Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, Essay 6

George Washington

By John Quincy Adams Ward, dedicated 1883

Bibliography & Out-takes

• Index page for OMOM bibliography, out-takes and discussion questions

• Published comments on the sculpture

• On the sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward

• On the subject, George Washington

• On the American Revolution vs. the French Revolution

• On Hegelian historiography

• Photos: Forgotten Delights blog entry for 12/29/06, with a close-up of the fasces and Bible behind Washington. Forgotten Delights Salute for April 30th.

Published comments on the sculpture

Stokes, Isaac Newton Phelps. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 (New York: Arno Press, 1967)  5:1982 (11/26/1883)

Theodore Dreiser, "America's Sculptors," New York Times 9/25/1898: includes a long section on Ward, "among the foremost of our American sculptors ... a man whose striking sculptural conceptions are perfectly familiar to New Yorkers." He cites the Washington, Shakespeare, and Conkling.

Edward Alden Jewell, "Winds of Scorn for Our Statues," New York Times 8/21/1938: "My personal vote for the finest single piece of public sculpture goes to the John Quincy Adams Ward statue of Washington: an eloquent, dignified, patrician work superbly placed on the steps of the Subtreasury in Wall Street."

Lederer, Joseph. All Around the Town: A Walking Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in New York City (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), pp. 18-19: notes that it was unveiled in the presence of President Arthur, and that there are more sculptures of Washington in the 5 boroughs than of anyone else.

Gayle, Margot, and Michele Cohen. The Art Commission and the Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan's Outdoor Sculpture (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988), p. 25.

SIRIS (Smithsonian Institution, Inventory of American Sculpture) IAS 77006221.

On the sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward

American National Biography: Lewis I. Sharp. "Ward, John Quincy Adams"; http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00903.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Ward once advised the young Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Continents, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 4), to "Make what you feel in the subject and work at it until your hair drops off or words to that effect." Quoted in Michael Richman, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor (National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1976), p. 41.

Taft, Lorado. History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan, 1903), pp. 225-6: "Foremost among the many interpretations [of Washington in sculpture], according to not a few good judges, including prominent members of the profession, stands this noble figure by Mr. Ward. A realistic treatment of the subject was by no means desirable. Houdon gave us this, combined with a mastery of curious skill. Mr. Ward shows us not the intimate, domestic Washington of Mount Vernon, nor even the actual - shall we say casual? - man seen by the few who stood nearest the inaugural, but the great, legendary figure toward whom the whole country turned in those days, and whom the years have further consecrated, glorifying even as they veil. If our very friends are largely the product of our imaginations, how much more is a great public character but a symbol on which to hang the attributes of our likes or our dislikes! We owe thanks to Mr. Ward for such a 'symbol.' This quiet, impressive figure, supported by the fasces and enriched by the sweep of the great military cloak, lifts its hand in the simple gesture which betokens authority guided by moderation and intelligence. It has in it the essentials of Washington, while the peculiarities, real or imaginary, are left out. The statue is the greater for the well-weighed omission."

Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., in an address delivered before the Century Association the year after Ward's death, commented: "Both men [Ward & Winslow Homer] cultivated the robust and masculine order of design, both quietly ignored the current shibboleth that a work of art must be precious in every detail; both, I take it, would have scorned the cosmetic theory that surface has a value irrespective of the thing expressed. [Probably a crack at Rodin.] ... [Ward's] sense of aims and of economy was so keen, that he rarely gives that surplusage of epidermal charm that is expected of the modern artist. ... He sought broad, simple, and monumental effect." And again: "Such an art presupposes discipline, clearness of aim, self-knowledge on the part of its creator. It is not my purpose to appraise Ward's singularly even and meritorious production. It seems to me to have a high and especial value in view of prevailing notions that hysteria and the artistic temperament are convertible terms. Ward's life and purposeful well-balanced work are an effective protest against the fallacy that the life artistic ranges between overt melodrama and inward tragedy." John Quincy Adams Ward, Memorial Addresses Delivered Before the Century Association, Nov. 5, 1910 (New York: for the Century Association, 1911), pp. 2, 5-6. This was published 3 years before the Armory Show that introduced Modernism to America, but the philosophical changes that made Picasso's and Matisse's works acceptable had already been already been in circulation for decades. See my article "19th-Century French Painting and Philosophy" in The Objective Standard, Fall 2006, pp. 53-143.

