CHAPTER FOUR

_CALIFORNIA_

Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records. But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind.

Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to Omaha.

His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon was independent and lived his own life.

The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.

During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India. She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar trick in painting and not hard to achieve.

Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont. His schoolmates there recalled that the margins of his books were covered with sketches and that he liked to draw maps and make caricatures of his teachers or of local men in public life.

His teachers at St. Mary’s had readily noticed his talent. They had set him to drawing saints and angels--subjects of which, at the time, he was not particularly fond. He refers to his Kansas experience in an article written in 1919:

My interest in the beautiful began before I came to St. Mary’s, but it was due to encouragement there, and to a definitely expressed desire on the part of two young men who were graduated the year I left that the determination was awakened in me to treat seriously what I had previously considered a delightful trick.

One of these men was named Murphy, and I shall never cease to remember with profoundest gratitude his earnest talk to me as we walked up and down during the evening recess. He talked to me of the great masters. He got books for me. I came to know the whole Italian school, painters and sculptors. And for years it seemed that I knew little else. As a result I have never gone to Italy. [Nor did he until 1931.] As I grew older I found I had a powerful bias toward Italian art and its melodrama. But I did not want to go there, even though I admire Italian and Grecian art more than all else.

Murphy went out of my life and I have never heard of him since. He may not--doubtless does not--remember what he did for me. But in those evenings at school he set me afire. And the goal he painted seems bigger, better, more wonderful and worthwhile now than it did, even then. So he served. He may never have known it, but I owe everything to his inspiring words.

The whereabouts of Murphy was never traced because his first name apparently had been forgotten, and hundreds of Murphys passed through St. Mary’s before it surrendered its charter and became a Jesuit seminary sometime after the First World War. People who knew the place in the eighties are not surprised at Gutzon’s declaration that his real inspiration came from there. It was a small school that had grown out of an early mission to the Potowatomi Indians, but it had few characteristics that identify the tank-town college. Out of it in half a century came a singular troop of famous persons, many of whom no doubt crossed Gutzon’s path without realizing that he was a fellow alumnus. Judges, lawyers, bishops, educators, engineers, builders, doctors, merchants, chiefs, sailors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, musicians and all the rest of them are included in the list. It is interesting to note that Borglum is the institution’s only offering to sculpture.

His life at old St. Mary’s seems to have been perfectly normal. He had several fights which he remembered ever after. He remembered, too, that he was always in the right, which is likewise perfectly natural. His chief exploit in fisticuffs was a wrangle with three rather hard lads in the dining room, and there is a tradition that he won. At any rate, he learned how to protect himself with his bare fists--a skill that he always counted as a major asset.

He finished the academy course--the equivalent of high school--when, at that period in the West, he was considered sufficiently adult to find a job. Dr. James suddenly moved his family to California. Gutzon quit St. Mary’s and went to work as a lithographer’s apprentice in Los Angeles, and studied engraving and designing on stone. At the end of six months he was producing work that he thought was good. That, of course, was nothing to cause any emotional outbursts among the lithographers, because Gutzon thought that everything he produced was good.

The young man wanted better pay, but he didn’t get it. The lithographer said that if he stayed at his work he would someday be an experienced hand. But Gutzon sacrificed this opportunity. He went to work for a fresco painter, and he got more money. He rented a little studio and did part-time work as he pleased.

On a ranch somewhere in the vicinity was Solon Borglum. Of all the family he was closest to Gutzon because he had shown interest in art. Gutzon eventually got him to leave the ranch and to take up the study of painting and sculpture seriously. He contributed to Solon’s support and, in time, to his tuition in a Cincinnati art school. But there is little mention of this in his written record, for he was shy about such things.

California was a constant surprise to him. He was by himself and supporting himself. He felt free and able, and he was proud of himself. His father had gone back East with a family that in time totaled nine. Someplace with that brood was August, Gutzon’s companion at St. Mary’s. It was to be a long time before Gutzon would see some of his other brothers and sisters. But no matter! California was warm in the winter, and it didn’t cost much to get things to eat. And he kept meeting people who interested him. While he was still with the lithographer he met an artist named Eberlie, a really good painter of the Düsseldorf school. Eberlie turned out beautiful ensembles that seemed perfect in color and design. Gutzon yearned to do the same thing.

Something had awakened in him. He went on and on with his work in the tiny studio, producing little that looked like anything, learning slowly what was wrong. He couldn’t have quit. He was still there even after Dr. Borglum and the family had moved back to Omaha.

Information about his early years in this paradise, however, doesn’t come so much from him as from strangers. Charles F. Lummis, whom he knew well and with whom he later wrangled extensively, wrote a piece about him in _The Land of Sunshine_ (later, _Out West_) magazine in 1906. He said:

It was a matter of nine years ago. Los Angeles was a country town, just emerging from adobehood. This writer found a green, serious lad belaboring canvas in a bare room on what was then Fort Street. He had no money and not many friends. The painting he was at had many shortcomings and showed his lack of art education. Yet there was in them a creative breath that promised to make him heard from....

He was born in the West and was Western in every fibre. Soon after graduation from seminary he came to Los Angeles, and presently began the long, hard struggle of an unbefriended artist. By and for himself, by sheer dint of pluck and brains, he hewed his way. At last his pictures attracted the attention of one of the few connoisseurs then here.... A couple have been sold to Easterners at good prices....

Gutzon, however, was not long friendless. He appears to have been discovered by George Butler Griffin, who had married a Castilian lady from Colombia and lived in Los Angeles. They had several gifted children, one of whom was the mother of the actress, Bebe Daniels. Another daughter, Mrs. Eva Griffin Turner, herself a painter, was among Gutzon’s early heralds. She met him first in the eighties and never forgot a detail of their meeting.

