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Lorado Taft
The Chicago Years
By Allen Stuart Weller, Robert G. La France, Henry Adams, Stephen P. Thomas UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09646-4
CHAPTER 1
Paris to Chicago
NEARLY TWENTY-six YEARS OLD and fresh from Paris, Lorado Zadok Taft established himself in Chicago early in 1886. At that time the single professional sculptor in the city with more than a local reputation was the veteran fifty-eight-year-old Leonard Volk. Only five works of sculpture had been installed in public places. Three of these were by Volk, and all three followed the conventional design of official monuments of the period, with a lofty classical shaft surmounted by a heroic standing figure with relief sculptures or allegorical personifications at the base. Two of these are in Rosehill Cemetery: a memorial to a group of firefighters (1864) and a Civil War monument (1869). The third was the more elaborate tomb of Stephen A. Douglas on Thirty-fifth Street (1881). Volk is now chiefly remembered for the casts he made of Abraham Lincoln's face and hands in 1860.
The city erected an incongruously elaborate fountain on the South Side as a memorial to Francis M. Drexel, with a standing portrait figure presiding over a base covered with bronze classical gods and nymphs, acanthus leaf borders, winged lions, and scallop shells (1881). This was the work of Henry Manger, a pedestrian German sculptor working in Philadelphia. The only work in Chicago that comes close to the artistic aims and intentions Taft had assimilated at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris was John Boyle's The Alarm, representing an American Indian family on the alert, erected in Lincoln Park in 1884. It was the commission that brought Boyle back to this country from Paris soon after Taft had met him there in 1880.
Aside from Volk and Taft, five other names are listed as "sculptors" in a massive annual directory of the city of Chicago in 1886. These were Edward P. Goutink, Charles Hofman, Howard Kretschmar, William W. Starr, and Henry N. Zearing. Kretschmar, the teacher of Taft's friend Robert Bringhurst in St. Louis, had lived in Chicago since 1884 but was mainly active as an osteopath. He produced a number of public monuments in St. Louis, but none in Chicago. The other four remain completely unknown and were probably modest makers of grave monuments.
At the time, the city was without doubt the center of architectural developments of great significance. The enormous amount of construction that took place after the great fire of 1871 brought architects from all over the country (and from Europe as well) to share in these opportunities. Again, the business directory published in the year of Taft's arrival lists no fewer than 195 names under the category of architects. There was also the possibility of sculptural decoration connected with some of these buildings, which were constructed with astonishing speed and with many technological innovations. Still, much of the architectural design remained curiously derivative of historical precedent. The 1886 list of architects contains the names of numerous firms and individuals who are remembered as significant in the history of American architecture: Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, Holabird and Roche, as well as such individual practitioners as William W. Boyington, Henry Ives Cobb, William LeBaron Jenney, Irving K. Pond, and John M. Van Osdel. In contrast, though the same directory lists almost exactly the same number of artists (194), there is not a single name among them that arouses the slightest sense of recognition.
Chicago already had a professional art school when Taft arrived there. This was the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, founded seven years previously. In 1882 its name was changed to the Art Institute of Chicago. From the beginning, it had announced a threefold purpose: the maintenance of a school of art and design, the formation and exhibition of collections of works of art, and the cultivation and extension of the arts of design by all appropriate means. After some years of carrying on its program in rented space in a business block on State Street, it was housed in a building on Michigan and Van Buren until its own building on Michigan and Adams was completed. This was a handsome Romanesque structure designed by Burnham and Root, activated and occupied in the fall of 1886.
How was an unknown young American sculptor to make a living in Chicago, a city not noted for art production and patronage? To a sculptor of his generation there were three kinds of commissions for which he could hope and for which his years in Paris had equipped him. His professional maturity came just at the time when an enormous number of Civil War monuments were being erected all across the country. It was just over twenty years since the war had ended, and the generation of men who had fought it had reached a stage when they wanted to memorialize it in heroic terms. The great majority of these monuments were little more than catalogue mail-order jobs, but every competent sculptor in the country was seeking and receiving commissions in this field. A second sculptural opportunity was the grave monument. Throughout the nineteenth century, the cemetery was a major attraction in almost all cities and towns, and a lucrative business for the artist. Finally, and in a category which most artists regarded as somewhat less desirable, there was the continuing demand for portrait busts. These were sometimes the result of the life and death masks that sculptors frequently made during the era. Taft was well prepared in all of these genres: his training at the École des Beaux-Arts had given him a great deal of experience in the kind of design that was expected in the first two directions, and he had already proven himself as an accomplished portraitist.