A New York Times article of 3/26/1911, "J.Q.A. Ward's Work Is Now on Exhibition," includes a lengthy quote from Herbert Adams, sculptor of the Bryant in Bryant Park (OMOM Essay 22): "Of the many works he has left behind him perhaps those that make the widest appeal are his Indian Hunter his Shakespeare [OMOM Essay 37], his Beecher, his Gen. Thomas, and, above all, the Washington in front of the New York Treasury Building. Each of these, in its own manner, is eloquent with his characteristically virile artistic quality. I believe that the very latest work of his lifetime, the equestrian statue of Hancock, a work but recently unveiled, will stand as one of the very finest examples of his achievement. Its large monumental impressiveness has seldom been surpassed. And in these swift-moving times of ours, what an example to his fellow-artists to live up to their highest ideals in this struggle throughout this enterprise! ...

The real and abiding value of Mr. Ward's contribution to our art is due to this, that he had a highly personal, fundamentally American, and extremely virile ideal as to what an American artist should be and do - an ideal which he pursued to the end of his days, devoting to it all the gifts of his large nature - imagination, love of beauty, sympathetic insight, sincerity, perseverance. Whatever his work, he never could bear not to do his best.

In certain ways his ideal differed from that of his fellow-workers and this difference helps to make his distinction. At a time when it was the fashion for our sculptors to go abroad for training and inspiration, he remained here, and while practising his own art, he strove to develop, on his native soil, the allied arts of bronze casting and marble cutting. Thus, in becoming a sculptor, he became also a master of all the technical processes connected with his chosen work. ...

Probably other men besides myself are thankful to him for the candor and seriousness with which he spoke to us f our work. He spoke to the point: his words had a tang that made us think of them afterward: there is an ancient saying that the wounds of a friend are better than the kisses of an enemy."

Adams, Adeline. John Quincy Adams Ward, An Appreciation. Written for the National Sculpture Society. New York, 1912.

Ruckstull, F.W. Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great (Garden City Publishing Co., 1925), p. 462: "The most powerful portrait sculptor of America was J.Q.A. Ward. What he lacked in grace, he made up in power and living reality. And, taking it for all in all - dignity of subject, appropriateness for its place, searching synthesis of character and living quality, - we regard his "Washington," at Wall and Nassau Streets, New York City, as the greatest standing portrait statue in the United States."

Proske, Beatrice Gilman. Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, rev. ed. (Brookgreen Gardens, 1968), I, 3-7: the section "Sculptors and their Works" opens with, "It is John Quincy Adams Ward, born to short a time ago as June 29th, 1830, who marks a turniing point in the history of American sculpture. Those who went before were either given over to the neoclassic school or provincial men, whose limited skill and training warrant them only historical interest."

Sharp, Lewis I. John Quincy Adams Ward, Dean of American Sculpture, with a catalogue raisonne. Newark, London & Toronto, 1985.

On the subject, George Washington

American National Biography: Forrest McDonald. "Washington, George"; http://www.anb.org/articles/02/02-00332.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. As always in ANB, the annotated bibliography is extremely helpful.

On the American Revolution vs. the French Revolution

John Ridpath. "Ideas and Revolution: Locke and America; Rousseau and France." Audio recording available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

Susan Dunn. Sister Revolutions. French Lightning, American Light. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.

See also Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 14 (Lafayette).

On Hegelian historiography

When considering how history came to be regarded as a march of inevitable, predetermined events rather than a sequence of choices by individual men based on their own ideas, I came across this quote from that regrettably influential German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. "The history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom. But objective freedom - the laws of real freedom - demand the subjugation of the mere contingent will, for this is in its nature formal. If the objective is in itself rational, human insight and conviction must correspond with the reason which it embodies, and then we have the other essential element - subjective freedom - also realized. We have confined ourselves to the consideration of that progress of the idea and have been obliged to forego the pleasure of giving a detailed picture of the prosperity, the periods of glory that have distinguished the career of peoples, the beauty and grandeur of the character of individuals, and the interest attaching to their fate in weal or woe. Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the idea mirroring itself in the history of the world. Philosophy escapes from the weary strife of passions that agitate the surface of society into the calm region of contemplation; that which interests it is the recognition of the process of development which the idea has passed through in realizing itself - i.e., the idea of freedom, whose reality is the consciousness of freedom and nothing short of it.

That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of spirit - this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile spirit with the history of the world - viz., that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God,' but is essentially His work." From The Philosophy of History, Great Books of the Western World, v. 43 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990), trans. J. Sibree, pp. 392-3.