NDIVIDUAL or nation, it is well to stop now and then to ask one's self candidly, Whither away? Not that man can more than guess the path that person or nation will tread; but it interests and sometimes profits to determine, so far as the signs permit, the goal towards which we tend. The experience of one artist cannot be said to settle definitely a matter so wide-reaching as the trend of sculpture in a community which outwardly is like those of Europe, but differs from them in many important respects. Still, it teaches something, and may direct us to the right view. In matters of the fine arts painting so takes the eye that we are hardly conscious of the extent to which the art of the statuary is called to play a part in the decoration of cities. Comparatively few persons heed the parks of Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and those other cities where statues are amassed. By private efforts for the most part, and only to some degree by the aid of legislatures, our land is gradually becoming peopled with a nation of silent effigies in granite, bronze, and marble. The papers have paragraphs and notices, and faithful reports of ceremonies at the unveiling of memorials get into print; but most of us fail to note how frequent these have become, how large a factor in the landscape of our great cities is the statue. This is true of Great Britain and Ireland, and of France on a yet more comprehensive scale. In these lands the Government is more active than individuals; especially in France does the state actively engage in the support of schools and scholars, grant rewards to merit, and systematically encourage its sculptors and architects, while withholding nothing of these benefits from workmen of other nationalities in the largest and most intelligent way. Perhaps it is because with us the evolution of sculpture is more spontaneous and from the people, so far as it goes, that we are apt to misread the signs of what is too closely bound up with our lives, just as one is likely to be uncertain of the pictures of one's own face and character. This spontaneity, this unfostered quality in American work, should be borne in mind when we come to speak of the future of sculpture here. Meantime it is a truism to say that we cannot be too careful what is the grade of the statuary we put up. To cap it, let another truism be forgiven the sculptor himself, how necessary

that we should understand and appreciate the man to whom such work is intrusted!

Olin Levi Warner was born somewhat more than forty years ago in Suffield, a little Connecticut town where deacons are powerful and where his descent from a hero of the Revolution is oftener heard of than it would be in the city of New York, once the town of tories. His life has been uneventful in the picturesque sense; hard labor, disappointments, meager pay, and meager existence are not sensational matters to any one except him who suffers them. Artisan, telegraph operator, pupil, graduate of a fine-arts school, workman for trades, sculptor— Olin Warner has been each of these in succession, and in each case has done his duty manfully. Very difficult has it been for him to reach the point where recognition was possible; very slow but sure has been his evolution. The school-boy who astonished his mates by "whittling"-observe the trait which is now hardly more than a tradition of the stage Yankeelittle figures out of wood, chalk, or plaster was succeeded by the youth of nineteen who determined to test his artistic force after a delightfully ignorant but robust method to decide therefrom whether or not he would devote himself to sculpture. He procured a barrel of plaster, set it solid, removed the staves, and set to work manfully to whittle from the ungrateful mass a portrait of his father. A medallion of his father and mother, made at a much later period, is given in the woodcut to recall this turning-point of his career. For on the success of this his future hung. Luckily for him, perhaps more luckily for us, it was voted a capital likeness; great was the sensation in the small circle in Vermont where his parents then lived. He was dubbed a genius, and a famous future was predicted for him. But nobody came forward with practical aid to enable him to study sculpture. In this dilemma Warner acted with a resolution characteristic of many Americans, and thereby assured himself of eventual success, though at the loss of precious years. He deferred his further education in art until by his own unaided efforts he could collect money with which to live abroad. By learning the trade of an operator on the telegraph he not only supported himself for six years, but laid aside enough to take him to Paris. The heroism of a struggle like that can never be measured, because artistic natures suffer more

than ordinary people from the little miseries of life and the great misery of that hope deferred which sickens the heart.

