Louisine, while reserving many precious works for her children, on her death in 1929 bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum the greater part of the collection, comprising almost two thousand Egyptian and Roman sculptures, and European, Asian, and Islamic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and decorative objects. It was, perhaps, in toto the greatest of all gifts to the Metropolitan and more remarkable for the absence of strings about galleries being named after the Havemeyers or rules about the ways that the collection should be displayed.
Built by the People and Dedicated to Learning
The American Renaissance was not simply for the elite of high society and those who aspired to join its ranks. It extended to the masses and the need to provide them with the means of education and self-improvement. Thus the Boston Public Library, built between 1887 and 1894, was a major building with a truly public purpose. Built with money from public funds but supported by the academic and cultured elite of Boston, its purpose was proclaimed by its major inscriptions. Above the entrance and center doors were the legends, “Built by the People and Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning” and “Free to All.”
The graceful design and grand scale of the library put it on a par with great European monuments. The form of the Boston Public Library is that of a large Renaissance palazzo in a pink Milford granite that has bleached over the years, designed by architect Charles Follen McKim to contrast with the darker colors of neighboring buildings in Copley Square. All the different interior elements—entrance, function, and decoration—are subservient to the outer form of a solid block. An inner courtyard of yellow brick offers the sanctuary of an academic quadrangle. However, the interior is dark—handsome to those who admire a stolid design giving an impression of stability but heavy and oppressive to those who find libraries intimidating. This lowering effect was heightened by almost a century of neglect which allowed dirt and decay to disfigure the interior until the library trustees initiated a comprehensive restoration project in 1991.
Among the artists who contributed to the exterior were Bela Pratt, who designed the statues of Art and Science to guard the doors; Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed relief panels over the doors; and Ken-yon Cox, who designed the exterior panel and seal executed by Saint-Gaudens. Among the artists who contributed to the elaborate sequence of interior space and decoration were Daniel Chester French, who designed magnificent bronze doors, and Frederick MacMonnies, who provided memorials of heroes. The murals are of particular note. For the delivery room Edwin Austin Abbey provided The Quest for the Holy Grail. His medieval knights, attired in rich colors and attended by angels, have a Pre-Raphaelite sensibility. French mural painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes supplied murals entitled The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit: The Harbinger of Light, celebrating what he himself termed “the four great expressions of the human mind: Poetry, Philosophy, History, Science,” in pale color schemes suggested by frescoes of the early Italian Renaissance.
Most impressive of all, John Singer Sargent painted murals about The History of Religion on a comprehensive scale, drawing on ancient, Byzantine, and Renaissance models with vision and power. In the centerpiece, The Oppression of the Children of Israel, Sargent produced an icon of cultural protest that had considerable resonance for Americans who had survived the turbulent passing of American slavery: glacial portraits of an Egyptian pharaoh, representing the power responsible for the enslavement of the Hebrews, and a harsh Babylonian king, representing the state responsible for the first Diaspora; and a tender portrait of a yearning Israelite youth whose aspirations remain beyond the mortal world. Below the centerpiece are friezes of the prophets, clothed in black, white, and gray, their somber contemplation set off sharply against the gold leaf base. Sargent wanted these murals to be illuminated by natural light from the skylights above, but the library authorities decided to remedy leakage problems from the skylights by covering them, thus blocking out the light.
What is now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., completed in 1897, became even more celebrated for its decorations than the Boston Public Library. Its interior boasted towering marble columns, murals, mosaics, and stained glass. Yet, strictly speaking, the exterior design of the Jefferson Building, by Smithmeyer and Pelz—the winner of a competition in 1873—predated the American Renaissance.
The original architects of the Jefferson Building were immigrants who responded readily to different stimuli in those years before scholars became more exacting in their application of Italian Renaissance styles. John L. Smithmeyer was born in Austria and Paul J. Pelz in Germany. Having served apprenticeships in Chicago and New York, they came to Washington, D.C., in the 1860s. Their understanding of what constituted an Italian Renaissance building was based largely on the facade. After a long delay before construction commenced in 1887, various troubles ensued and both architects were fired, Smithmeyer in 1888 and Pelz in 1893. They were succeeded by General Thomas Lincoln Casey, chief of the army engineers, and Bernard L. Green, an engineer. Hitherto, any revisions had been minor: now, Casey and Green’s revision of the original plan included redesigning the dome.
