Lorado Taft: sculptor

              1920

Figure

LORADO TAFT Sculptor

Mr. Taft at work in his studio







Figure


NO INTRODUCTION of Lorado Taft is needed to the intelligent American public; but we believe a word as to his career will be of interest to those who anticipate the pleasure of hearing him.

Lorado Taft was born at Elmwood, Ill., in 1860.  He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, at Urbana, where his father was professor of Geology.  His interest in sculpture began when, a boy of thirteen, he was permitted to help a Belgian plaster-worker repair a collection of plaster casts which had reached the University of Illinois badly damaged in transit.  In 1880, after his graduation from the University, Mr. Taft went to Paris where he studied for five years in the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  Since 1885 he has resided in Chicago, with occasional trips to Europe, including Italy and Greece.

He has been connected with the Art Institute of Chicago for more than thirty years, as instructor in modeling and as lecturer.  He is professorial lecturer on the History of Art at the University of Chicago and non-resident professor of Art at the University of Illinois.

He is a member of the National Sculpture Society, of the National Academy, of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects and is one of the Board of Art Advisors for the state of Illinois.  He received a silver medal at Buffalo in 1901, and a gold medal at the exposition in St. Louis in 1904.

Mr. Taft's recent professional works include: The Blind, a group inspired by Maeterlinck's drama of the same name; the Columbus Memorial Fountain, at Washington, D. C., the Solitude of the Soul, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fountain of the Great Lakes, adjoining; the Washington Monument, at Seattle, Wash.; Blackhawk and Ogle County Soldiers' Memorial, at Oregon, Ill.; the Thatcher Memorial Fountain, at Denver, Colo., and—recently set up—the vast Fountain of Time, on the Midway Plaisance, Chicago.

As an author, Mr. Taft has published a History of American Sculpture, and another work, six lectures on Recent Tendencies in Sculpture.

Also, in 1919, he lectured for six months to members of the A. E. F. at Beaune and Bellevue, France.

Mr. Taft's Chicago studio is situated on the Midway, in the immediate vicinity of the University of Chicago.  His summer residence and studio are on the Rock River bluffs, near Oregon, Ill., where for years, he has been the head of an artists' camp and where he has erected his colossal statue of Blackhawk, in commemoration of the former inhabitants of the beautiful Rock River valley.  Mr. Taft is an easy and fluent speaker, full of spontaneity, alive with humor, interesting his audience as he carries them through an evening of the highest educational value.  His lectures, as shown from the accompanying synopsis, are full of information and thoroughly illustrated either by actual processes of modeling or by the stereopticon.  In the first lecture noted here an artist's studio is reproduced upon the stage.


LECTURE I—A Glimpse of a Sculptor's Studio, or How Statues are Made.
The materials—clay, plaster, marble, bronze.  The tools.  Building up a bust from life.  The problem of features, proportion and expression.  The big skull.  The muscular mask.  Rapid changes in the shape of the head.  The portrait of the Princess of Lamballe.  From youth to old age, with occasional digressions.  Building up a figure; pose and proportions.  Expression in lines.  Draping a statue.  The plaster cast.  Piece molds and lost molds.  Chopping out a cast.  The marble.  The pointing instrument.  Trials and perplexities of marble cutting.  Triumphs of the sculptor's art.  Illustrated fully at each step by the actual process upon the stage.

LECTURE II—American Sculptors and Sculpture.
From Greenough, Powers and Crawford to Ward, St. Gaudens, French, MacMonnies, Bartlett, Barnard and the younger men.  With 150 beautiful illustrations of their representative works.




Printed in U. S. A.

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