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.
