The Borglums:
Early Artists in California

 An Exhibition at the Stamford Museum and
Nature Center in Stamford, Connecticut

By Jean Stern
Executive Director, The Irvine Museum

If one were to ask most Americans to name America's most famous sculptural monuments, two works would undoubtedly head the list: The Statue of Liberty and the Mount Rushmore Memorial. Ask further the names of the sculptors who authored these great works, and ninety-nine out of one-hundred will have no idea.
 
The Statue of Liberty was given to the United States by France in 1884. It was designed by the French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), who himself fought for freedom and liberty in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 under the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Since the Statue was commissioned by the French government, cast in a French foundry, and designed by a French sculptor, it could be argued that this grand monument that presides over New York Harbor is not wholly an American sculpture. However, Mount Rushmore is! The Mount Rushmore National Memorial was commissioned and financed by private American citizens and the Federal Government in 1927, it was carved out of American granite, and designed by John Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941), one of America's most famous sculptors.
 
Borglum also earned great renown for his remarkable, life-like statues of Abraham Lincoln, a subject that so grandly impassioned his life that he named his son Lincoln Borglum. Likewise, many people also recognize his name as the creator of Stone Mountain, a monumental sculpture group dedicated to heroes of American history, carved out of the side of a mountain in Georgia. His crowning achievement, however, is the massive sculpture group of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, with its portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
 
There are a large number of books, articles, and film documentaries that recount Borglum's life as a sculptor. Few of these, unfortunately, mention that first of all, he was a painter, and even few disclose his importance as a California artist and his considerable role in the genesis of the Los Angeles art community.
 
Borglum's Los Angeles period parallels his association and marriage to Elizabeth Borglum (1848-1922), an artist who was one of the first professional painters in Los Angeles. She was one of the first people he met upon arriving in Los Angeles, and at the end of their marriage, which bore no children, Borglum left Los Angeles, never to return. The fascinating story of John Gutzon Borglum and Elizabeth Borglum begins in California, in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In the 1860s and 1870s, when Impressioniism flowered in France, California was a distant, isolated region. The initial transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific, was completed in 1869. That line connected the burgeoning market centers of Kansas City and Omaha in the east, with the growing agricultural regions of California, ending in the west at San Francisco Bay. Prior to the completion of the Union Pacific, the only approaches to California were overland by horse and wagon through hostile territory, or by ship from Panama or around South America, a trip that often took over seven months. The pre-canal Panama route, although much shorter, required docking on the Atlantic side, crossing the fever-infested isthmus to the Pacific side and boarding a ship to continue to California.