Book of Gardens 
43 
AMERICAN SCULPTURE FOR AMERICAN GARDENS 
An Infant Art That is Worth Fostering 
I F sculpture is to be really acclimated in our 
American gardens it must be indigenous, of 
a kind that the average citizen can understand. 
It must be made to look at home in the aver¬ 
age American place. It must be treated, not 
as an outstanding object of art dominating 
everything in sight, but as symbolizing the 
spirit of the place, of the flowers and leafage, 
an integral part of the picture. Such statuary 
will not be too conspicuous, and is more likely 
to be of bronze or lead than of marble. It will 
be more difficult to set especially where the 
composition is entirely informal, if there are 
no places contrived for sculpture to fill. Stat¬ 
uary in such surroundings is apt to look as 
though it had strayed in by mistake or had been 
casually dropped, as it does in most of our 
parks. 
The important fact underlying this problem 
of finding the right place, whether in an archi¬ 
tectural garden or a commuter’s yard, is that 
the setting ought to be designed as well as the 
statue. It is not sufficient to give thought to 
the sculpture; it is necessary to give serious 
thought to the place where it is to go. If 
there is no fit and proper place for it, no niche 
in which it will naturally belong, no scene of 
inevitable fitness, one must be made. The 
statue should seem as much at home as a dryad 
stepping out of the tree in which she lived, or 
the spirit of the cave or the waterfall. 
When the question of putting statuary in a 
small place arises, the first consideration 
should be, not “Is it good sculpture in itself, 
that I happen to like for its own sake?” but, 
“Is it the kind that harmonizes with its sur¬ 
roundings? Is there any kind of sympathy, 
obvious or subtle, between the sculptor’s 
thought and the lives and loves and aspirations 
of those who live with it, or is it as remote from 
them as the Group of the Laocoon?” 
Or to put the same idea in a different way, 
“Was the sculptor thinking of an American 
A fountain, by Mrs. 
Harry Payne Whit¬ 
ney, designed for an 
A merican gar den . 
C ourtesy of the 
Whitney Studio. The 
text in this article is 
prepared by Harold 
A. Caparn, land¬ 
scape architect 
“A Girl Aquaplaningby Rena Tucker 
Kohlman, shows the freedom of interpre¬ 
tation characteristic of our American gar¬ 
den sculpture. It stands 20" high and is 
intended for a basin fountain or a small 
garden pool where the water could be ar¬ 
ranged to spray against the figure. Cour¬ 
tesy of the Milch Galleries 
In the cleft of a rock garden you discover 
a young Pan piping away. The gray stones 
are immediately animated and the rock 
plants vitalized. This figure by Janet Scud- 
der is in the Rockefeller gardens at Po- 
cantico Hills and shows the proper placing 
for such work—secluded and surprising as 
you come upon it 
