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Deacon Chapin (Pl. 29), of Springfield, we have a purely ideal production, the finest embodiment of New England Puritanism in our art, for no portrait of the real Chapin existed. This swift-striding, stern-looking old man, who clasps his Bible as Moses clasped the tables of the law and grips his peaceful walking-stick as though it were a sword, is a Puritan of the Puritans; but he is an individual also--a rough-hewn piece of humanity with plenty of the old Adam about him--an individual so clearly seen and so vigorously characterized that one can hardly believe the statue an invention or realize that no such old Puritan deacon ever existed in the flesh. Something of this imaginative quality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even in his purely decorative figures. His angels and caryatides are not classical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested. And it is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them but an invented personality, the expression of the nobility, the sweetness, and the pure-mindedness of their creator. And in such a figure as that of the
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Adams Memorial