In 1892 Casey’s son, Edward Pearce Casey, a former Ecole student and a protege of McKim with a New York practice of his own, was appointed architect and given charge of the interior design and decoration. The various architects had been so economical in their use of funds that it was now possible to set aside a special fund for the decoration of the building with sculptures and murals. The younger Casey acted as architectural impresario, supervising the work of nineteen leading mural painters on 112 murals completed within two years. In addition, he commissioned twenty-two sculptors and seven other artists (who worked on ornamental paintings). The list of contributing artists and sculptors reads like a Who’s Who of artists of the American Renaissance, including such men and women as Elihu Vedder, Pratt, Cox, Philip Martiny, French, and Saint-Gaudens.
The completed Thomas Jefferson Building, inspired by the Paris Opera of the nineteenth century and Italian palazzos of the fifteenth century, is different from other masterpieces of the American Renaissance. The interior design is picturesque because of its many embellishments, but is somewhat fractured; its elaborate parts overwhelm any integral unity. Despite the high quality of the sculptures, much of the decoration—particularly the mosaics—is crudely executed. It looks well photographed in a catalog but the effect in full scale at firsthand is raw.
Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Architecture, by virtue of its scale, was the controlling artistic enterprise that determined the place and role of the other arts. Of all the arts it was architecture that was the most developed professionally. In 1857 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) was founded. Hitherto, most architects had learned their craft by educating themselves, in apprenticeship to a mentor who might himself have been an immigrant or trained in Europe. For instance, Richard Morris Hunt studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts from 1846 to 1853 and returned to the United States in 1855. In 1858 he established a private atelier in New York, providing training for young architects of whom several, including William Henry Ware, George B. Post, Henry Van Brunt, and Stanford White, were to become leaders of the American Renaissance.
In The Prophets Elijah, Moses, Joshua (1895), the central panel of his mural The History of Religion for the Boston Public Library, we see two sides to artist John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925) later work. Whereas Moses (center) is a monumental bas-relief, an inscrutable figure holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments and enveloped in wing-like scrolls, Elijah (left) and Joshua (right) are simpler, darker figures, set against a gold leaf background, and painted with looser, flowing strokes that convey anguish as well as dignity. (Boston Public Library; photo by Library of Congress.)
In 1865 the first American school of architecture was created under pioneer William Robert Ware at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. Later, schools were established at Cornell (1871); Syracuse (1873); Michigan (1876); Columbia (1881, also under Ware); Pennsylvania (1890); Armour Institute (1895); and Harvard (1895). All followed the precedent established by Ware, first at MIT and later at Columbia, of employing the training method of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, including the hiring of French critics, notably Maurice J. Prevot at Cornell and Paul Cret at Pennsylvania. Several other aspiring architects chose to study at the Ecole itself, including Henry Hobson Richardson and Charles Follen McKim. While American attendance at the Ecole was at its peak between 1890 and 1914, by the 1890s most American architects were committed to the principles of the AIA.
Both the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and American architectural schools emphasized that successful architecture depended on a sense of order and form and that buildings should meet traditional standards of “firmness, commodity, and delight.” A sense of order would be instilled in young architects, first, through formal courses in architectural history, construction, physics, and physical geometry; and second, in a studio where the architects’ talents would be molded by qualified instructors. While architectural schools taught various styles, in the Gilded Age they showed a preference for Roman, French, and Italian forms of classicism.
The method of design taught in schools entailed three separate activities. In the first stage the student studied a problem and devised a preliminary solution, or parti, in the form of a sketch, or esquisse. If the parti was considered successful, it would be developed in a further sequence of drawings—the second activity. The third activity was the elaboration of the original ideas in drawings revealing elevation, plan, and section. Architectural drawings were the means by which ideas were investigated and made available to patrons and builders. By the time a building was under construction, transfers, also known as blueprints, had been made from the working drawings and given to the construction team.