Taft knew that, as an unknown artist, he was unlikely to immediately obtain major commissions in any of these fields, but the possibility existed for engaging in purely commercial decorative work, such as designs for bronze or iron low-reliefs used as fire screens and as overmantel decorations. Firms produced objects in multiple copies and issued catalogues that reproduced many different designs. Several bronze companies in Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and elsewhere specialized in producing and marketing such works, which seldom carried the names of the artists who designed them. In addition, there was the possibility of designing sculptural decorations for buildings or portrait medallions of popular heroes, which were in particular demand. Taft had already determined to enter the competition for a major monument in Chicago, and this was no doubt one of the reasons he installed himself there, but he promptly made contact with bronze companies and was successful in obtaining orders for work of this commercial type.
Two or three other professional activities might also have been a source of income to a young sculptor, and Taft was soon involved in all of them. Such occupations included teaching, lecturing, and writing. Teaching, first in his own studio, and later at the Art Institute, became a continuing part of his life. It was not long before people discovered that he was a knowledgeable and appealing public speaker, and this was a period when lectures were a popular form of public entertainment. There was a possibility of writing for one or another of the Chicago newspapers, and there was apparently a good deal of interest in the accounts that a young American could provide of living and studying in Paris.
Taft had returned to this country from Paris in October 1885 at the age of twenty-five. The return was a sudden and rather unexpected one; he had been in Paris most of the time since 1880 and had already made plans for another year's work there, though he had not been enrolled as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts for two years. Still, he had successfully exhibited works in two of the annual Salons. There were two important reasons for Taft's return to America: he decided to enter a competition for a major monument to President Grant in Chicago, and he was in love with the beautiful Carrie Louise Scales, who had returned with her widowed mother from Paris to their home in St. Louis. Moreover, a close friend, Robert Bringhurst, with whom he had lived and worked as a student in Paris, was just setting up shop in St. Louis. Taft's family had left its hometown of Champaign, Illinois, and had moved to Hanover, Kansas, so it seemed natural and desirable that he should follow Carrie and Bringhurst.
On his return, Taft no doubt visited relations in Massachusetts and his family in Kansas, but by November he had joined forces with Bringhurst, who had a studio on Washington Avenue in St. Louis. Taft moved in with him and they lived and worked together for a brief period. The two artists planned to submit models to as many competitions as they could learn of and hoped to collaborate on some big commissions. The large equestrian portrait of Grant for Chicago was of course a major concern, but they had also learned of a competition for a standing Grant for Leavenworth, Kansas. The sculptors posed for each other and one day bought a blue Union officer's overcoat for two dollars, a useful studio prop. Soon their studio was full of clay horses and figures, some of which the artists cast in plaster. Taft also began working on a figure of Commodore Stephen Decatur (1779-1820), started studies of various reliefs, and continued to draw.
A new professional experience arose when the young sculptors were employed to make a death mask. The three-year-old daughter of Dr. J. H. McLean, the famous St. Louis patent medicine man, had died of diphtheria. McLean wanted a cast made of her features the day after her death. Taft and Bringhurst made a mold of the little face and hands and hoped that an order for a bust or medallion would result. This was probably the first of a number of death masks that Taft made in his early professional years; and it gave him the idea for an ambitious melodramatic short story, which was never actually brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
During the two months he was in St. Louis, Taft was, of course, seeing Carrie Scales and her mother frequently—indeed, it was their presence that probably accounted for his being there. Although in one of his letters to his family he writes, "I don't see Carrie very often and that distresses me because I feel that I am not doing my duty to the fatherless" (he was actually meeting with her nearly every day). He went to church with them, took walks with Carrie, and was entertained at their home. He took her to a reception at the art museum and they attended concerts together. Mrs. Scales was evidently fostering the romance; early in December, Taft writes, "Carrie is wonderfully nice, and I guess she likes me. I know her mother does." He kept Mrs. Scales fully informed of the news he received from Hanover about his father's bank, and she seems to have considered investing some of her funds in the new venture.
Taft spent Christmas and New Year's Eve with Carrie and her mother. By the end of the year, the two young people had made their feelings for each other known and had become engaged, no doubt with Mrs. Scales's approval. Taft's letter to his parents announcing this important event has not been preserved, but his mother's reply on December 23 expresses the ambivalent feelings she must have experienced at this news from the one she adored toward a girl she had never seen: "I shall not moralize upon the magnitude of the step which you have taken. Neither shall I tell you whether joy or pain seemed to predominate upon the announcement. Wait until I see the little syren [sic] who has captivated my treasured heart. If she can manage to stand by your side and maintain her part in the Mama's affection—then I promise to receive you as one."
