Arts and Letters

In marked contrast to him [Charles Eliot Norton] was our great sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward. Put to the categorical question, he would probably have admitted the value of all the esthetic disciplines—those of the amateur, the philosopher, and the critic; he would have admitted also the existence and the validity of rules and axioms. But neither the rule nor the trained beholder was his first concern. Each instance presented to him a separate and absorbing problem, to be solved only by the communings of the individual artist with that particular task. The rule was well as far as it goes, but the test of the rule is the exception. Hence the interest of Ward's work in its varied, widely varied aspects.

Educated in American studios, unfamiliar in early life with great original creations of any epoch, he studied casts or pictures, read descriptions, and worked as opportunity came. As a craftsman he secured a manual training so fine that it gave restraint to his exuberant fancy. So far as he can be identified with a school he was a Hellenist and classical. To subjective, suggestive, impressionist sculpture he was utterly strange. In the pediment of the Stock Exchange in New York his genius reached its climax. He could not bear the restraint of low relief, scarcely of high, and those virile figures, each a superb American type, stand out full in the round with only a suggestion of attachment to the architecture which they adorn. His work is objective to the highest degree, and stands in close relation not only to the trained but to the average beholder by the conviction of reality which it enforces on the human eye.

Ward thoroughly understood the American public, and to that public he addressed himself, and was understood. Some of his ideas were no doubt alien to those generally cherished by the members of his guild, and it remains so far true that in the heroic and monumental he was not always at his best, so instinctive was his feeling for measure and proportion; but in what was purely statuesque, in breadth and scale, in the realization of his vision, he could and did accomplish what few have done, and was thus defiant of criticism. His knowledge and his sympathy were comprehensive, and his gift of expression was uncommon. A true democrat, he was not indifferent to the noisy, insistent self-assertion of mediocrity, for he knew its power in forming public opinion. Hence he never permitted himself to be silenced by its wearisome iteration. To it he often addressed himself with trenchant language, and as a rule came off triumphant against the cuckoo throng. There was nothing of what is styled in art the precious about his temperament or his work.