Following training at an architectural school, it was considered essential for a young architect to serve time in a well-established office. The best-known such office was that of McKim, Mead and White (formed in 1879), and among their trainees who went on to establish distinctive careers nationwide were Cass Gilbert, John M. Carrere, Thomas Hastings, Royal Cortissoz, Henry Bacon, and Egerton Swartwout. McKim, Mead and White could be as autocratic as the industrial entrepreneurs. One of Stanford White’s assistants, H. Van Buren Magonigle, recalled White in “A Half Century of Architecture,” written for Pencil Points in March 1934: “He would tear into your alcove, perhaps push you off your stool with his body while he reached for pencil and tracing paper and in five minutes make a dozen sketches of some arrangement of detail or plan, slam his hands down on one of them—or perhaps two or three of them if they were close together—say, ‘Do that!’ and tear off again. You had to guess what and which he meant.” Imaginative architects such as White had profound preferences and these showed in their finished works. Stanford White was a noted bon viveur and his buildings, such as the Madison Square Presbyterian Church (1903-6), reflected somewhat his flamboyant life-style. So did Madison Square Garden, which White designed in 1891, and which, by dark irony, became the scene of his death when he was shot there on June 25, 1906, by Henry Kendall (“Harry”) Thaw, jealous husband of Evelyn Nesbit, a showgirl with whom White had an affair.
White’s partner, Charles Follen McKim, was far more controlled, indeed reticent, and his buildings were more strictly classical, restrained, and heavy, such as the Boston Public Library and the original Pennsylvania Station (1902–11). However reticent he may have been in public, H. Van Buren Magonigle found McKim’s methods with his assistants as disconcerting as White’s. McKim, immaculately dressed and poised, would sit down at a draughtsman’s work space and there dictate his design aloud and then want it continuously revised on the original draft according to his constantly evolving ideas. The poor draughtsman had to struggle to keep abreast of the revisions, which became more difficult as he tried to cope with paper successively blackened by each erasure and change.
In the mid-1960s New York’s old Penn Station, between Seventh and Eighth avenues and Thirty-second and Thirty-fourth streets, New York, with an outer concourse designed on the lines of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and an inner concourse constructed with steel to allow shafts of light to stream from skylights to tracks, was demolished, prompting a public outcry by conservation groups. People were at first aghast at commercial vandalism and subsequently appalled at the replacement–an inferior and squalid modernist construction that property developers had fobbed off on the public. The loss of the much-loved original station stimulated more effective political lobbying by various preservation groups, and appropriate protective legislation helped ensure the survival of other classic buildings.
Architects were responsible not only for the public buildings they had designed but also for the public space outside them. Even as distinguished a landscape architect as Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., one of the creators of Central Park, and the man who, with Calvert Vaux, had first coined the term “landscape architect” in 1863, was subsidiary to Charles McKim, architect of Columbia University’s main campus in Morning-side Heights and of the path that comes to a climax with the Low Library (1894), designed as a Roman Pantheon.
Similarly, Olmsted found, much to his chagrin, that his original scheme for an “informal water effect” at the Court of Honor at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was deflected by ambitious and self-serving architects determined on a scheme of imperial splendor. Thus the principal exhibition buildings were grouped together in a Court of Honor linked by terraces, bridges, and canals suggested by Olmsted’s assistant, Henry Sargent Codman. After the exhibition closed, Olmsted redesigned the site as Jackson Park.
Another landscape artist who, like the elder Olmsted, made the transition from designing informal gardens to landscape architecture (and later to the architecture of buildings) was Charles Adams Platt, who had originally studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts as a painter. With his younger brother, William, he toured Italy in 1893 to study, draw, and photograph villas and gardens from the fifteenth century onward. Charles published their findings, first in two articles for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in July and August 1893, and then in book form as Italian Gardens (1894). The essence of his argument was that house and gardens should be considered and designed as a total unit and that landscape architects in the United States should employ the same methods as the designers of the gardens of Italian villas.
