Arts and Letters

Hermon Atkins MacNeil was born at Chelsea, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1866. After the usual public school education he graduated at the head of his class from the State Normal School, in 1886. Obviously his intention was to train himself as a teacher of drawing in the public schools. A more distinguished lot awaited him. In his early twenties young MacNeil studied at Boston with that remarkable physician, anatomist, and draughtsman, William Rimmer, who for a generation was the embodied conscience of the more serious artists of Boston. Rimmer's discipline added fibre to MacNeil's fundamentally refined talent. To the end of his life MacNeil mentioned Rimmer with admiration and gratitude.

Following this brief Boston training, which confirmed him in his vocation as a sculptor, MacNeil for three years taught drawing and modelling at Cornell, saved a little money, and gained experience. There followed the usual pilgrimage to Paris. Beginning as most Americans did, at Julian's, he studied with Chapu, whose elegance and ideality, drawn largely from Hellenistic and Renaissance sculpture, must have been congenial to his young American disciple. Within a few months MacNeil won fifth place among many contestants for admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and finished the remainder of his two years' sojourn under Falguière. One can imagine little sympathy between such a master and such a pupil. Yet from the robust and florid academicism of Falguière, MacNeil, eminently open-minded and intelligent as he was, may easily have learned an executive habit which was to serve him well in his own copious temporary sculpture for world's exhibitions.

At twenty-six, in 1892, MacNeil returned from France and accepted a position as a teacher of sculpture in the Chicago Art Institute. Chicago was then in the last agonies of preparation for the Columbian Exposition—the first American World Exposition planned by a reasonably unified and competent administration. In many ways MacNeil profited by the situation. He modelled very creditably the sculpture for the Engineering Building. It was his first big job. For it he won his first medal. He served ably on committees, gained the friendship and confidence of the most prominent American architects of the time, and the good architect is a chief source of patronage for the good sculptor. In short one could hardly imagine a young American sculptor more auspiciously launched. It must have amazed his friends when instead of seeking commissions he chose several years of further study abroad, won the Rinehart traveling scholarship, and married the talented sculptress in miniature, Carol Brooks. No less than four times husband and wife were to be honored together by the same jury—an all-time record for married artists. MacNeil had not only acquired a professional partner, but also had domesticated a sympathetic and helpful critic.

MacNeil's four years of advanced study in Europe were spent mostly at Rome, where he profited by the hospitality of the American School, then delightfully lodged in the Villa Aurora, and made a useful friend in J. Q. A. Ward. Very significantly, three out of four considerable works which MacNeil carried through at Rome were on Indian subjects—“The Moqui Runner," "The Primitive Chant," and what was to be his most popular bronze, "The Sun Vow." His only obvious concession to his classic environment was the high relief of six figures, "Out of Chaos Came the Dawn."

All the same I am sure that the sight of fine Hellenistic sculptures in the museums and private collections of Rome must have strongly influenced as intelligent and sensitive an artist as MacNeil. But these revered examples chiefly furthered the fine craftsman in him. Now consummate craftsmanship in whatever art is a matter of infinitesimals. It is the departure from the actual appearance and measurements by small fractions of an inch that gives the heroic marbles of Olympia their supreme distinction, and this sense for telling infinitesimals guided all Greek sculpture of the greatest centuries. So while MacNeil's heart remained with his lithe or rugged Indians, his taste as a craftsman gained much from the Greeks.

A few years after MacNeil's Roman years Mrs. Adeline Adams was to write most perceptively of his rare gift as a modeller in clay: "There are few American sculptors who manipulate the clay as charmingly as does Mr. MacNeil. His work is full of delightful touches and felicitous passages. Yet the firm construction is never sacrificed to the superficial graces."

It was this discretion that kept MacNeil free from many passing fashions and exaggerations. His bronzes looked bronzy, his marbles stony, when it was common to make bronze look like a sort of metallized clay, and even marble was forced to suggest the casual thumbing and fingering of the modeller.

MacNeil returned by way of Paris, where at the World Exposition of 1900 he exhibited two of his Indian subjects, and the tradition that he and his wife should be medalled together was continued. By 1900, being now 36 years old, he settled in the spacious studio at College Point, Long Island, where he was to work for his remaining forty-five years. His high competence and reliability had been widely recognized. Commissions and honorary memberships, medals, and citations he took modestly in his stride. In 1905 he and his wife were elected associates of the National Academy, and the next year he could write N. A. after his name. In 1908 he was elected to the Institute; in 1926 promoted to the Academy. These were overdue honors, but MacNeil had never been precocious, choosing rather for a progress that was steady and sure, letting recognition take care of itself.

