CHAPTER SIX

_ENGLAND_

There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember “the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the histories point out briefly that they were with us. Depression had begun to spread in 1890. The banking house of Baring, badly entangled with Argentine investments, closed its doors. The British began to dump American securities. The gold reserve began to disappear. And, in general, that is how things went for five or six years.

Nowhere in Gutzon’s record of the times is there much mention of panic or money shortage. This may be a good place to record that in London he did show some concern about dollars--what they were and how they were kept. One gathers, indirectly, that he liked to be working. That he really enjoyed the pleasure of others in the things that he painted or carved was fairly obvious. Against that, he knew all that was to be known about hunger. His movement to England at a time when living in California was beginning to look difficult may indicate that somebody was taking thought.

Life in England appears to have been no complete idyll. Gutzon himself was quite happy. There was work for him to do and he had plenty of English friends, but one gathers that Mrs. Borglum found the exile a bit painful.

In 1897 Jessie Frémont wrote this to him:

If you come away or go away from London, I shall be sorry and disappointed in you. English people _demand_ stability. And there is to be no talk even of preference for any other place. The time will surely come when you can put your preferences into execution, but it does chill and turn away interest to have a vanishing prospect.

Mrs. Borglum has too much sense and far too much affection for you not to see that this is for your true interest. You cannot re-cast a national mold and England is set to its “slow-and-sure,” sure being its complement to slow. I do not blame Mrs. Borglum’s American impatience, but “stay where the money is.”

The artist’s prevailing mood during 1897 seems to have been one of profound melancholy and disillusionment regarding Europe. He kept a diary at this time which, with his letters from Mrs. Frémont, is the chief source of information concerning his life in England.

Mrs. Frémont’s letters gave him great cheer and comfort. General Frémont had an artistic and sensitive nature with frequent ups and downs of mood. Circumstances beyond his control had ruined his dreams for developments in California. The United States government itself had taken land from him for war purposes in 1861, and he had never been paid for it. His widow was still hoping to have her claim settled thirty-six years later. She knew the value of money, the need for patience and diplomacy; and she could sympathize with a struggling artist in language that he could understand.

Gutzon’s diary opens with an indication that he needed the sympathy. He begins:

Now, at last! I feel some--enough--desire to make notes of steps and landings in this, this curious life that we are doomed for a certain time to bear. I must be honest with myself--else why record? Lies, trivialities and the daily doings of the body are not worth thinking of much less making memoranda of. But it’s not

[Illustration:

_Courtesy of E. K. Edwards_

“GENERAL SHERIDAN”

This statue is in Washington, D.C.]

[Illustration: “WARS OF AMERICA” MODEL]

for the public--not for one single soul. For I am alone and who would understand?

Six years ago I said to myself, “I’ll be great at thirty, or never.” I am thirty. I have had the disturbing pleasure of being called “master” by the French critics and some Americans, yet at the moment I cannot spend sixpence without wondering where the next one will come from. Art is not self-sustaining until it becomes commercially valuable, and a man is not to be counted until he is in popular demand.

Gutzon’s reach was far beyond his grasp, and his Heaven was far away. Undoubtedly he was extravagant. He loved beauty and costly things, rare books, rich stuff and tapestries. But the problem of where the next dollar was coming from began to worry him less and less. He got big commissions in America, in England and all through his life. His trouble was not that he failed to make money but that he never learned how to keep it.

He never seemed to know the value of a dollar, nor did he care. His real extravagance was in putting into commissioned work added richness of detail or extra figures that he thought would add to the effect. That was why he rarely came out of an undertaking with any great profit to himself and was hounded by debt all his life.

He rarely spent money on his person, except for small lovely things that he could carry in his pocket. He often had holes in his shoes, and his unpressed clothes were always a distress to his friends. To emphasize the sacrifices of a struggling artist, he used to tell of buying baked potatoes on the street corners of London to keep his hands warm. The potato-buying story was undoubtedly true, but it was hardly a record of a typical condition.

Building was his chief delight--always. In London, after he had lived for months in a studio apartment in West Kensington, he rented a villa in St. John’s Wood and proceeded to make repairs and additions to it, regardless of cost. The villa had a rose garden, and he frequently talked of how he mowed the lawn early in the morning before starting the day’s work. All his life he enjoyed the work of beautifying his surroundings. During the years he built at least six other studios and houses for himself without ever being satisfied. His ideal home, which he was always ready to describe in detail and with feeling, was a fabulous sort of place that existed only in his restless mind.