The City Beautiful movement was synonymous with the rise of another architect, Daniel Burnham, who began to come into his own following the premature death of his partner, John Wellborn Root, in 1891. Burnham was a staunch champion of the moral purpose of the American Renaissance. He served the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in a variety of roles, notably as director of works and chairman of the consulting board. Shortly after, his company, D. H. Burnham and Company, began to concentrate on public and commercial buildings, becoming the leading architectural company in America. Daniel Burnham was a shrewd and pragmatic executive, well able to manage numerous talented individuals. He also prided himself on his ability to think big. An associate, Willis Polk, rephrased one of Burnham’s cherished opinions. Much quoted, it reads: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. . . . Make big plans; aim high in hope and work. . . . Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.” For those who came to dislike the classicism of the American Renaissance, this was simply a reworking of the tired adage of the tailor advising a dissatisfied customer about the material he proffers: “Never mind the quality, feel the width.” In the opinion of later critics, the buildings of Burnham and his admirers were inflated. Yet the very scorn piled on these classical buildings by later generations who wanted them torn down to make way for buildings of more contemporary, modernist styles, attests to their authority as symbols of a particular civilization at its zenith. Burnham gained a considerable reputation as a city planner, notably for schemes for Washington, D.C. (1901-2), Cleveland (1902-3), San Francisco (1904–6), and Chicago (1906–9). His career was capped by his appointment as first chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C, in 1910.
The Great Hall of the Library of Congress, with a statue of Minerva by Philip Martiny (1858-1927). The photograph by W. C. Handy, by judicious choice of angle, makes the solemn atmosphere more intriguing and the goddess of wisdom and war a yet more elusive captive. (Library of Congress.)
Our sense of the cumulative impact of American Renaissance architecture comes not just from the surviving buildings but also from the numerous photographs and drawings of the others. As David Gebhard and Deborah Nevins show in their 200 Years of American Architectural Drawing (1977), architectural drawings, while an essential part of the process of creating a building, could also become complete works of art in their own right. Through a whole series of means—elaborate intersections of the interiors, careful shading of elevations, perspective drawings, and so on—architects made sustained attempts to convey a sense of three dimensions rather than two. Some clients could not visualize a proposed building through purely architectural drawings. They required elaborate and dramatic perspective drawings, such as Francis L. V. Hoppin prepared. Hoppin was the most sought after artist of the day for perspective drawings. Having studied at Brown, MIT, and the Ecole before working in the McKim office (1886–94), where he was the specialist in perspective drawing, he went on to design his own buildings, including the New York Police Department Headquarters and a house for novelist Edith Wharton in Lenox, Massachusetts. His talents as a perspective artist remained in demand and he undertook important work for the McMillan Commission in Washington, D.C. Egerton Swartwout, another McKim employee, characterized Hoppin’s skill to provide “colored, blue sky and trees where you know there aren’t any, and flying shadows, cloud shadows on the building you know, a real snappy piece of work.”
Other distinguished renderers of architectural drawings included Hughson Hawley, an English immigrant who started as a scene painter and moved to architectural rendering, completing 11,000 architectural drawings in a long career. Hawley’s special gift was to present buildings clearly but with great dignity, as suggested by his presentation of the facade for the Rhode Island State Capitol in Providence (circa 1892) by McKim, Mead and White. Jules Guerin, originally of St. Louis but who had studied in France, showed the influence of the French impressionists in his hazy, often golden drawings of architectural projects, such as his Arch of the Rising Sun From the Court of the Universe, a project by McKim, Mead and White for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco of 1915. Guerin chose to minimize detail in order to accentuate atmosphere.
