Solon Hannibal Borglum was an American sculptor. He specialized in themes of the Old W.
Background
Solon Borglum was born on December 22, 1868, in Ogden, Utah, United States, the fourth child of Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum and Ida (Michelson) Borglum. There were six sons and three daughters. The father and mother were Danes, who came to this country in the early sixties, settling for a time in Ogden. From them Solon derived many of the sturdy traits characteristic of the North Danish stock. His feeling for form and his instinct for anatomical structure were a two-fold inheritance from his father, who, arriving here as a woodcarver, later became a physician, practising at Fremont, Nebraska. Since his work carried him far and wide into the country, Dr. Borglum had many horses, and these young Solon loved better than his school-books.
Education
Solon spent some not too happy years in the public schools of Fremont and Omaha, and in Creighton College. Later he studied at the Art Academy. At l'Académie Julien he studied six months under Denys Puech, then one of the new forces in French sculpture.
Career
At sixteen Solon Borglum was sent to western Nebraska as cowboy on his father's 6, 000-acre ranch. Afterward, he took charge of a larger outfit. During many years of close, sympathetic watching of animals he developed an extraordinary sense of animal form and movement. His vision and memory were swift, fine, true. Often he spent his leisure jotting down on stray bits of paper his visual impressions of man and beast in action, in repose, in transition. His artist brother, Gutzon, returning from study abroad, was amazed by the vitality and truth of these rude sketches, and urged the ranchman to turn artist. Solon, like his father before him, had the courage to make a complete change in his way of life. He was then twenty-six, and without any knowledge whatever of art as taught in schools.
Borglum joined his brother in the Sierra Madre mountains, studying under him for some months, passing then to Los Angeles, and later to Santa Ana, where he rented a so-called "studio" at two dollars a month. The confinement irked him. He therefore set on his door a sign, "In Studio Saturdays Only. " The rest of the week he spent roaming the mountains, living among the lawless, meeting with the disinherited, and eating with the uncivilized, - indians, half-breeds, white men, types noble or ignoble. Being spiritually-minded, he was strengthened, not coarsened, by contact with the wild free life he loved and studied. A sound instinct had told him that "Saturdays Only" would appeal to clients who might be indifferent to unrestricted privileges of visit. Promptly appeared a manly sitter, an Eastern school teacher, whose portrait he painted for five dollars. Acquaintance ripened into friendship, interest was aroused, other clients came. Ladies took lessons at a dollar apiece. Encouraged by friends, he exhibited his work, made sixty-five dollars.
Fortified by a railroad pass received from a brother, Solon went to Cincinnati to study at the Art Academy, joining both day and evening classes. In his narrow rented room he knew the loneliness of cities. But not too far away were the United States Mail stables, lit all night, and these he frequented in the early morning hours, to study the horses. He learned from veterinaries, he worked at dissections. Experimenting in clay, he modeled a sketch of a horse pawing its dead mate, and showed it to Mr. Rebisso, director of sculpture at the Academy. Rebisso recognized the young man's gift, invited him to work in his own studio, and made it possible for him to go to Paris. At last, after obstacles that would have daunted a man of less intrepid mind, Borglum had found in sculpture his true lifework.
Borglum's stay in Paris gave him larger advantages for special study and a wider horizon of general culture. Frémiet, veteran master of animal form, was his constant adviser, correcting the ardent young American's work out of his own inexhaustible lore. And Solon Borglum, wherever he went, had the advantage of a rare personal charm springing chiefly from native goodness, from his quick and abounding sympathy toward all life. To his first Salon he sent two spirited groups, both well received, especially his "Lassoing Wild Horses. " The next year, 1899, he won honorable mention at the Salon, for his "Stampede of Wild Horses. "
After one more year in Paris, Solon remained near New York, making at Silvermine, Connecticut, his studio home, Rocky Ranch. Here during a period of seventeen years Borglum's art found natural and varied expression in works ranging from busts to equestrians, from small bronzes such as the "Bulls Fighting" and the "Border of White Man's Land" in the Metropolitan Museum to the four large groups modeled for the St. Louis Exposition, 1904, and the "Pioneer Group, " Court of Honor, San Francisco Exposition, 1915. His sculpture is impressionistic, deeply felt, soundly constructed. He is at his best in frontier themes such as "Burial on the Plains, " "Pioneer in a Storm, " "Snow Drift, " "The Blizzard, " "The Intelligent Bronco, " "The Rough Rider, " "Cowboy at Rest. "
Nor was Solon Borglum one of those sculptors whose labors end with the completion of a clay model turned over to the practitioners. He could, and when advisable did, carve in marble and in wood, with a hand not enfeebled by super-civilization. A photograph which shows him carving his marble group, the "Command of God, " indicates well this sculptor's aspect; his frame, not tall, but powerful, his intellectual head, his eager, friendly countenance.
On the entrance of the United States into the World War, Borglum, by reason of age refused as a soldier, went to France with the "Y. " His service abroad was of indomitable heroism. Frequently under fire, escaping when a shell blew up his canteen, gassed twice, continuing in the saddle before complete recovery, he won the hearts of the French officers with whom he worked shoulder to shoulder in the Foyer du Soldat.
Solon was an inspiring teacher of fundamental truths. One of his last works of sculpture is the "Little Lady of the Dew, " a kneeling figure in marble. Here, as in his two standing figures of the same period, "Aspiration" and "Inspiration, " the ideal theme is a departure from his usual choice.
It would seem that a new chapter in his artistic life was opening when he died, a few days after an operation for acute appendicitis. The main body of his work, depicting as it does a vanishing phase in American life, has a unique historic value. More than any other of our artists, he himself was part of all he tells. His frontier groups form an epic sculptured in free verse. They reveal clearly their open-air origin. Subtleties of modeling, academic nobility in composition, the grand style of past ages, were outside Borglum's purposes and powers. His passion in sculpture was to impart the very essence of things seen and felt; hence, and not because of Rodin's influence, he became a master of elimination. Surely no man knew better than he every strap and buckle horse or rider might wear; but he was an artist and not a harness-maker in shaping his bronze and marble tales. In its own large, unacademic way, his sculpture has saved for our contemplation certain swiftly-passing moments in the march of American frontier life.
Achievements
Solon Borglum was a noted sculptor depictiing mostly frontier life. Among his works are two fine equestrians, the "Bucky O'Neill, " Prescott, Arizona; and the "Gen. John B. Gordon, " Atlanta, Georgia. Other works of note are "Soldiers and Sailors Monument, " Danbury, Connecticut; the "Hurley Monument, " Topeka, Kansas; the "Washington, 1753, " owned in Canada; the austere "Schieren Memorial, " Greenwood Cemetery. Solon founded the American School of Sculpture in New York City in 1920. He also wrote his Sound Construction, a book of six hundred drawings, the fruit of his life's observations in comparative anatomy, and in the basic forms of all nature as seen in all great art.
Membership
Solon Borglum was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Solon never lost the spirit he put into a sketch. " - Gutzon Borglum
"He was the first American to enter Rheims when the German Army fell back. " - Raymond V. Ingersoll
Connections
On December 10, 1898, in Paris, Solon Borglum married Emma Vignal, daughter of a French Protestant clergyman.
