His first important statue, the "Farragut," is a masterpiece of
restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design--a design, too,
that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures
in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. In
later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper
feeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of composition
as is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue of
Sherman.
Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this
power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities:
knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of
surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and
proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may
be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct--I mean that
much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only
of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round
is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with
actual form--a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of
an object, it _is_ the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for
the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to
it--which must be added to it to make it art--it is the reproduction in
another material of the actual forms of things.
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