439 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
The extremists among the landscape men would bar all 
monuments and works of art from the parks and frankly 
regard roads, walks, bridges and pavilions as necessary nui- 
sances. Others would exclude only the ugly or inappropriate, 
and would restrict the public monuments to the small squares 
or formal plots at street intersections. The lack of beauty 
in the average conventional portrait or equestrian statue has 
been the chief excuse for this attitude of mind. 
Superintendent Jensen is one of those, however, who be- 
lieve that there is an appropriate form of public art for the 
parks ; the kind that has a decorative beauty appropriate to 
its site and surroundings, or a meaning in itself that the per- 
son of average intelligence may read. Even the so-called 
symbolic statue whose symbolism is too often expressed only 
in the classic device which a conventionally posed model bears 
in the hand falls short of its mission here. The figure or 
group itself must deliver the message without extraneous 
devices, and it must fit its surroundings. This view was very 
aptly expresse.d by Mr. Taft in a talk which preceded the 
opening of the exhibition in these words: “We would people 
our parks not with long-coated statesmen and restless war- 
riors, but with figures of airy grace, fit denizens of woods 
and meadows.” 
The Municipal Art League is thoroughly in accord with this 
view of the matter and the Field Museum gladly co-operated 
by loaning a number of casts of small models for groups that 
had adorned the late World’s Fair at Chicago. The most 
impressive part of the showing, however, was made by the 
recent works of the Chicago sculptors which have been seen 
at the exhibitions at the Art Institute. The architectural 
groups from the museum, while they served a good decorative 
purpose in the formal rose garden, lost much of their signifi- 
cance apart from the buildings whose exhibits they were in- 
tended to suggest. When such striking effects can be pro- 
duced with only the material that chanced to be available, 
it needs no long stretch of the imagination to foretell what 
might be accomplished when the works are constructed with 
some such purpose as this in view. It is proposed to hold 
these exhibitions each year, and if future progress is as great 
as this first one is successful, it may easily become the unique 
art event of the country. Some of the aforementioned frock- 
coated and uniformed bronze celebrities are very near to this 
new idea exhibition in Humboldt Park so that a comparison 
of the two styles of art was easily made, and it must be 
admitted, was all to the good of the new idea. The huge 
grim figures of Kosciuszko and Fritz Reuter might well have 
been jealous of the Frog Boy, the Fisher Boy, the Fairy 
Fountain, and other plastic fancies that seemed so perfectly at 
home in the 'gardens and along the rivulets. With the green- 
ery of spring to give additional background to the figures and 
green bronze as the material instead of the plaster, the pic- 
ture v/ould have been perfect. 
The exhibit consisted of formal and informal divisions, the 
first in the circular rose garden and the informal groups by 
local sculptors distributed among the winding walks, gentle 
slopes, and naturalistic planting along the banks of a very 
real imitation of a forest stream emerging from stratified 
rocks and following a sinuous course to mingle with a branch 
of the larger lagoon. There was enough of nature’s art of 
concealment to give surprises in the views, enough of per- 
ennial planting to give sufficient background to the figures 
and not enough of wildness to make these works of man 
seem lost in the solitude of the forest or the vastness of 
the landscape. 
The most impressive, and by reason of their pastoral char- 
acter, the most appropriate of the groups from the Field Mu- 
seum were those representing Labor and Industry and Indian 
Corn and Wheat modeled by Daniel C. French and E. C. 
Potter in collaboration, placed two on either side of the en- 
trance to the Rose Garden, forming a dignified monumental 
entrance. These sturdy figures of the great draft animals with 
their attendants are sculptural types that please alike the 
learned and the unlearned. Looking straight across the gar- 
den, at the head of the basin that' forms its center, is the fairy 
fountain group by Leonard Crunelle, previously illustrated in 
these pages in connection with an exhibition at the Art Insti- 
tute. With its three childish figures mounted on their pedestal 
and the little sprite on the ground in front poised on the very 
edge of the pool, its appeal to the childish fancy is universal. 
Closing the view in this direction is the, well designed open 
shelter of concrete at the ends of which were two groups by 
Karl Bitter from the World’s Fair, Justice and Art. 
Ranged around the circular border of the garden on the 
embankment above the sunken part of the planting space, stood 
small models by Robert Kraus representing Daguerre, Sene- 
felder, Ericsson, Whitney, Galvani, Watt, great inventors of 
machinery, and personifications of •Victory, Science, Earth, 
Fire, Water, and .Air, modeled by M. A. Wangen; Diligence, 
by Karl Bitter, and Electricity, by N. A. McNeil. All of 
these figures decorated the machinery building at the fair. 
Behind these and immediately in front of the curved pergolas 
on either side of the garden were placed groups by Karl 
ARCHITECTURAL GROUPS FROM WORLD’S FAIR PLACED ABOUT THE BORDER OF THE ROSE GARDEN. 
