American art and American art collections; essays on artistic subjects . hose that per-vaded the era of the Revolution,or which underlie our own char-acter as a nation, could not satis-fy the primary conditions of thetheme. The Florentine Gothicof the fourteenth century seemsto imply exuberance of youth,love of splendor, luxury of life,ostentation of manners, pride ofart, fastidious refinement carriedto the point of effeminacy. Ifwe might venture to name thequalities which should inspire theespecial work which we have inhand, we should rather think ofrepose, strength, virility, dignity,simplic
American art and American art collections; essays on artistic subjects . hose that per-vaded the era of the Revolution,or which underlie our own char-acter as a nation, could not satis-fy the primary conditions of thetheme. The Florentine Gothicof the fourteenth century seemsto imply exuberance of youth,love of splendor, luxury of life,ostentation of manners, pride ofart, fastidious refinement carriedto the point of effeminacy. Ifwe might venture to name thequalities which should inspire theespecial work which we have inhand, we should rather think ofrepose, strength, virility, dignity,simplicity, as the leading char-acteristics of such a shrine; butthese qualities should be setforth with every available re-source of learning and poeticfeeling, tempered, however, withthat evident reserve of powerwhich is the most difficult ex-pression to confer upon a com-position of architecture. The study by Mr. M. P. Hap-good, of Boston, an architecturalstudent, made apparentlyrather as an ex-ercise in designthan with com-petitive intent, ~1 %? M <M£ 1 loir Mini / /. was a much more grammatical ex-ample of the use of an acceptedtype of form than any of thecompositions to which we havereferred, with a better apprecia-tion of scale, and was fairly repre-sentative of the sort of work tobe expected from students trainedin the theory and practice ofdesign. It had grace and sen-timent modestly expressed, andwith a wholesome sense of disci-pline ; it had the obvious advan-tage of a distinct place for acentral statue on one side, with-out suggestions of competitionon the other three; it had agood play of outline, and on thewhole indicated the beginning, atleast, of a workmanlike achieve-ment in monumental design. Itsfaults were mainly faults of , at the base, the horizontalline should have had a fuller andmore vigorous expression, espe-cially in the offsets of the water-table, and some of the vertical linesof the buttresses on the sides of themonument should have been lost
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade18, booksubjectart, booksubjectartists
