Italy, the Magic Land. Lilian Whiting

Bates College he modelled a bust of its president, and a little later, going to Washington (in the winter of 1865–66), many of the noted men of the time gave him sittings, and in a series of portrait busts his genius impressed itself by its dignity of conception and an unusual power of sympathetic interpretation. He modelled the bust of Grant while he was the General’s guest in camp, taking advantage of whatever spare minutes General Grant could give for sittings in the midst of his pressing responsibilities; and it is perhaps due to this unusually intimate intercourse with the great hero, and the rapport, not difficult of establishment, between two men whose natures were akin in a certain noble sincerity and lofty devotion to the purest ideals, that Mr. Simmons owes the power with which he has absolutely interpreted the essential characteristics of General Grant in that immortal portrait statue in the Capitol.

      Washington is, indeed, the place to especially study the earlier work of Franklin Simmons. An important one is the Logan memorial—an equestrian statue which is considered the finest work in sculpture in the capital, and which is the only statue in the United States in which both the group and the pedestal are of bronze. The visitor in Washington who should be ignorant of the relative rank of the great men commemorated by the equestrian memorial monuments of the city might be justified in believing that General Logan was the most important man of his time, if he judged from the relative greatness of his statue. When Congress decided upon this group, Mr. Simmons was requested to prepare a model. This proving eminently acceptable, Mr. Simmons found himself, quite to his own surprise, fairly launched on this arduous work, involving years of intense concentration and labor. For this monumental work was to be not merely that of the brave and gallant military leader—a single idea embodied, as in those of Generals Scott, Sheridan, Thomas, and others—but it was to be a permanent interpretation of the soldier-statesman, mounted on his battle-horse; it was to be, in the comprehensive grasp of Mr. Simmons, the vital representation of the complex life and individuality of General Logan and, even more, it must reflect and suggest the complex spirit of his age. In this martial figure was thus embodied a manifold and mysterious relation, as one of the potent leaders and directive powers in an age of tumultuous activities; an age of strife and carnage, whose goal was peace; of adverse conditions and reactions, whose manifest outcome was yet prosperity and national greatness and splendid moral triumph. All these must be suggested in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the artist’s work; and no sculptor who was not also an American—not merely by ancestry and activity, but one in mind and heart only; one who was an intense patriot and identified with national ideas—could ever have produced such a work as that of the Logan monument. So unrivalled does it stand, unique among all the equestrian art of this country, that it enchants the art student and lover with its indefinable spell. When this colossal work was cast in bronze, in Rome, the event was considered important. The king and the Royal family visited the studio of Mr. Simmons to see the great group, and so powerfully did its excellence appeal to King Umberto that he knighted Mr. Simmons, making him Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy. Nor was Mr. Simmons the prophet who was not without honor save in his own country, for his alma mater gave him the degree of M.A. in 1867; Colby College honored him with the Master’s degree in 1885, and in 1888 Bowdoin bestowed upon this eminent Maine artist the same degree. In 1892 Mr. Simmons married the Baroness von Jeinsen, a brilliant and beautiful woman who, though a lady of foreign title, was an American by birth. An accomplished musician, a critical lover of art, and the most delightful of hostesses and friends, Mrs. Simmons drew around her a remarkable circle of charming people and made their home in the Palazzo Tamagno a notable centre of social life. No woman in the American colony of the Seven-hilled City was ever more beloved; and it was frequently noted by guests at her weekly receptions that Mrs. Simmons was as solicitous for the enjoyment of the most unknown stranger as for those of rank and title who frequented her house. Her grace and loveliness were fully equalled by her graciousness and that charm of personality peculiarly her own. Her death in Rome, on Christmas of 1905, left a vacant place, indeed, in many a home which had been gladdened by her radiant presence. One of the most beautiful works of Mr. Simmons is a portrait of his wife in bas-relief, representing her standing just at the opening of parted curtains, as if she were about to step behind and vanish. It is a very poetic conception. A bust of Mrs. Simmons, also, in his studio, is fairly a speaking likeness of this beautiful and distinguished woman. It is over her grave in the Protestant cemetery that Mr. Simmons has placed one of his noblest ideal statues, “The Angel of the Resurrection,”—a memorial monument that is one of the art features of Rome to the visitor in the Eternal City.