Painting and Sculpture
Underlying the need to supply the public with high art was a conviction that such elevated art must be noble, heroic, and ideal. Ideal art was an idealized interpretation of the world that drew upon the past rather than from nature, as the artists of the Italian Renaissance had done. Essentially, the ideal meant images that were noble and beautiful, were universally applicable, and carried the ideal of elevated thought and virtue.
As with architecture, the means of training and inspiring new generations of easel artists and sculptors was art institutions. Hitherto, training had come by practice in a studio, such as the studio of William Merritt Chase in the Tenth Street Studio Building, New York. Chase and his fellow artists, many of whom had studied in Munich, wanted art to be executed with the freedom and élan of Franz Hals or Diego Velazquez. Opposed to this school of thought were those who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and favored the Italian Renaissance, its interest in allegory, and its more accomplished techniques. This school of thought convinced patrons, municipalities, and the public of the need for art institutions to transmit the principles and techniques of classical art. Accordingly, whereas in 1875 there were only ten art schools in the United States, by 1882 there were thirty-nine and another fourteen at universities as well as fifteen decorative art societies.
Among principal artistic influences upon artists in the American Renaissance were poetry and myth. Both in sculpture and painting, the human figure, whether nude or skimpily clad, was either used to personify abstract concepts such as Justice, Industry, or the State, or a real person imbued with higher virtues. Among artists to startle the public with his use of nudes was Olin Levi Warner whose bronze sculpture, Diana (1887), with minimal classical attributes, was widely praised for its supple form and implied sensuality.
At first artists who chose subjects from the classical world did so without commissions. This interest in classical forms extended to artists such as Thomas Eakins. His technique was usually based on painting single layers of pigment, a technique inspired by the works of Velazquez. In a period when much American art was saccharine, many of Eakins’s portraits were arresting for their force and candor, such as The Gross Clinic (1875) and Walt Whitman (1887). Nevertheless, Eakins admired works by the Greek sculptor Phidias. In the mid-1880s he began to explore classical subjects as in the rough-hewn subjects of his Arcadia (1883). However, the ends to which artists developed classical themes varied. Whereas Eakins’s Arcadian paintings and sculptures suggest an idyllic ancient world, works by another contemporary artist, Francis David Millet, conveyed the regular life of that world.
To emphasize the allegorical nature of their work, artists and sculptors lent their subjects classical garments, shields, wreaths, and wings. In a letter of 1912 Abbott Thayer, who had studied with Jean Léon Géróme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, explained his liberal use of wings on female subjects, notably in his Venetian Angel (1889): “Doubtless my lifelong passion for birds has helped to incline me to work wings into my pictures; but primarily I have put on wings probably more to symbolize an exalted atmosphere (above the realm of genre painting) where one need not explain the action of his figures.”
Across the nation, as time softened residual bitter memories of the Civil War, it became a subject for commemoration as some sort of inevitable ritual initiation, necessary to bring the nation to full national maturity. This was certainly the spirit in which Augustus Saint-Gaudens conceived and executed the Admiral David Farragut Memorial for Madison Square Park, New York (1877–1881). His bronze statue of the admiral, aloft a granite pedestal designed by Stanford White with incised figures representing Loyalty and Courage and carved by Saint-Gaudens, captures Farragut on the bridge of his ship with the wind raising his coat. Yet Farragut’s expression remains stoical and assured.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s imposing bronze monument to Colonel Robert Shaw in Boston (1884-1897), set in a dignified neoclassical frame by Charles McKim, also commemorated the wartime contribution of African-American soldiers. Commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it took Saint-Gaudens almost fourteen years to complete, and underwent continuous revision until he was satisfied that he had achieved a suitable balance between the realistic purpose of the marching soldiers, each man an individual portrait, and the symbolic nature of their eventual triumph. Above the soldiers flies an allegorical figure of Victory, carrying a laurel wreath and a poppy of sleep. (Library of Congress.)
