Photo of the Day: ‘Spirit of American Youth,’ George Westinghouse Memorial, Pittsburgh PA

I have already posted about the lily pond and the plaques at the George Westinghouse Memorial. But this statue, which I saw while being driven around in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, led me to wonder why it looked so oddly recognizable, even though I had never been to this site nor seen this statue.

As I approached “The Spirit of American Youth” that day two months ago, I saw that it had been created by Daniel Chester French, best known for the nearly godlike seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. (See this post for my discussion 10 years ago of the creation of that DC landmark.)

After that iconic memorial, almost anything else would appear to be anti-climactic. But nothing by a supreme craftsman, let alone a genius, is without interest, and this work certainly qualifies. 

According to Harold Holzer’s 2019 biography Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor asked the Westinghouse memorial committee about molding a figure of the inventor himself. But the committee requested something more oblique, less in French’s traditional realistic mode: “a ‘modern’ masterpiece.” 

The result was a bronze statue of a schoolboy, dressed in a hooded sweater and standing in the prow of a boat, his hat in one hand and books in the other. He is so astonished by what he has just been reading about Westinghouse that he has absent-mindedly crumple his cap.

On its own terms, the statue was accomplished, as might be expected from one of the nation’s foremost sculptors. Yet not everyone agreed on the appropriateness of the product. 

Although some critics hailed it as a fine portrayal of American boyhood,” others thought it did not rank with French’s other high-profile commissions such as the “Minute Man” of Concord or the “Republic” statue of the 1893 Colombian Exposition of Chicago, let alone the Lincoln Memorial.

It is possible, had he been allowed to move ahead with his original idea, that French would have brought unsurpassed knowledge and feeling to a likeness of Westinghouse (whom he knew from summers in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts). That he didn’t give up entirely on that idea can be seen in the fact that he exhibited his original bust of the inventor in the annual Stockbridge Art Show, near their summer homes.

The Westinghouse statue turned out to be French’s last major project; he died a year later at age 80. Maybe this image of a youth in the grip of inspiration owed something to his own memories of youth, when he was encouraged in his artistic studies by Anna Pratt, the sister of Little Women novelist Louisa May Alcott.