On his arrival in Paris, at the age of twentyfive, Olin Warner was lucky in meeting several generous young Frenchmen who counseled him wisely and put him in the way of an immediate practical acquaintance with tools, processes, and work. When he entered the École des Beaux-Arts he was already something of a modeler, and avoided a vast amount of routine through which the ordinary scholar wades without understanding why. He was three and a half years in Paris, and always speaks with gratitude of the aid he received there from French fellow-students and masters. While in Paris he modeled a slender girlish dancing figure called "May," which he was forced through poverty to sell to a firm of dealers in artistic gas-burners. Returning to America, he found New York the city most likely to help him, and here for five years more he struggled and starved until recognition came. During this dismal period he worked for manufacturers of silver and plated ware, bronze mantel ornaments, and such matters. Perhaps it is Mr. Daniel Cottier to whom we owe the fact that his courage was not completely overthrown and he forced to give up sculpture. By granting him the use of a room, and encouraging him with his cheery and acute criticism, Mr. Cottier in all probability saved Warner to the fine arts. Others also recognized his honest, earnest character, and among the young founders of the Society of American Artists none was better liked personally, none more esteemed for the quality of his workmanship, than this blunt young sculptor. The period of Indian statuary through which all our sculptors must pass with the regularity of a disease of children brought him no further harm than a statuette, conceived in no petty spirit, in which an Indian brave has a panther down which he is dispatching with his tomahawk in a position. that leaves little hope of life to the victor. At the Centennial Exhibition a colossal medallion of Edwin Forrest made an impression, not entirely because it was spirited and because the name was still beloved and admired by old frequenters of the theater, but rather owing to its peculiar broadness and boldness in relief. The effect is anything but soft, nor is it pleasing,- it is almost brutal,and the modeling makes one think of the French sculptor Rude. Only on remembering the nature and dramatic style of Forrest is one reconciled to such a portrait. But it is the real man. An opposite of opposites was the bust of President Hayes, ordered by Mr. McCormick, the chairman in the campaign that elected Mr. Hayes, and given to the Union League VOL. XXXVII.-54.

PORTRAIT BUST OF MISS MAUD MORGAN.

Club, where it now is. Indian heads and heads of beasts in high relief, medallion fashion, were made for the Long Island Historical Society and decorate the façades of the Brooklyn building. In vigorous modeling they recall the Forrest portrait. An order from Mr. I. T. Williams permitted Warner to attack quite another problem. "Twilight" is a half-draped ideal figure of a woman who holds her robe before her face. When this delicate and difficult piece of sculpture was put in marble

ness, there is refinement of contour; in place of theatrical effect to please on a distant view, there are restraint and loveliness fitted for close examination.

But the strong characteristic of movement is not lacking: the finely modeled legs and feet are in the expectancy of movement, as a dancer trembles almost imperceptibly on the eve of taking the step. Yet knowledge of these triumphs, though they may prove the most prof itable of all, because they belong to the coming advance in sculpture, was restricted to a

the portrait is the summit test of an artist's power; if he has the talent to make a likeness and a piece of fine art at the same time, so that the friends of the sitter are not disappointed while others cherish the canvas for its intrinsic art, then indeed is he held a master capable of the highest flights. Among the artists Mr. Warner's bust of Mr. Cottier produced the greatest enthusiasm, for in that he seemed to hit the combination of breadth and delicacy that is classical, and yet neglected nothing essential in the likeness. On all sides one heard the praise

of this Greek work. It is, indeed, a genial thing, not without a suspicion of humor, as if Pan had touched his elbow as he wrought the clay and Bacchus and the Fauns had stood about. It was soon followed by the bust of a young performer on the harp. The sculptor appeared to wish to show that he was master of the feminine face as well as the masculine, and could combine dignity and simplicity with beauty in one rounded piece of art. A lovely grace bathed this figure with a charm that literally and without exaggeration recalled the great antiques. A plaster replica was bought by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Then came a charming bust of Miss Cottier and the virile, beautiful head of J. Alden Weir the painter, which Mr. Kenyon Cox has drawn. A series of basrelief portraits belongs to this period, comprising his father and mother on one field in profile, likenesses of artist and writer friends, including the admirable medallion of Mr. Wyatt Eaton for which the sitter has supplied the pen-and-ink sketch, andghastly pot-boilers!-busts of the dead. recalled from photographs to such poor life as we have to be content with when our dear ones are no more. Likenesses of one sort or another afford an income to the sculptor who neither lives in a country devoted passionately to the fine arts nor has yet won fame. It is so in France, which comes nearest to a land of art. Normally, and on this line, Warner has risen to his present eminence.