Within the limits assigned to this address no enumeration of his works or of the honors received therefor is possible. His own statement that "he made something of a specialty of Indian subjects" must cover his most characteristic and popular works; you can see them in a score of museums or public parks. But his eminent availability drew him into monumental projects—the great cascade at the St. Louis Exhibition, World War Memorials at Albany and elsewhere, the monument to President McKinley at Columbus, Ohio, a pediment of the Supreme Court Building at Washington—these examples must suffice. His most personal appeal does not transpire from these adventures in the monumental, but they all claim respect for their dignity, restraint, and fine craftsmanship.

Nowhere does MacNeil's sound Scotch breeding show itself more clearly than in his always thrifty use of time. His production was constant and great—here the layman should be reminded that a sculptor's studio must be a well-organized industrial enterprise—yet MacNeil readily accepted voluntary duties in the numerous societies that honored him with their membership. Onerous service on juries, public services, for World Fairs or for the Municipal Art Commission of New York City—all this executive work he dispatched skillfully and cheerfully without intermitting or retarding his personal work at College Point. He kept clear of worry and of unreasonable haste, was practically never in arrears. All of which goes to show that the sterling sculptor was also a master of the art of living.

The variety of MacNeil's work can only be suggested. It moves between the heroic pedimental figure at Washington to medals and one of our best coins, the Liberty Quarter. It includes such fine full length portraits as the Ezra Cornell, Francis Parkman, and Lincoln the Lawyer. There are gracious busts of young women such as the "Beatrice" in the tradition of the Renaissance and of MacNeil's first French master, Chapu. But I believe he never made an equestrian statue. Finally he willingly returned to his Indian subjects till nearly the end of his long life. He was seventy when he made one of the best of these, the bronze of the time-worn chief Multunomah. MacNeil died on October 2, 1947 in his 82nd year. While MacNeil had worked unsparingly for himself and for others, he had indulged few of those lost motions which age prematurely the artist or, for that matter, the man in the street.

To the artist and art critic it is a constant surprise, perhaps a chagrin, to find how often the unguided public taste is sound. This seems to be the case with that public taste which has made MacNeil's "The Sun Vow" his most popular work, has multiplied versions of that bronze group, and has shown it in many museums and parks.

Formal reasons for this preference are easily found. From every aspect the group is elaborately and perfectly composed. The young and the mature body offer the greatest variety of repeating or contrasting curves. This the average beholder immediately feels without reflection or analysis. Again, just materially, as so much cast metal, it is one of the most skillfully modelled and surfaced bronzes of our time. There is comfort in merely looking at it.

What are I think falsely called sentimental considerations enter into this preference. Delightful is the family resemblance between the old and the young face, united in zest for the rite, sharply contrasting in the pliant forms and features of the Indian lad and the time-hardened and furrowed face and body of the father and medicine man. Superbly differentiated are the lyrical rapture of the youth as his eye follows the well-aimed shaft towards the sun, and the proud yet moderated satisfaction of the father in the prowess of his son.

And deeper meanings impose themselves. Like all barbarians, the father in his late thirties is already past his physical prime, is beginning to be an old man. In a matter of fifteen years at most the lithe body of the boy will have stiffened into the forms now his father's. A symbol for our human transiency and for the old doctrine of the inexorable flux—a reminder of that profound saying of Victor Hugo's, "We are all condemned to death with an indefinite reprieve!" "Nous sommes tous condamnés à mort, avec un surcis indéfini."

But the symbol yields not despair but a reasonable hope. Father and son pay homage to what is most permanent in the vast of flux, the life-giving sun. We may make our long enduring eddy in the universal flux, may survive for a time in our influence and our work, while our progeny may see to it that, even biologically, we do not die utterly.

As I close I like to guess what MacNeil would have thought, had I said to him something like the above about his "Sun Vow." I can imagine his demure and very courteous smile, while he thought what many an artist has thought about many a critic—“How interestingly the critic talks about what never interested me as I modelled or painted."

Yet modern psychology teaches us that a lot is going on in the artist's spirit as he works—a lot which merely grazes or even wholly escapes his consciousness. Thus it seems to me any fine work of art may have meanings of which the busied artist may not be fully aware—meanings which he could never himself put into words. If this be so, then is it not a part of the business of the critic (who should be an artist in words) to find words for these deeper meanings?