The engagement to Carrie was evidently supposed to be secret: at any rate she preferred not to be introduced to the famous American singer Emma Thursby, who gave a concert in St. Louis on December 30, soon after the engagement. Taft had heard Miss Thursby in Paris and had met her on several social occasions, and she had shown him marked favor on her visit to Champaign a few years earlier. "Carrie slipped away behind a post, fearful that I might want to present her and 'tell them all about it.' She says I have to 'tell everything' and that I shall make her hair turn grey with worry if I don't learn to keep my counsel."
Taft spent a quiet New Year's Eve with Carrie, and started out the next morning for Chicago, stopping in Champaign to visit old friends. Carrie was still insisting that he keep their engagement a secret. He spent two nights with his friends Henry and Marietta Beardsley and wrote a long letter to the family almost entirely concerned with his encounters with former neighbors: the names of nearly forty of them are introduced. He carried photographs of his work with him and exhibited them proudly. He was asked to dinners, went to church on Sunday morning, received the kisses of some of the older ladies, and informed his mother that many of her friends in Champaign were anxious for a visit from her.
Taft was soon settled in a room on South State Street (No. 243) in Chicago, which he also used as a studio, but he needed more space for a really professional environment. In March, he discovered on the same street (No. 103) a space that he longed to convert into a studio. "I saw such a beautiful studio this morn. It is at the top story of a big business block, an immense sky light—walls beautifully tinted—pretty fireplace, tout qu'il fait—unoccupied and only fifty dollars a month! O dear, for once I wished myself rich. I may take it yet if some of these plans 'pan out.' Then I would be one of the swellest artists in town!" The generous Mr. Simeon B. Williams, who had proposed that Taft enter the Grant monument competition, promptly offered to guarantee the annual rent up to $500, and in addition advised him to organize his own class in modeling.
Taft shared the studio from the first with a young architect, W. Mead Walter, and it was not long before C. Clayton Minor, painter and photographer, joined them. Both paid part of the rent. Taft was soon working in this happy environment, assisted by a youth named Charlie Mulligan. By this time he was working on an order for a bas-relief on a Civil War subject for which he was to receive $100 when it was finished. An exhibition of the Western Artists Association at the Illinois Club on Ashland Avenue included four of his works—two plaster busts, the head of a soldier, and a so-called "Ideal Head," probably a little marble portrait of a girl he had carved in Paris the year before. One of the plaster busts was likely the portrait of the Rev. Dr. Robert W. McAll, which he had brought back with him from Paris.
Once Taft was established in his studio, the premises were open to visitors who, almost from the beginning, found their way there, along with private pupils. He practically held "open house," and was delighted that visitors and guests came in increasing numbers. As he described in a letter from April 7, 1886: "There is a kind of exaltation and joy in the present struggle that does me good. I like this meeting of the wealthiest and most cultured people, not as a starving art student but as a rising artist. You would be ashamed to hear myself talk but it seems to take and it's what they expect."
By midsummer of 1886 Taft was thriving, and he wrote an enthusiastic note to the family: "Prospects are now accumulating at a terrible rate, rolling up like clouds. There must be something in them.... I believe I can astonish them." He had lost no time in making professional contacts with several of the bronze companies which fabricated and sold reliefs, medallions, other types of decorative metal work and arranged orders for larger monumental pieces. He already had had a commission to make a death mask of one of the city's oldest settlers (Philo Carpenter, see later in this chapter), and he had been virtually promised the job of making a life-size figure of the Marquis de Lafayette for Lafayette, Indiana.
Taft had not been long in Chicago before William M. R. French (1843-1914), the director of the Art Institute, approached him for professional reasons. The director asked him to deliver a talk on sculpture in France (illustrated with stereopticon slides) for a course of lectures scheduled at the Art Institute; this led to requests from other groups and individuals. William French's younger brother, Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), was an already established sculptor with a growing national reputation. Finally, William French asked Taft, during the sculptor's first summer in the city, to join the staff of the Art Institute as an instructor in sculpture classes when the next school term opened in the new building in October. Taft was delighted. "I am so pleased at the prospect of teaching and building up a department of sculpture, in that fine new building which the Art school is to occupy in the fall." His schedule called for two mornings and three evenings a week, and he was paid $50 a month.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lorado Taft by Allen Stuart Weller, Robert G. La France, Henry Adams, Stephen P. Thomas. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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