the late Olin Warner, who was born four years before Saint-Gaudens, and who exercised always an elevating influence. But Warner would probably have uttered with eagerness the tribute which the living sculptors in this country yield to Saint-Gaudens, testifying to the initiative he took, to the constructive part he played, in the formation of our school. He entered the field with the mixed racial equipment characteristic of so many distinguished Americans. His mother was an Irishwoman; his father was born in France. Saint-Gaudens himself, born in Dublin, in 1848, was brought to this country in his earliest childhood; and though he spent more than one period abroad, he remained as distinctly American in his art as though he had come from a long line of native ancestors. With a difference. He did not take up sculpture where Greenough and the others had left it, working on their foundation and transmogrifying their tradition. He showed his Americanism in striking out in a totally new vein and making his own tradition. Half Irish, half French, and wholly sympathetic to his environment, he was committed to American tendencies, not as an heir, with much to unlearn, but simply in so far as his genius inclined him to assimilate them. No American artist has shown a greater freedom than he from what are gener ally called "early influences," and are specifically described as "So-and-So's manner." He was thirteen when he was apprenticed to a cameo cutter, and he spent sev eral years at this craft; but I have never perceived in his sculpture anything to remind one of these beginnings. At night he studied art. Cooper Union and the Academy of Design were both useful to him at this period. Then, in his nineteenth year, he went to Paris, and at the École des Beaux-Arts profited by the teaching of Jouffroy until the Franco-Prussian war broke out and he entered upon a three years' residence in Rome. In all that formative period he appears to have worked patiently toward the expression of a temperament which outside influences could stimulate but could not mould to their own likeness. He was perhaps fortunate in studying under Jouffroy, a safe master, who, for all his classicism, was nevertheless near enough to such men as Rude to have seen, and turned away from, the quicksands of commonplace in which the conventional classicist is sooner or later lost. He was enough of an individualist in his art to keep Saint-Gaudens from falling into routine, and enough of an academician to nourish in his pupil the sense of measure which might have slumbered if he had fallen into the hands of a more naturalistic teacher. He set him on the right path, helped him to develop his technique along |