Since Abraham Lincoln was the greatest hero of the Civil War, it was inevitable that he should become the subject of numerous idealized sculptures by Daniel Chester French in Lincoln, Nebraska (1909-12), and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Chicago (1887 and 1897-1905), of which the most monumental occupies the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1911–22). The Lincoln Memorial was the creation of architect Henry Bacon, sculptor Daniel Chester French, and mural painter Jules Guerin. The building was planned as a classical temple with thirty-six doric columns, representing the states when Lincoln was president, and forty-eight festoons representing the number of states when the Memorial was under construction. Guerin’s murals on either side of the statue were to “typify in allegory the principles evident in the life of Lincoln”—Emancipation and Reunion. The magnificent outsize marble sculpture of Lincoln is a hero upon a Roman chair decorated with two sets of fasces—the bundles of axes and rods borne by the lictors attending the consuls of ancient Rome. In the Lincoln statue the fasces were intended as symbols of republican probity. By perverse irony, in 1922, the very year the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated, the fasces acquired a different, sinister meaning across the Western world. Dictator Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy as head of a Fascist government that took the name of its movement from the fasces, hence transformed into symbols of totalitarianism.
Out of the need to create a heroic past for the United States came work extolling the American West: paintings and sketches of dashing, if rough and ready, cowboys by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell; and dignified, heroic, and refined sculptures of Indians, or Native Americans, by Alexander Phimister Proctor.
Artists’ search for symbols also led them to another distinctive form of the American Renaissance, the ideal American woman as a virgin—a symbol of Liberty, Justice, and Columbia. They depicted elegant young women glowing with health but unaware of their latent sexuality. The American virgin can be discerned in all forms of art from highbrow paintings by Thomas Derring to the lowbrow of the Swift Packing Company’s Premium Calendar. The most practiced exponent was Charles Dana Gibson. The typical Gibson girl with full hair, hourglass figure, and fresh gaze was an American icon before and after the turn of the century. She was a major presence in literature, notably in works by novelist Henry James. In Portrait of a Lady (1881), the apex of James’s early career, a misunderstanding by an American virgin abroad leads to her entombment in a loveless marriage and contributes to the early death of the man who truly loves her.
Idealization of human figures extended beyond those intended to represent abstract qualities to aristocrats of flesh and blood. Here the idealization was modified but still discernible. It can be seen in the works of expatriate artist John Singer Sargent, born in Florence, who was the supreme American portrait painter of the age. Sargent first became famous for a succés de scandale: the portrait of his cousin Virginie Avegno, Mme. Gatreau, as Madame X (1884) in a decollété pose. Shortly after he settled in London, he won public acclaim for his study of two little girls lighting a Japanese lantern, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86). Influenced by Velazquez and Degas, Sargent’s subsequent portraits of aristocrats in London created an image of the English nobility in the 1890s and 1900s that has been a most enduring memorial. His portraits record a social type as well as an individual. Such portraits as The Earl of Dalhousie (1900) and Sir Frank Swettenham (1904), imperial consuls both, carry the projected values of British upper crust society at the turn of the century with all its self-confidence and hauteur. Sargent’s The Wyndham Sisters (1900) was a learned variation on the Three Graces and intended as a homage to the eighteenth-century English artist Joshua Reynolds. Sargent exaggerated the height of his exquisite female subjects, thereby lending them additional authority as well as showing the effortless poise of those who were in charge of society and knew it. He was also much influenced by the French impressionists, of whom Claude Monet became a close friend. Sargent could capture every effect of light on form in a few rapid strokes.
For many artists of the American Renaissance, art was only art when it was contrived. In his 1908 portrait of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), artist Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) achieved two layers of meaning. The portrait of the artist at work is a profile, thereby echoing the classic pose Saint-Gaudens used in numerous low-relief portraits. The work on which Saint-Gaudens is engaged is a relief of William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), prominent teacher of the Tenth Street Studio Building, whom Cox much admired. (Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Gift of Friends of the Sculptor, 1908; photo, Library of Congress.)
Sargent’s impressionistic works were similar to those of another American expatriate painter, Mary Cassatt. Cassatt was better known and appreciated in France, where she exhibited with Degas and the impressionists in 1879-86, than in the United States, where she exhibited with the New Society of American Artists in 1878. Her pictures are of bourgeois society at play. Several of her works feature mothers and children in tender scenes, such as The Boating Party (1893-94).