She was twelve years old at the time and for a year or more had been sketching and painting in her own fashion with a child’s color box. She was allowed to trail along with him and a class he was instructing, and she never forgot what he said as the pupils gazed at a sunset beyond Los Angeles.

“The artist,” he declared--and it seemed to her that he was talking to himself--“The artist should approach nature with great reverence.”

[Illustration: BORGLUM WORKING IN FIRST IMPROVISED STUDIO AT STAMFORD]

[Illustration: “DR. TRUDEAU,” THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN]

He left the class for a while when he went to work with William Keith, an artist in San Francisco. Gutzon was an extravagant admirer of Keith, who was called the “Grand Old Man of California Painting.” He stayed in his class for several months. During that same period he took a short course under Virgil Williams.

Mrs. Turner vividly remembered his home-coming and how his old students reassembled with him for outdoor sketching. But he was not long for his old ways. He had painted a picture called “Stage Coach” and some rich man had seen it. There was an immediate furor over the picture and Gutzon. And so presently he went to Paris to study.

“He won prizes,” Mrs. Turner mentioned, “and he was greatly admired.”

And then we have the memory of Bob Davis, onetime editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_ and a columnist for the New York _Evening Sun_. In his California days he was a printer’s apprentice with a job near Gutzon’s studio. Davis describes Gutzon’s studio thus:

His walls were the most fascinating thing in my life. They were hung with pictures of stage coaches and horses leaping at you from every direction. These things were painted in oils and I thought they were the finest things in California. He also modeled in clay and chiseled a bit in stone. During the lunch hour I visited his studio and struck up a friendly acquaintance. He confided that his ambition was to excel in sculpture and that he painted only to get the sinews with which to go on.

One noon I entered his studio and found him in high spirits. He was rigging a large canvas on the easel and making great preparations for something important.

“I’m going to do a life-size, seated portrait of General Frémont in military regalia,” he told me. “Mrs. Frémont is bringing him around this afternoon for the first sitting. Come around tomorrow at lunch time and I’ll have the figure rounded in. He has a strong face and I think I can make a pretty good picture.”

I saw the painting from the first touch of the brush. Frémont always came in on the arm of his wife who seemed to be the one person he wanted to please. She brought with her a military coat adorned with gold fringe and epaulets, a garment the great Indian fighter wore with dignity.

And it was a good picture. Day after day it assumed more life and grandeur until it was finished and taken away to be exhibited in an art gallery on Spring Street. I went to see it there. And I boasted about my acquaintance with the artist to anybody who would listen to me.

There seems to be no doubt that the Frémont portrait was one of the most important works of Gutzon’s youth. It got him attention and acclaim. But more than that it got him the friendship and advice of Mrs. Frémont. The general was nearing death when Gutzon first saw him. The portrait was finished in 1888 and Frémont died in Washington, D. C., in 1890. But the motherly interest of Jessie Benton Frémont in the artist went on unbroken for many years. She helped him with letters to important people and with advice on how and where to sell his works. Some of these letters were still in Gutzon’s effects when he died.

The most discriminating patron of the young artist in California was, perhaps, Spencer J. Smith. Smith bought enough canvases to give Gutzon a start toward his training in Paris. These pictures, tenderly cared for, are still in the possession of Smith’s widow in the same house where the artist saw them hung some sixty years ago. As then the house, surrounded by gardens, stands like an oasis in the heart of busy Los Angeles.

Shortly before going abroad in 1889, Gutzon married Mrs. Elizabeth Putnam, whom the family called “Lisa,” a painter of ability and a teacher of art. Unfortunately, the details of the romance are lacking. Gutzon never talked about such intimate matters. His father and other members of the family met her only after the marriage.

Lisa seems to have loved her husband. At any rate, his worries during the early years in Europe made little impression on her--nor on him. Yet, that there was some difficulty in their relationship is evidenced in letters written to Gutzon by friends of both of them. A young sculptor pupil, Arthur Putnam, who lived with them at Sierra Madre, mentioned the vague unhappiness he sensed in Gutzon and tried delicately to probe into the matter. But, unfortunately, only the question of Putnam is extant. Gutzon’s reply to his letter has not been kept.

From the sculptor’s diary, a sporadic and sketchy document, it is plain that he was passionately anxious to have a child. It is probable that the impossibility of this was the basis of whatever trouble he had with Lisa. Moreover, she was twenty years his senior and did not care much for his strenuous way of life.

Such was Gutzon’s fear of hurting her, and his almost abnormal dread of publicity in so personal a matter, that the legal tie was not broken for several years. Few of Gutzon’s friends of later years knew of this marriage, and his own children were in their teens before they heard of it.

A French servant, Jeanne, who had lived with the Borglums in Europe, accompanied Lisa to California to live with her until her death. In 1931 she wrote to the sculptor about certain of his paintings that he had given to Lisa and closed her letter with a significant and touching thought.

“You have two beautiful children,” she said, “and you are at last happy. You deserve it....”

Gutzon and Lisa bought a little house among the orange groves in Sierra Madre, near the base of the mountains back of Pasadena, not far from where the Santa Anita race track now stands. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had a horse ranch on land that included the site of the race track, was a great friend and allowed Gutzon to use his horses as models. Gutzon loved this place. His favorite subjects for sculpture were horses, and he never tired of looking at them. Mrs. Frémont, after seeing his equestrian casts and drawings at his studio in 1889, summed up his future with the gift of prophecy: “The boy is spirited. Here is one sculptor who will ride to fame on horseback!”

That wasn’t quite true, but it was near enough. Within the year he was moving. And never thereafter did he recognize the existence of anything that could hold him back.