Page:Charles Grafly, Sculptor, an appreciatiative note, Trask, 1910.djvu/3

84 unity of impression and tend to confusion of mind.

With comparatively few sculptural works about us, we find our architects and modelers adorning public buildings with bronze and stone representations of the nations of the earth, dependent for their force upon a few facts gleaned from the physical geography. Our parks and little urban open-places are populated by expressions of grateful remembrance of the illustrious dead artistically inspired by a desire to faithfully portray those relics of uniform carefully preserved by the descendants of the deceased. Our battle-fields are planted with the sculptors' concessions to the critical ability of patriots, whose youth was filled with strife, and manhood with memories of strife, to the exclusion of all thought of beauty. Our burial places abound in mortuary horrors which, with clumsy fingers, point in the assumed direction of immortality, inspiring hope in a future life by the thought that it, at worst, cannot contain ugliness to equal their own.

Artistic independence will help our condition and will come, no doubt, with increase of general culture, but independence alone still leaves the sculptor impotent if he remain without a thorough training in his craft. Let us be thankful, then, for the growing respect accorded the uncompromising artist, and doubly thankful for the recognition, which now seems imminent both within and without the profession, of the fact that artistry without craftsmanship is dumb.

Of American sculptors living today none is more completely master of his medium than is Charles Grafly.

Whatever his artistic message, and its fullest expression still waits upon occasion, no hand more firmly than his grasps subtleties of form, no touch than his more surely directs the unwilling clay to rhythmic flow nor warms cold-hearted marble to tender cadences of life.

Self-apprenticed at the age of seventeen to the largest stone-carving establishment in Philadelphia, in which city he was born in 1862, Mr. Grafly's first sculptural training was with mallet and chisel. Extensive contracts secured by his employers for work on the Philadelphia Public Buildings, then in course of construction, followed by labor troubles, led to his assignment to carvings of intricacy and importance originally intended for maturer hands. This early responsibility and accomplishment combined to develop self-reliance and the habit of completion which have ever since been dominant notes in his career. For him, fortunately, the student habit of tentative variety was minimized.

Admitted as a student in modeling to the schools of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1884, he was already a workman. His training there under