Although inspired by ancient murals and the Italian Renaissance, American sculpture showed far more human personality than its models. During his studies in Paris and a visit to Rome, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the great American sculptor of the age and one of the first to show the influence of the Italian Renaissance in his work, developed a subtle style of modeling from Renaissance ornamental motifs. While drawing from Greek sculpture, Saint-Gaudens gave his subjects a sort of tender personality. In the words of artist and admirer Kenyon Cox, it was as if they were not detached gods and goddesses but, rather, men and women with their own characters, virtues, and faults. His sculptures had none of the deep hollows of classical statues but instead a low relief to imply some sort of veil between sculpture and viewer.
Another American sculptor who specialized in public statues of American heroes was Paul Wayland Bartlett. He was disturbed by the poor quality of many public memorials to the Civil War across America. He himself concentrated on heroes before the Civil War, such as Washington at Valley Forge (cast 1927) and Lafayette on Horseback (1899–1908), exhibited in the Louvre as a gift to the French people in acknowledgment of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty.
Once again mural paintings became a major art form. New buildings, especially public buildings, required the assistance of murals, sculpture, and other decoration to complete the design. Murals by John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, Gari Melchers, and H. Siddons Mowbray adorned capitols, churches, libraries, and expositions. Their subjects ranged from the biblical to the allegorical and depicted the contribution of arts, science, and technology to the new American world of scientific and social achievement. For the Gold Room of the Henry Villard Houses, New York, John La Farge produced murals depicting Music and Art; for the Supreme Court room in the Minnesota State Capitol he painted four panels on the history of law depicting Confucius, Moses, Socrates, and Count Raymond of Toulouse (whose subject is “Adjustment of Conflicting Interests”). H. Siddons Mowbray decorated the University Club (1904) and J. P. Morgan Library (1905–7) in New York with murals inspired by Pinturicchio’s work (1492-94) in the Vatican for Alexander VI.
Despite clear draughtsmanship, many paintings by artists in the American Renaissance had some of the characteristics of free form and a concern for the overall design that would later become associated with abstract art. This is partly due to the blurring of the distinction between easel art and decorative art in the interest of total design. The idea of expanding the traditional horizons of easel art was welcomed by such experimental artists as John La Farge who, in a lecture of 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, explained that artists’ minds were enlarged by having to encompass larger spaces and different materials. Another artist intent on exploding traditional boundaries was Arthur F. Matthews of California who, with his wife, Lucia K. Matthews, produced exquisite designs, furniture, and paintings.
Although artists and architects in the Gilded Age were inspired by the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, their patrons never let them forget the priorities of the present. It was their task to celebrate the confidence of accumulated capital. One of the most representative ornaments of the age was the opulent Adams Vase (1893–95) of gold adorned with pearls, enamels, and semiprecious stones. Designed by Paulding Farnham, chief designer of the Tiffany Company (1889–circa 1904), it was presented to Edward Dean Adams, chairman of the American Cotton Oil Company, by the stockholders and directors. Robber barons and artists in their employ had chosen as symbol of America’s new prosperity not silver or lead, but gold. As society hostess Elizabeth Drexel Lehr explains in “King” Lehr and the Gilded Age (1935):
It merited its name. There was gold everywhere. It adorned the houses of men who had become millionaires overnight, and who were trying to forget with all possible speed the days when they had been poor and unknown. . . . Gold was the most desirable thing to have because it cost money, and money was the outward and visible sign of success.
The menacing shadows and memories of the Civil War cast a dark pall over Reconstruction, but time eased the most bitter memories and thus the Civil War became a subject for commemoration by sculptors and artists as a ritual initiation that had brought the nation to full national maturity. This battlefield monument to the Confederate dead of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, has an idealized equestrian soldier, his arms outstretched as if to supplicate God as well as to defy the Yankees. (Photograph by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration in 1936; Library of Congress.)