t Mr. Simmons owes the power with which he has absolutely interpreted
the essential characteristics of General Grant in that immortal portrait
statue in the Capitol.

Washington is, indeed, the place to especially study the earlier work of
Franklin Simmons. An important one is the Logan memorial,--an equestrian
statue which is considered the finest work in sculpture in the capital,
and which is the only statue in the United States in which both the
group and the pedestal are of bronze. The visitor in Washington who
should be ignorant of the relative rank of the great men commemorated by
the equestrian memorial monuments of the city might be justified in
believing that General Logan was the most important man of his time, if
he judged from the relative greatness of his statue. When Congress
decided upon this group, Mr. Simmons was requested to prepare a model.
This proving eminently acceptable, Mr. Simmons found himself, quite to
his own surprise, fairly launched on this arduous work, involving years
of intense concentration and labor. For this monumental work was to be
not merely that of the brave and gallant military leader,--a single idea
embodied, as in those of Generals Scott, Sheridan, Thomas, and
others,--but it was to be a permanent interpretation of the
soldier-statesman, mounted on his battle-horse; it was to be, in the
comprehensive grasp of Mr. Simmons, the vital representation of the
complex life and individuality of General Logan and, even more, it must
reflect and suggest the complex spirit of his age. In this martial
figure was thus embodied a manifold and mysterious relation, as one of
the potent leaders and directive powers in an age of tumultuous
activities; an age of strife and carnage, whose goal was peace; of
adverse conditions and reactions, whose manifest outcome was yet
prosperity and national greatness and splendid moral triumph. All these
must be suggested in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the artist's work;
and no sculptor who was not also an American--not merely by ancestry and
activity, but one in mind and heart only; one who was an intense
patriot and identified with national ideas--could ever have produced
such a work as that of the Logan monument. So unrivalled does it stand,
unique among all the equestrian art of this country, that it enchants
the art student and lover with its indefinable spell. When this colossal
work was cast in bronze, in Rome, the event was considered important.
Th