In his diary he mentions having gone shopping with the painter Frank Brangwyn to consider taking over Sir Edward Leighton’s studio. They decided it was too pretentious. In Paris he rented a studio in the Boulevard Arago. He still found some of his old friends and business acquaintances in the neighborhood when he visited it in 1931, thirty years after he had moved out of it. It was a place of rare memories. He had fitted the little stove with a red isinglass front, and he had burned a solitary candle in it in those freezing days to give the illusion of rosy warmth.

In Gutzon’s reminiscences it seems always to have been cold in the neighborhood of Boulevard Arago. A sculptor, living in one of the garrets with which the region seems to have been plentifully supplied, fashioned a masterpiece. It was still in the wet clay when the thermometer dropped below freezing. The artist was frantic. In the bitter cold of night he began to fear for his statue. He got up and wrapped it in rags of clothing and finally in his only blanket to keep the ice away. He died of the cold. But the statue for which he froze to death now reposes in warm, serene quarters in the Luxembourg.

Frank Brangwyn, some of whose work may be seen in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, was the one artist who made a deep impression on Gutzon in England. The Borglum diary is filled with notations such as this: “November 19, 1897--Short half hour with Brangwyn.... He belongs to _art_ and will do work that will live.” And the feeling was mutual. In later years Brangwyn wrote, “I admire those strong virile things of yours. It is like a strong sea breeze on a hot and listless day to see your honest works....” Each foresaw for the other a greatness that he could not hope for himself.

The sculptor met Ruskin briefly and was so impressed with his features that he made a statuette of him. The figure is seated with a rug over the knees and was one of Borglum’s most successful pieces. A copy of it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

He also met George Bernard Shaw, although little of art figured in their association. In a letter years later he mentioned Shaw’s attendance at meetings of what he called the “Kingsley Society.” “This,” wrote Gutzon, “was a lively debating society and we visited once a week at one another’s homes. I debated with Shaw on ‘The Ignorance of Educating Me.’ I forget which side. Shaw likes to play smart, but at heart he is a serious, lovable, great man.”

Gutzon may have been right about most of these points, but he made an error in naming the club. It was probably the Fabian Club. Shaw denied that he had ever heard of the “Kingsley Society,” and mentioned that for that matter he had hardly heard about Kingsley.

Gutzon remained in England until the turn of the century which, considering the intensely modern impact of his life, seems like a long time ago. The days of quick success had become fewer in 1897, and they lessened rapidly thereafter. There was trouble on the horizon and the people of England were uneasy and crotchety.

In the controversy preceding the Boer War, which broke out in 1899, he was loudly critical of the British for their oppression of “the intrepid band in the Transvaal,” and freely forecast that they would pay for it dearly. And they did. General Baden-Powell, another of Borglum’s friends, was besieged with his troops in Mafeking, a little town north of Kimberley. There, holding what appeared to be a hopeless position, they came closer to starvation daily while England prayed.

Years afterward, in an article about the Boy Scouts, which Baden-Powell founded, Borglum recalled the turning point of that war:

I was in London. I was sitting in the New Globe theater. Duse, the magnificent, was giving one of her superb performances. And during one of the curtains the director came onto the stage with an announcement.

At first he said, “I hope that everyone will remain in his seat. I hope that you will be quiet and let the play go on.” The audience was dead still, trying to understand. And then the man said: “Mafeking has been relieved.”

The play ended right there. I never saw a sedate audience so completely surrender to joy. Believe it or not, every man everywhere in the theater kissed the others, kissed the women, shouted and cried. They poured into the streets and jumped up and down. They crawled onto the tops of buses and danced. And then and there Mafeking became historic.

Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England....

Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery.

The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them.

They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them. For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,” the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still extant.

The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in 1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it.

The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.

The eleven paintings that accompanied Lancelot and Guenevere back to England were scenes from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_--Queen Titania asleep with Oberon’s love potion in her eyes; Titania’s encounter with Bottom, the weaver; her adventures with Quince, the carpenter, Starveling, the tailor, Snout, the tinker and Flute, the bellows-mender--all in a fine, fantastic humor. Gutzon was still at work on this group on June 30, 1903, which was the day before he started for England to make delivery and supervise installation. He was very ill with typhoid fever that year, and his cash had disappeared. Friends about the studio took up a collection to pay his steamship fare to Liverpool.

Borglum’s last years in England were marked by a tremendous emotional depression. His journal, in places, becomes almost incoherent as he attempts to analyze mental suffering. He found relief in work, and he worked incessantly.

