Brookgreen Gardens Museum in South Carolina exhibits the largest collection of American sculpture anywhere. It finds its uniqueness, however, by placing each piece in its own beautiful outdoor setting surrounded by dogwoods and magnolias or set in the center of pools with splashing fountains thus combining the beauty of nature with the beauty of artistic creations by outstanding American sculptors.
Visitors wander along winding paths that lead to one magnificent work after another to experience the joy of seeing great art in garden settings. There is something for everyone — art lovers and nature lovers — and temperate climate makes it possible to visit during all seasons of the year.
Situated on the coastal highway 20-miles south of Myrtle Beach and 90-miles north of Charleston, the property extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Inland Waterway and encompasses 9,000 acres with 400 acres landscaped for the sculpture gardens.
The museum was created in 1931 by the philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington and his famous-sculptor wife Anna Hyatt as a not-for-profit cultural institution open to the public. The original property comprised four large plantations: Brookgreen, Springfield, Laurel Hill and The Oaks, all created by land grants from King George II.
The sculpture collection, which was started by the Huntingtons, continues to grow year by year. Important works are purchased, others are commissioned to be created by sculptors for the gardens, and still others are gifts to Brookgreen. The works — all realistic sculpture — encompass a time frame of over 150 years, from the early nineteenth century until today.
Among the hundreds of sculptors represented at Brookgreen are Hiram Powers, John Quincy Adams Ward, Daniel Chester French, Frederic Remington, Donald DeLue, Beatrice Fenton, Gaston Lachaise, Edward McCartan, Elie Nadelman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, R. Hinton Perry, and Lorado Taft.
Following is a very small sampling of the collection which demonstrates its great quality and diversity:
One of the most famous pieces of American sculpture is the Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the artist’s only nude female figure. It was commissioned as an ideal figure to top the tower of the original Madison Square Garden in New York City. The slightly over-life-size model of 1894 from which the original statue was enlarged is the basis for the bronze casting in Brookgreen Gardens.
The End of the Trail, created by James Earle Fraser in 1915, has become a symbol of the change in lifestyle of the Native North American Indian brought about by the Western migration of European immigrants. This bronze equestrian statuette successfully captures the pathos of a dejected, windblown rider and his horse. Fraser was a student of Agustus Saint-Gaudens in Paris and returned with him as his studio assistant in Manhattan.
The sculptor who most successfully combined the simplification of form and at the same time utilized the mass of his figures was Paul Manship.
Years ago, when asked what single event influenced his art the most, he readily answered that it was a trip to Olympia in Greece while he was a student at the American Academy in Rome before World War I. There he saw statues by the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias for the pediment of the Temple of Zeus, and we can see the influence of Phidias in all of Manship’s work.
Brookgreen has many pieces of his sculpture, but the largest is the huge bronze sundial with the gnomon 40-feet in length, Time and the Fates of Man, created in 1939. In it the three female figures spin the thread of life, measure it, and cut it. The passage of time symbolizes a person’s life cycle.
Anna Hyatt was already an outstanding sculptor by the time she married Archer Huntington in 1923, so it is fitting that a good number of her sculptures are in Brookgreen. Undoubtedly the most striking piece is the Fighting Stallions, a huge over-life-size aluminum group created in 1950.
She was fascinated by horses, studied them extensively and preferred equestrian monuments such as her Joan of arc of 1915 which stands on Riverside Drive in New York. The French government made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1922.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commissioned Carl Milles in 1949 to created The Fountain of the Muses, and it was installed in the museum in 1955 just six months before the sculptor’s death. It was very popular with the Metropolitan’s visitors as it became the centerpiece for the formal dining room, but, unfortunately, structural problems developed due to the great weight of the water in the pool, so the bronze sculptures had to be placed in storage.
Brookgreen was chosen as the most appropriate site for its relocation, and it was purchased in 1982 and opened to visitors there in 1984.
Carl Milles wrote: “Of the eight fountain figures round and in the pool — five of these represent the arts — men who have been drinking the holy water from the Goddess Aganippe’s well. Famous water helping the musical artists as well as all artists to get the right spirit to work and create. Here we are seeing them rushing home, filled with enthusiasm — each one with his new ideas forcing them to hurry.” The five sculptures of the artists are the poet, the architect, the musician, the painter and the sculptor.
In the 1990s this writer, as founding president of NYC-based nonprofit arts foundation, American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART), garnered and achieved funding for a commission of an over-life-size bronze — “Reaching” — by one of America’s greatest contemporary sculptors EvAngelos Frudakis.
This exquisite female nude now resides on top of a granite rock in the middle of her own reflecting pool as she and other new acquisitions of splendid sculpture continue to enlarge and enhance the wonder that is Brookgreen Gardens.
The collection now consists of more than 2,000 works of sculpture by over 430 American sculptors, making it by far the most important museum of American sculpture in the world.
Alexandra York is an author and founding president of the American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) a New-York-City-based nonprofit educational arts and culture foundation. She has written for many publications, including "Reader's Digest" and The New York Times. She is the author of "Crosspoints A Novel of Choice." Her most recent book is "Soul Celebrations and Spiritual Snacks." For more on Alexandra York — Go Here Now.