By Frederick W. Coburn
A large silver polo trophy, lately exhibited at the rooms of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, was more truly Greek in spirit than most prizes and trophies shown in shop windows of the American Athens. The Hellenic youth, victor at Olympia, bore away a sculptured or beaten prize which, exhumed, is held a priceless treasure of the modern museum. The American-made cups, mugs and punch bowls of commerce, which the successful competitor brings from the contest, are often so bad that his wife refuses to give them house room. A painter, who is likewise a yachtsman, keeps his costly gold and silver trophies in a dark cupboard, laughingly referring to them as the skeletons in his closet. Thus far apart have art and athletics been ever since the great decadence of all the arts of design in the nineteenth century.
Embodying a reaction against the tameness of the traditional trophy the S. D. Warren Memorial Cup of the Dedham, Massachusetts, polo club has more than ordinary significance. Wishing to memorialize a foremost member and benefactor of the club, the late Samuel D. Warren, president for some years of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a committee of polo players in the spring of 1911 raised a few hundred dollars with the understanding that it should be invested in a manner that would have pleased Mr. Warren.
Consultation with Frederic Allen Whiting, then secretary of the Society of Arts and Crafts, led to the making and submitting of a sketch by C. Howard Walker, architect and designer. The scheme was for a silver bowl, seven inches high by 14 inches in diameter. A conventionalized polo stick appeared in each of the flutes dividing the exterior surface. Around the bowl ran a series of low-relief plaques, each with heads of horses and horsemen, the composition representing a characteristic incident of polo play. The whole space devoted to ornamentation was small, in contradistinction to the profusion of meaningless motives covering the trophy of commerce. Each motive in this design was related to the sport in question and hence was logical in subject.
Mr. Walker's sketch having been accepted, an order for the cup was given to Arthur J. Stone, silversmith of Gardner, Massachusetts, maker of the cup given to President Eliot of Harvard University on his seventieth birthday, the vase and salver presented to William Gericke, retiring from the leadership of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and many other important works in silver. Mr. Stone, a master craftsman of the Society of Arts and Crafts, learned the silversmith's craft at Sheffield, England, worked for some years in American commercial establishments until impelled by aversion to factory methods to set up his own shop. The trophy conceived by Howard Walker was made in this establishment after the processes followed prior to the age of machine production and subdivided labor. On the bowl the names of the victors in the first annual competition have already been inscribed. Whatever polo club finally gets the piece will have a trophy that is out of the trivial, that is, at least, as well meant as any prize ever contested for at Olympia.
The energy with which the secretary of the Society of Arts and Crafts went after the business is, professionally speaking, a moral of the Dedham cup incident. The polo club's committee was complaisant, but, though it was composed of educated men, it had to be shown. And the lesson is that there are others of the same generally favorable disposition—members of the countless associations of golfers, tennis players, yachtsmen, canoeists, marksmen, fly casters, baseball players, militia men and other devotees of competitive sport. Their trade almost invariably goes to the factory, but only because the factory's representatives go for their trade, while the artist does not. Too often the artistic craftsman bewails conditions unfavorable to his emulating the great metal workers of old, whereas in reality a committee of his own golf club might upon persuasion give him an opportunity such as would have rejoiced the master workmen of other days.
Competition, at all events, for the athletic associations' work has been encouraged of late. In 1908, through representations of members of the Society of Arts and Crafts, the committee managing the Bermuda Yacht races was induced to let Mr. Walker submit a design for four cups, all of which were to be of the same pattern. These cups, executed by as many craftsman, gave to many a new notion of artistic possibilities in the trophy. Following the Bermuda committee's example yachtsmen in charge of the international Sonder Classe races of 1909 established a competition among craftsmen for the cup offered by President Taft. The award for a design went to Gustave Rogers, a metal worker of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who, in modeling the eagles and the mermaid heads that served as handles, had the cooperation of Louis Potter, sculptor, of New York City, and, in beating up the bowl, of Richard Dimes, a veteran English silversmith, resident in Boston. Mr. Rogers has also designed and executed prizes for local yachting events. The athletic sports of healthy young men and young women, with their interplay of bodily rhythms, easily stir the artistic imagination—as they have stirred it from the Olympic games usward. The visual thrills of intercollegiate football; the springy curve of the half-back's body as he makes the final wrench to get one yard more; the picturesque contour of the wizard baseball pitcher; the nice establishment of unstable equilibrium between the canoeist and his outrigger on one side and the taut tackle of his racing machine on the other; the centaur-like harmony between pony and polo player—nowhere are decorative motives suggested by these lines of life and activity more appropriately worked out than on the trophies with which successful effort is rewarded. Within the limitations fixed by the material of the cup or bowl or other designated prize the artist, and he alone, may embody in permanent form a gratifying reminder of fleeting and beautiful combinations on the athletic field.
Source: Art and Progress - September 1912
Trev.