He painted murals for private homes and made the illustrations for at least two books, _The Spanish Main_, with pictures of old war galleys, and _King Arthur_, with especially fine drawings of oak trees a thousand years old. He had some success as a portrait artist. He painted the likenesses of a large number of the aristocracy at whose country houses he was entertained. One of these was the portrait of Lord Mowbray, which was exhibited at Liverpool with the Lord Mayor taking part in the ceremonies. He mentions in his diary the painting of the composer, Clarence Lucas, who thought it a good portrait “that possibly might also be a work of art.”

There is also some evidence that during the late nineties he was doing more and more work with sculpture. In his journal he mentions a lost piece, “The Return of the Boer,” which brought considerable attention to his carving. It showed a man on horseback returning to his ruined home. He was a figure of complete dejection, his shoulders drooping, his head bent down. His rifle was before him across the saddle. The horse was sniffing at the burned bits that remained of a house. The statue brought plenty of criticism and discussion but no money. The Parisian who cast the group said it was _trop personnel_ to be a financial success. Gutzon’s only copy of it was borrowed by the dancer Loie Fuller for an exhibition and later left by her in a New York bank as security for a loan. Presumably it lies forgotten in some vault.

Another bronze group, “Apaches Pursued,” had greater public appeal and was exhibited in several shows in Europe. It was decidedly popular in Turin, and a copy was bought for Kaiser Wilhelm II. It shows two horses in full gallop, one of the riders holding to a third man whom he has lifted off the ground in his flight. The critics were pleased by its composition, which was as striking as its animation.

Oddly enough, this group came back into public view in 1946 in an art dealer’s window in Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. It was found to have been purchased by a Philadelphian at an auction sale of the effects of “Diamond Jim Brady.” A copy made from this is now in the Witte Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.

All in all, in 1900 Gutzon Borglum was one of the most popular artists in England. He lived in a comfortable villa, he had plentiful work, and what he did was enthusiastically received. And mental dejection did not keep him from having a rather full and varied social life.

In a letter to Mrs. Frémont he mentioned meeting a Madame Helen Bricka, who brought his work to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of Teck of whose household she was a member. Gutzon visited the Duke and Duchess and so met, and threw into the air, a little boy who grew up to be the Duke of Windsor and, for a time, the King of England.

Through Madame Bricka he was summoned by Queen Victoria to bring his work, both painting and sculpture, to Windsor Castle for an exhibition. But for a young man born on the shore of Bear Lake, Idaho, the invitation was not clear enough. One may be permitted a bit of speculation as to what might have happened if he had caught the meaning--if he had paraded with his work under royal patronage before the aristocracy of Great Britain. But it is futile thought. He sent his art to Windsor for an exhibition, but he never met the queen. It never occurred to him that a queen might want to see him.

He had a very successful one-man show at Macmillan’s in Bond Street, and he made many friends in England and France, some of them American artists. Some of these appeared later in his life and in his correspondence in the United States. One of them was Carl Sobieski, descendant of the famous Polish general. Another, who noted his experience entertainingly, was the writer R. M. Eassie. He told Gutzon of hearing of his connection with the Angels of St. John the Divine, in the heart of Africa, thirty-five miles from the nearest whites.

One of Gutzon’s last entries in his London journal tells of a party in 1901 at his home, “Harlestone Villa,” in St. John’s Wood. It is worth mentioning in that it honored Isadora Duncan and marked her debut as a dancer.

Gutzon had known the Duncans in California. Isadora’s father had recently been in London and was on his way back to America when his ship, the _Mohegan_ foundered off the Irish coast. The sculptor had gone from England to take charge of Duncan’s body and to see that he was properly buried.

Isadora, her brother and sister had come from California after their father’s death. August Borglum, Gutzon’s brother, was a guest at the party and always recalled the impression Miss Duncan made as she danced out from the studio onto the lawn, scattering red rose petals that she had been gathering in the villa garden. Isadora, Gutzon observed, brought an active revival of memories from home. “The fresh western breeze that came with her,” he said, filled him with nostalgia.

Very likely it did. Shortly afterward he had gone over to Paris and was standing idly on a street corner. It was a day like any other in his life except that he had had a brief meeting with a casual American tourist in a café, and that there was an unusual amount of cash in his pocket.

Suddenly there came to him an irresistible urge to return to the United States--to go home. All his pent-up irritation over spiritual repressions and his grievance over decadent art conditions in Europe surged over him at once. He leaped at a passing

[Illustration: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN”

This statue, in front of the Newark courthouse, was Borglum’s own favorite.]

[Illustration: GUTZON AND MARY BORGLUM]

cab, offered double fare if he could get to the Gare du Nord in time for the boat train ... and so, presently, he had passed through Cherbourg and was on a ship headed for America.

This ended an era in his life and marked, definitely, the beginning of another. He was never to return to Europe except for the placing of work he had produced in the United States.