The war for the Union found in Connecticut a good, perhaps a great, governor. His face and figure have been reconstructed by the best of Connecticut sculptors, and Buckingham now sits in his curule chair surrounded by the battle flags held and won in that struggle of fratricides. Warner is at a high mark in this subject,-none too grateful, be it said, owing to the hideous. clothes with which modern man disfigures himself,- for he brings out the solid worth of Buckingham, his massive proportions and not ignoble presence, and brings them out not coarsely or with melodrama, but soberly, plainly, discreetly. The civil war was precipitated by an agitator of agitators who made slavery his anathema: the statue of William Lloyd Garrison has now been added to the growing list of thorough works of art for which we have to thank Warner. It stands on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. Something in the ascetic face reminds one of Emerson and Wendell Phillips, as it leans slightly forward over the chest of a man the reverse of athletic-the chest of a type-setter

PORTRAIT BUST.

while the right hand clutches a roll of paper forcibly, as if the man was inwardly moved, while self-control keeps the features calm, even benignant. The crushed paper represents that press which made possible his struggle with the slave interest at the North and the South. The pose is quiet, easy, dignified; the action pentup, not gesticulatory; the head and face venerable and intelligent. Under the chair are bound volumes of "The Liberator," artfully adjusted so as to fill gaps, and to carry the eye over

the whole statue, the result sought being what is termed the monumental in statuary rather than the picturesque, which is more befitting to the statuette. Turning from the Buckingham to the Garrison one is more than ever impressed with the narrowness of the range to which the sculptor is restricted. Here are two elderly men of the same period, each wearing the same hideous garb, each seated, each bareheaded, each more connected with books than with weapons, though in either case a belligerent position had to be taken,- each engaged

ular gaze. Without recourse to banalities that breed weariness, he has achieved the difficult task of making two quite distinct works of art on a plan which is nearly identical.

Nevertheless too much stress should not be put on these colossal portraits. For reasons about to be advanced, consider rather the five typical heads of human races which decorate the façade of the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Philadelphia, or an original, well-composed basrelief of Venus leaning over to caress Cupid, the two figures managed so as to leave the

in the same general warfare as a non-combatant in the ordinary sense, yet each must be originally and individually managed. A separate stamp must be felt in each, so that they who know neither name nor fame of him should gain from the statue some inkling of the services for which he is honored. The picturesque way is to tell the story by accessories; for example, a printingpress for Garrison, a Hartford capitol in miniature for Buckingham. Or the fact that the latter was ex-officio commander of the Connecticut militia might warrant a uniform, while Garrison might have been picturesquely treated with a slave and fetters as accompaniment. But in both cases the strong feeling for the monumental as opposed to the picturesque caused Warner to waive such easy methods of capturing the pop

least of the field unoccupied, after the fashion of ancient Greek coins, cameos, and intaglios. The past ten years of hard work for Mr. Warner have been lightened by one trip to the Mediterranean, Italy, and Spain, in company with the ideal colorist Albert Ryder and others of his intimacy. Few sketches were made, except a wax sketch of a Chioggia fisherwoman of the old Venetian peasant stock as she stands in the village street spinning yarn with her primitive spindle and bobbin. The impression must have been strong, for Warner is not a facile, ready sketcher, and the figure has certainly caught a vivid look that shines out through the apparently hopeless confusion of the bits of wax.

The latest work from Olin Warner has